Mind the Gap

Mind the Gap - the key drivers for team effectiveness, and using Belbin to find the team's 'blind spots'

In the second of this series of articles responding to McKinsey’s paper ‘Go, teams’, we examine their key drivers for team effectiveness, and take a look at a common myth: that teams already know what they need to work on.

Key drivers for team success

McKinsey’s research identifies multiple health drivers across four different areas that define how well teams work together.

The most significant of these, they found, were: trust, communication, innovative thinking and decision-making.

Collectively, McKinsey claims, the four highest-scoring drivers account for between 69% and 76% of the differences between low- and high-performing teams when it comes to three key outcomes: efficiency, results and innovation.

We know that understanding our unique Belbin Team Role profile can help teams with all of the above.

• Trust and Communication

Discovering and announcing our behavioural strengths (and the strengths of others) builds trust within the team, enables individuals to communicate more effectively and facilitates innovation and the decision-making process.

• Decision-Making

High Co-ordinators seek consensus to make important decisions, whilst strong Monitor Evaluators can be relied upon to weigh all factors carefully and take their time to arrive at the right decision.

Teamworkers, on the other hand, tend to avoid decisions (in case it causes friction or division within the team) and might struggle under pressure.

• Innovative Thinking

When it comes to innovation, we can ensure that those with Plant and Resource Investigator strengths are granted the right environment to explore new ideas and that other team members are brought in at the right time to evaluate and implement those ideas.

In Management Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail, Meredith Belbin reveals that effective team members need to know and declare their strengths, but should also be adaptable and time their contributions effectively. (A detail-focused Completer Finisher, for example, is indispensable at certain stages of a project, but often a hindrance at the outset.)

In other words, we need to be attuned – to our own contribution, and to the dynamics of the team – to build the kind of trust and understanding within the team that leads to effective performance.

So how do we discover the strengths present in the team – and act on the information?

Many psychometric (or personality) tools are self-reporting (they rely on individuals’ self-awareness, which is often lacking) and carry this forward into team analyses, so results often don’t reflect what is really going on in the team. This can cause disillusionment long term, which damages trust.

Belbin measures behaviour rather than personality, and relies on feedback from others within the team to produce results, so the team can get a more realistic picture of what is going on.

And that’s key because, according to McKinsey, “teams are often unaware of their most important gaps and can have shared blind spots [...] Teams may believe a particular behaviour is a strength when it is actually a weakness or they may choose to work on something that they already do pretty well.”

Many of the drivers McKinsey identifies are, we would argue, not ‘behaviours’, as they claim, but team competencies. (Psychological safety, for example, is not a behaviour, but a belief, often based on experience.) What’s more, they are not boxes to tick off – most relate to team culture changes which must be sustained in order to deliver performance improvements.

Finding the team's 'blind spots'

If we want teams to improve across all drivers (paying particular attention to those that contribute most to team success) then we need a granular focus on the individual strengths that make up the organism of the team – the real-world observable behaviours and understanding that will foster the trust and communication from which all else follows.

Without this granular focus, it is more difficult to enter into the specifics of how change will be managed – and sustained.

The Team Role Circle

The Belbin Team Role Circle gives an at-a-glance view of the strengths present in the team, so that individuals can see where the gaps and overlaps are, and can decide how to address them, if necessary.

Because this data is derived from the whole team’s feedback, discussions are grounded in reality and result in real actions.

For example, a team with lots of Implementers and no Resource Investigators might struggle with ‘External orientation’ – continuing with existing processes and failing to recognise important upcoming changes in the market.

A team of Monitor Evaluators might not rate highly for ‘Meeting effectiveness’, as meetings will tend to deteriorate into lengthy debate without resulting action.

An appreciation of the Team Roles present in the team can give teams clarity regarding their collective strengths and weaknesses – and a strategy to manage this information towards greater effectiveness.

This might mean recruiting into the team, or ‘borrowing’ resources from elsewhere within the organisation (or externally). It might mean declaring a ‘Team Role void’ – acknowledging the gap and giving the team scope to explore its latent resources and choose the best person to fulfil that particular part.

Crucially, ‘tick-box’ competencies for individual team members can dull the shine of someone’s strengths, by encouraging focusing them instead on improving weaknesses.

But teams can balance their strengths and mitigate those weaknesses collectively, towards team excellence.

Or, as a certain someone once put it more succinctly...

Nobody is perfect, but a team can be.