So far we've talked about four dimensions of formal team structure. Departmentation, centralization, rewards, and virtuality. Now, I wanna shift our conversation to two key concepts in terms of informal team structures. The first one that we're gonna talk about is what we call team roles. Team roles are the behave or we call behavior types that individual team members on overtime in the team. What we often find in our work is that people generally take on two or three types of team roles and what you want to focus on as a leader within teams is making sure that all of these roles are covered by at least someone in the team. We've done a lot of research over decades now on whether the key roles within teams. Starting with some research by June by the name of Belvin. And moving on even to more recent research. We've identified nine key team roles that you really want to focus on to make sure that all of those roles are fulfilled by someone in your team. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk through each of these nine team roles. Make sure that we share our understanding of what those team roles are. I'll have you think about your own teams, maybe go to the discussion forums to talk about the roles that you've played in your teams and what you see as roles that are missing from your team. And then I'll share with you some of the research that we've been doing on those specific roles and how those drive team success. So that's where we're going. So let's first talk about those nine different types of team roles. So, here what you're seeing is the Belbin website that lays out each of these nine team roles. And in particular, talks about what the role fulfills, what function it plays within the team, the strengths of a person that often fills this role, as well as the limitations that often come with individuals who play this role. And what you're gonna see here are the nine different types of roles. So, for example, we've got one called the Investigator. This is the person that is exploring opportunities on behalf of the team. Developing the team's network context, interviewing those different stakeholders to gain insights. We've got another role Teamworker. These are the individuals that really focus on team cohesion. They help the team gel. They listen to team members. They are able to diagnose when there's gonna be conflict. They help build trust among team members. And again often times the person for example who plays that investigator role is not the same person who plays that teamworker role. The third role we have here, Coordinator, focuses on team objectives, draws out different team members. So when we haven't heard from someone, it might be, well hey, we haven't heard from Sue recently, or we haven't heard from Bob recently. What do you all think? These are often the people that will also make sure that work is delegated and coordinated effectively. The fourth role that we have here, that I'll highlight, is called the Plant role. These are the creative types. These are the people that really play a role in generating ideas, fostering creativity, really helping the team solve complex problems. Next, we have an Implementor. This is the person that really makes sure that we can turn the ideas that often come from the Plant role, make sure that we can turn those ideas into practical actions. Develops efficient work plans to execute on the ideas. Than we'll also have what we call a finisher role, this is the person that often polishes the work, final product, evaluates our work out, comes to make sure we're delivering an accurate high quality piece of work, provides that quality control role if you will. Then we have an evaluator, this is the person that provides what I would often call that logical eye. This person offers an objective evaluation of the team's options. Really becomes a voice of reason to the team in a lot of cases so that we don't fall trap to things like group think, which is this concept of really the group going with the first reasonable idea as opposed to the best possible or optimal idea. So that's the evaluator role. And then we have another role that you'll see here on the website, the Shaper role. This person who's fulfilling this role would really be the motivator. This is the person that provides the drive, the motivation. To ensure that the team maintains it's focus and it's motivation to deliver those results. And then last but certainly not least, is we have a role called the Specialist role. And these are the individuals who bring really in-depth knowledge, expertise, of a key area to the team. Could be a specific function, could be a specific product. Whatever those key, in depth, knowledge areas are that the team needs to be successful, these are the individuals that bring that expertise. So again, I've described the nine roles. What I would encourage you to do is go to the discussion forum and share with your classmates a couple of things. The first is In your team experiences, what role have you often played? Or roles? Likely you're playing multiple of these roles. But it's also true that you're not playing all of them. You have certain strengths that lend yourself to certain roles and not others. What are those strengths? What are those weaknesses? What are the roles you often play? What are the roles you typically do not play? That's one line of discussion that I think would be really engaging to play out with your classmates and really dive into and discuss. Another area of discussion that I would encourage you to think about and talk about with your classmates is, in your team experiences, what roles do you see as being most critical for team success? And are there roles that you've found that often are not fulfilled in teams that really have held your team performance back. Share those insights with your classmates, listen and learn from your classmates giving their experiences. And then come back and I'll share with you some of the research that we found on team roles and how these roles can drive performance. So you've had an opportunity to discuss these nineteen roles with your classmates. Again, what roles do you play? What roles do you not play often in your team experiences? What roles are critical for team success? What roles are often missing in your teams? Now what I want to do is share with you some of the key research findings that we