Making the learning stick: sustainable behaviour change for real teams

Making the learning stick: sustainable behaviour change for real teams

In the last of our series of articles responding to McKinsey’s paper ‘Go, teams’, we examine how to work towards sustainable changes that make a real difference to teams.

(Find the first in this series – on Apollo syndrome – here, and the second – on discovering team blind spots – here.)

The importance of reflection through team diagnostics

Teamwork is a business matter, McKinsey says.

Leaders have a stake in helping teams to work better together, because we know effective teamwork drives higher performance.

The solution, according to the research?

Team diagnostics that help team members understand the impact of their ‘mindsets and behaviours’ upon the group.

This can be used to build towards a ‘charter’ that spells out how the team will work together.

Belbin is fundamentally a team tool.

It evolved as a diagnostic through Dr Meredith Belbin’s near-decade-long research into teams – why some succeed while others fail.

As a result (and unlike many measures of personality), it has team dynamics at its heart.

It focuses on the observable behaviours needed to facilitate team progress, rather than individual personality traits.

Whilst personality (and other individually-focused) measures can be useful for individual coaching, it is sometimes difficult to extrapolate findings and apply them in a team context, towards actionable outcomes.

Belbin Team Roles start with the team, providing teams with a language to describe how they collaborate, their strengths and possible areas of weakness.

Making the changes stick

Once teams understand what changes need to be made, how do we ensure that progress is sustained and that teams don’t slip back into old ways of working?

Constant re-evaluation is key, McKinsey claims.

“The more often teams take the time to step back and reflect, the more likely it is that new behaviours become the default way of operating.”

In order to get the buy-in that drives accountability and therefore sustainable change, it is crucial that solutions come from the team as a whole.

We're not very self-aware

Many tools rely solely on self-reporting, but most of us are not all that self-aware.

As a result, individual misperceptions are carried forward into the team diagnostic, skewing the results. 

When people come to Belbin because they are disillusioned with other tools, this is the top complaint we hear – that it was all well and good for a team awayday, but ultimately superficial in terms of offering real insights.

Where separate 360-degree tools are used, these can be broad in scope and unwieldy to analyse in a way that is directly useful to changing team behaviours.

Belbin sits in the sweet spot in between.

It is solely focused on workplace behaviours, and it works using evidence from everyone in the team.

In addition to self-perception, each team member obtains Observer feedback from others in the team, giving a realistic view of how behaviours come across to others.

This ‘reality check’ is key because, McKinsey suggests, leaders are likely to have a rosier view of team effectiveness than team members themselves do.

Linking to a work setting

In order for leaders to have a real understanding of how the team is faring, we cannot underestimate ‘the importance of soliciting all members’ perspectives to get a well-rounded picture of how the team is operating”.

And ‘operating’ is the key word here.

A tool which describes people’s inner experience can only take us so far.

What teams need is a language which can be used to connect people’s strengths to the work they are doing.

That is what happens on the ground when people use the language of Belbin.

We might say that we want someone to “ME” an idea – for someone with Monitor Evaluator strengths to assess its viability. Or we might indicate that the team is taking an overly Implementer approach to a list of contacts for follow up – focusing on the process of getting through the list instead of the purpose and outcome of the outreach.

This means of connecting people and work is truly at the heart of embedding strengths-based learning. When teams can connect this knowledge to the work they do every day, it is far more likely that the learning will stick.

Embedding team effectiveness in the organisation’s DNA

Lastly, McKinsey looks at ‘scalable impact’ – a continuous journey that takes place not just with a few teams but with every team within an organisation.

The recommendation? Using a ‘train the trainer’ method to cascade the approach from a couple of high-value teams to hundreds of teams.

For organisations who have embraced the language of Belbin Team Roles (and seen real change as a result) this journey often starts with accreditation – our own ‘train the trainer’ program.

Accredited Belbin champions are empowered to take the methodology across the organisation and derive real strategic and operational benefits: greater self-awareness among individuals, improved collaboration and a greater understanding of resources across the organisation as a whole.