Blog three
Leadership experience: roles in a team
In this third blog I am going to look at how a leader
does not necessarily have to lead the way and can learn what their group’s
strengths and weakness are by standing back. This particular experience was whilst
walking up Ben Nevis, Scotland. At the start of the walk the group were focused
and seemed relatively confident with the task at hand. This prompted me to take
a more relaxed approach to leading completely taking the backseat and to some
extent let them lead the way. This style of leading is known as ‘Laissez-faire’ leadership and can be used when
there is no need for a designated leader. The group or team can simply do it in
their own time. It can also help groups form their own roles amongst themselves.
For example, the group in this situation took up roles for themselves perhaps
without even consciously knowing it. Some of the responsibilities naturally
taken up in this instance were; some individuals liked to navigated, some would
like to make dissections based on information they had been given from small
issues like when to have a break to important decisions like which direction to
head off in, some individuals were highly motivated and were driven to get the
task of ‘getting to the summit and back down’ successfully, some of the team
would simply be supportive of others and help out in that sense.
A theorist, Dr Meredith
Belbin came up with nine team
roles that are widely used today in organizations/teams to identify individual’s
behavioral strengths and weakness. In the experience I talked about previously
I can see that members of the group naturally took up roles that played to
their strengths. The nine team roles Belbin came up with are as follows;
- Plant - creative team member.
- Monitor evaluator - this team member can take everything into account and can make a decision in a ‘dispassionate way’.
- Coordinator – a team member that is confident and able to delegate tasks out to team members.
- Resource investigator – a team member that has contacts outside the team, provides inside knowledge on the opposition and has links to the world outside the team.
- Implementer – the team member that that can plan real world workable strategy and put it into action.
- Completer finisher – team member that is a perfectionist and likes get the task done without any errors.
- Team worker– team member that is a good at bringing the team together and can identify what needs to be done.
- Shaper - highly motivation team member and wants to achieve their goal, they bring drive to a team and keep everything on track.
- Specialist – is a team member that has a lot of knowledge in the specific area that the team is working in.
(Dr Meredith
Belbin, 9 team roles - http://www.belbin.com/rte.asp)
