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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"We can see the effect in the fact that the language is used frequently in ongoing conversation but it’s in the one to one catch ups that we really feel the impact.
Managers spend much less time managing interpersonal relationships because team members are aware of their own strengths and allowable weaknesses.
Each team member has spent time having in depth conversations with their colleagues about their respective reports.
They are now able to understand each other and their behaviours at work properly, without the pressure of feeling that they’re being critical or making statements that reflect on a person’s personality."
Read the full case study here.
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