92. Key Roles in Effective Teams

Concept

If we have the right people on our team, we may or may not have the right roles in play. If we have selected the right people, they may play the necessary roles naturally—and they might not. A good team leader will watch for these roles and ensure that they are alive and well. He or she might even explicitly assign the roles to individuals to be sure those functions occur.

What roles would you say are key for any high performing team? Write down your thoughts here.

Blake and Mouton gave us the traditional functional axes in the Managerial Grid.⁶³ These axes are task and process. In other words, somebody has to be thinking about getting the job done and someone should be thinking about how we get the job done. While we can use this grid to assess managerial style (Jack Welch famously used a nine cell version), we can also apply this to teams. Who on the team is paying attention to getting the job done? Who is watching our process to ensure we aren’t behaving dysfunctionally?

The importance of getting things done, the TASK function, is obvious. If we meet and meet and work and work but never accomplish anything, what good is it?

The process function asks our team to be aware of and manage internal conflicts, dysfunctional communication styles, lack of listening, interrupting, getting everyone’s voice heard, and so on. Some people watch these things naturally; many, if not most, do not. The leader’s style will influence the process function dramatically. If the team leader is not a skilled facilitator, meetings can devolve into useless exercises.

There are at least two other dimensions that I think are important: creativity and practicality. In today’s world in which innovation and creativity are increasingly important,⁶⁴ encouraging creative thinking seems critical.⁶⁵ With the Internet, instantaneous information sharing, the ability to hide margins and buckets of money have evaporated. The world is much more transparent. The days of making margins on middle men and ignorance have passed. Creativity is critical to success in today’s business world.

That said, we could argue that a million new ideas are fine but only if a few of them bring in revenues. We need to balance creativity with practicality.

We could conflate the two axes, task and process, on a single balance scale. The middle position would be a good balance between task and process.

Then, we could chart two dimensions, task/process and creativity/practicality, and strive for a balance of both in our meetings and discussions. As mentioned above, organizations tend to recreate themselves. People tend to choose what they know. That leads to a resistance to change and innovation.

Observing a large sample of executive education teams in educational situations, Belbin argues for nine observable roles.⁶⁶ You and I might identify the common roles we see in our own meetings. (See below.) My concern, however, is more for what roles do we need rather than what roles we can commonly observe.

Example

Entrepreneur magazine highlights 10 companies with fantastic cultures.⁶⁷ They get results with good process, and balance creativity and process. Those companies include Zappos, Warby Parker, and Southwest Airlines. I once heard of a candidate at Southwest Airlines who submitted her resume on a sheet cake. She wrote her resume in icing! AND she got the job!

Diagram

Challenge

⁶³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerial_grid_model from Blake and Mouton, The Managerial Grid: The Key To Leadership Excellence, Gulf Publishing, 1964.

⁶⁴ For example, https://jeanneliedtka.com/ Also, https://ideou.com/pages/design-thinking

⁶⁵ For example, http://thecreativemind.net/1268/how-to-be-creative-michael-gelb-on-creativity-and-innovation/

⁶⁶ Belbin, M. 1981. Management Teams, Heinemann, London.

⁶⁷ https://entrepreneur.com/article/249174