have discovered related to these team roles and then talk a little bit about what you can do as a team leader to make sure that these roles are fulfilled. So the first finding that I think is important to point out is that there is actually mixed evidence on whether these nine team roles are distinct. And I think that is important to recognize, but the reason that that is the case Is possibly because people play multiple roles. If we find that people are playing multiple roles then it might be hard to really distinguish these nine roles, so when you go to assess your team for example, and I would encourage you to do this. I would encourage you to write down all nine of the roles with their descriptions. I will encourage you then to list the team members in your team who play those different roles and chances are you are going to find some individuals plays lots of the roles. Some individuals don't play any of those roles and some roles are missing. To the extent that people are playing multiple roles, that might mean that it's hard to distinguish between some of those roles. So that's one possibility. Another key finding that we have is people often associate or at least want to associate these roles with differences with career success. So for example, they may see the plant role, that innovator creative role as the one that gets the higher salary, the promotion, the glory, the fame. And then maybe someone like the specialist or the evaluator as being less likely to get promoted or lower on the status hierarchy. Interestingly what we find in our research is that there's little to no difference across these roles in terms of the people who fulfill the plant role versus the people who fulfill the evaluator role versus the people who fulfill the investigator role. There's largely no difference in salary, there's largely no difference in formal job responsibility. And really no difference in the status that those individuals hold within organizations as a function of the role they play. So you can play any of these roles and still have an extremely high level of career success. And so, again, it's not about what roles you play, it's really around what are the roles that are most critical for your team and if any of these roles are not being fulfilled, making sure that either yourself or someone is stepping up to play those roles. It's also important to recognize that none of these roles and the people in them are perfect. All teams roles have weaknesses that need to be managed. And Belbin, on the website that I pointed you to, provides some really good examples of what those limitations, what those weaknesses are, and some specific strategies that you could use to manage or offset those weaknesses. And so I would encourage you to engage with your classmates around what are some of the weaknesses of these roles, how would you manage those weaknesses in your teams? That would be another topic that you could really take to the discussion forum, share with your classmates, and listen and learn from them as well. And then last, but certainly not least and I think this is one of the most important insights in terms of team roles is again what we are finding, and no matter how you conceptualize team roles I have given you the Belbin's nine team roles. You may come up with your own. You may have a dozen. You may have seven. But whatever those roles are, what we find most common across our research is that you need to be balanced. Your team has to have some exposure, some fulfillment of all of these roles. If you are missing one or more of the really significant roles that need to take place within teams. That's when your team can really fall down on its performance. And so when you do that team assessment, when you list all the roles, you list your team members, what you really wanna pay attention to is two things. Are certain individuals playing multiple roles, because that means your team is really dependent on those people. If those individuals were to leave the team tomorrow you may have a challenge with back filling those roles. So that's something to think about, is how dependent are you on certain individuals within the team. The second thing to think about is, are there a given your assessment of your team? Are there certain roles that are not being fulfilled today? And if there are roles that you are not fulfilling today in your team, either you as a leader within that team, no matter what formal position you have, as a leader in that team you may need to step up and play that role. Or, you assign someone else to play that role. Either way, as long as it gets fulfilled by the person who's most capable of filling that role. These are some key findings related to team roles that I wanted to highlight for you. The last thing that I'll share with you is just how critical it is for your team to discuss these roles openly. So, here's a study that Dioka Beersman and some colleagues that we published are really looking at the importance of role discussions. Having open discussions about these roles within teams. And what we find is, when you have the discussion, it almost doesn't matter as much what your reward structure is. But, if you are in a team that has individual based competitive reward structure. Remember, that competitive individual reward structure, as we talked about earlier, is going to drive individual-focused behavior. Now that may be okay for your team if you're looking for speed and accuracy, or sorry, speed and efficiency, for example. However If you wanna get the benefits of that competitive reward structure, you have to have an open, explicit dialogue about these roles within teams. If you don't, as you see here, in this study, team performance is dramatically reduced. So it's important to openly discuss team roles. It's especially important to discuss openly those team roles if your team has an individual competitive based reward system that's not going to naturally create cooperation, collaboration within the team. Having these open, explicit role conversations can help drive teamwork and performance when you have that individual competitive based rewards system. So explicitly discuss those team roles, especially when there's that history of competitive rewards. Or, even if they're simply norms focused on individual interest or individual focused behavior, critical for your team's performance.
