Effective School Management

Team roles
The essence of Belbin’s research findings is that the mix of personal
characteristics in members of a team is a major determinant of the team’s
success. It is not simply the technical expertise that the members bring, for
Figure 10.1
Training and organization development matrix

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TEAMS
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this can be of second-order importance – it is the way they interact. Moreover,
astonishingly accurate predictions can be made of whether a particular team
will succeed or fail. Although the research was mainly carried out in a business
setting (the bulk of it at the Management College at Henley), it has been
successfully applied in school management training. Some of the problems
that schools repeatedly encounter in getting effective group working can
probably be ascribed to injudicious selection of members.
The development of these ideas is a fascinating story in itself, comparable
to the history of certain discoveries in physical science, but space does not
allow us to go into it here – you must get it direct from the book if you are
interested. What we shall do in this chapter is to summarize the main
findings of relevance to managers in schools and reproduce (with per-
mission) excerpts from the book and the website www.belbin.com..
The conventional wisdom in building teams in industry is that if you
contrive to put together, for example, your best accountant, researcher,
production person, salesperson et al. under a competent chairperson, you
have probably got the best possible team. Technical merit and expertise reign
supreme. What Belbin found was that this was a recipe for failure. In many
cases the less brilliant exponents of their profession worked more
successfully in a team. When very clever people are put together they tend to
suffer from ‘analysis paralysis’; anyone putting forward an idea finds it gets
hacked to bits by his or her colleagues, and no progress is made.
By contrast, the meticulous observation of winning teams shows that the
members individually adopt one or more of certain team roles, defined as ‘a
tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular
way’, which are indispensable to the successful completion of the task. Belbin
now recognizes nine such roles (Belbin, 1995). Belbin’s original eight roles are
listed in Figure 10.2, together with the typical features, positive qualities and
allowable weaknesses of the role incumbents. A short description of each role
and associated common traits is given below.