Idea 62: How to encourage creativity

It is not always easy to manage the creative and innovative aspects of teamwork. Ideally, individuals need to share the values, characteristics and interests of the other team members, to work with them in harmony and yet have something different to offer.

Belbin identified nine team-member roles, some of which are relatively self-explanatory:

1. Plant (solves difficult problems).
2. Resource manager.
3. Coordinator.
4. Shaper.
5. Monitor/evaluator.
6. Team worker (cooperative, diplomatic).
7. Implementer.
8. Completer.
9. Specialist.

A good team will exhibit all of the above ‘roles’, not necessarily with nine different people, but with fewer team members adopting different roles to complete the task.

Besides helping individuals to ‘perform’ the Belbin roles within a team, encouraging creativity in teams depends on a manager's skills in:

• Using the different skills within the team (having first identified the attributes of each individual).
• Ensuring that conflicts of ideas are allowed to happen and are tolerated by all.
• Recognizing particularly good contributions.
• Helping the team generate ideas (e.g. by brainstorming).
• Creating an open environment where individual team members can speak up honestly.