Problems with Belbin's Team Roles

I met a business lecturer the other who told me they didn't "believe in" Belbin. I've out it in quotes because I'd had a couple of glasses of Red and can't be entirely sure of the exact words...

This got me to thinking about the potential limitations of his research and the way some people use it, which include:

* the subjects were all middle managers selected for "grooming" for senior management
* the environment was within a management development programme at a business school
* the behaviour was observed during business simulation games
* Belbin himself confirms his model is NOT a typology, yet people use it that way

I have written some of these thoughts into the Wikipedia page I started on Belbin.

The biggest danger as always lies not in the model but in the mis-use of it to pigeon-hole people. Belbin himself argues against this pointing out that his subject teams adapted to fill "empty" roles.

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd
http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com

The maverick boss came to town

Last week I had the fantastic opportunity to attend a one-hour presentation by Ricardo Semler. Semler is very popular with management gurus (people like Charles Handy - one of my heroes) as the man who took a traditional, hierarchical, command-and-control business and turned it into a textbook team-based, democratic, fully devolved organisation while seeing profits grow healthily through national recession. Semler has written two books about his experience, tours the world giving lectures, and teaches at leading business schools around the world.

Semco's website contains a nice flash presentation of their corporate principles - check it out.

Semler said that hierarchy and systems are designed to restrict employee choice. A general does not want to ask the left flank if they want to be sacrificed in order to win the battle - managers have simply taken on the paradigms of military management without asking whether they are the best for the workplace.

At Semco, all top-down rules are questioned - unless there is a demonstrable need for a rule, it is scrapped. So over the last 25 years, Semco has ditched:

uniforms,
fixed working hours,
5-day weeks,
management authority by right,
titles,

and set itself up around project-based teams who

write their own budgets,
allocate their own wages,
and - get this - interview, appoint and appraise (anonymously) their own managers, up to and including Semler himself.

25% of profits are paid into a fund which is distrbuted by a committee elected by the workers.

If this model is so good, how come so few companies are doing it? (Handy says "no-one else is doing it")

1 Few medium and large companies are owned by their CEO. Semler had total authority to make these changes happen.

2 Semler suggested that managers in traditional companies would not have the skills to survive the worker review process. Imagine a certain entrepreneur's entire workforce turning around and saying "You're Fired!"

3 Semco makes pumps for marine applications and other large, expensive, bespoke, complex, technical items. Is there so much scope for workers in a call centre, or a biscuit factory, to work in six-month project teams, choosing a new team and new manager every time they reform around a new customer order?

While the Semco model may not be easy to apply to our own businesses, there are principles of transparency, trust, delegation and fair reward that we can all apply to some extent with our teams. What can you change this week to sweep away an unnecessary rule?

Some other blog entries on Ricardo Semler:
Quote: Keep asking "Why?"
Review of Semler's book Maverick

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd
http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com

"How can you tell when a team needs some teambuilding?"

Someone asked me that question this week at a networking event. Sometimes as consultants there is danger that we can get so wrapped up in our service that we lose sight of the real world business problems that mean clients could really benefit from our services. So here - with lttle explanation now, I may expand on some of these in future - are just the first 25 behaviours that indicate your management team could benefit from team building or facilitation:

1 a few people within the team dominate all discussions
2 work is duplicated and wheels a re-invented
3 "agreed" points are re-opened for discussion later
4 everyone thought someone else was going to do it
5 "Humour" is used to mask differences of viewpoint
6 people do not regard team meetings as valuable
7 few new ideas are generated
8 criticism is aimed at people instead of their ideas
9 people won't raise their concerns until after the meeting
10 team members' departments compete with each other
11 differences of opinion on who is the leader
12 discussions focus on blame rather than solution
13 meetings blindly stick to the same agenda every time
14 meetings are cancelled if the manager can't be there
15 meetings consist of tedious presentations of data
16 people can't explain how their work fits into the whole
17 people can't explain how others' work fits into the whole
18 managers aren't inspired to share meeting news with their own teams
19 nobody reads the reports before the meeting
20 members do not meet outside formal meetings
21 no-one can state the mission of the team of the purpose of its meetings
22 meetings are held even though none is needed
23 different departments are told different stores about what happened
24 high turnover of team members
25 reluctance to allow outsiders into meetings

I have avoided the higher level stuff like "atmosphere" and tried to stick to the actual behaviours. Feel free to add more in comment, if you think I have missed something!

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd