Where do I fit in?

I took the Belbin Team Roles assessment the other week. For those who are not familiar with the assessment Belbin suggests that, by understanding your team role within a particular team, you can develop your strengths and manage your weaknesses as a team member, and so improve how you contribute to the team.

Team leaders and team development practitioners often use the Belbin model to help create more balanced teams. Teams can become unbalanced if all team members have similar styles of behavior or team roles.

If team members have similar weakness, the team as a whole may tend to have that weakness. If team members have similar team-work strengths, they may tend to compete (rather than co-operate) for the team tasks and responsibilities that best suit their natural styles. So you can use the model with your team to help ensure that necessary team roles are covered, and that potential behavioral tensions or weaknesses among the team member are addressed.

So I went through the assessment and I came out as a Plant! So to give you an idea of my what my 'default' behaviour is I have described it below...

The Plant is the creative innovator who comes up with new ideas and approaches. The plant is a specialist idea maker characterised by high IQ and introversion while also being dominant and original. The plant tends to take radical approaches to team functioning and problems. Plants are more concerned with major issues than with details.


I am not sure what I am going to do with this information at the moment. My boss used a great analogy about really enjoying reading horoscopes but taking it with a pinch of salt and using it as a talking point rather than a something to rule your life by.

"Do you want a collection of brilliant minds or a brilliant collection of minds?"

Further Reading:
Official Belbin Website