We spent a morning with the healthy ice-cream start-up Oppo. We spoke with the founders Harry and Charlie Thuillier to get their views on why they saw a need to use Belbin in their rapidly growing company, and the outcomes from the workshop.

Harry:

Hi, I am Harry this is Charlie. We work for Oppo Brothers and we make temptation you never need to resist in the form of low calorie but brilliant tasting ice cream and deserts.

Today we are working with Belbin who are well known for their work with high performing teams so that we can make our team work better. We are stocked in Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Ocado, Amazon, and a whole load of other stores in the UK. We are in about seven thousand stores around Europe and we need to grow as fast as possible.

Belbin is really helping us to do that by creating the right behaviours in our team and maximising on those behaviours so that people really can perform to their strengths.

Charlie:

We are an incredibly small team and we haven’t got an awful lot of resource, so we have to make sure we maximise our strengths wherever possible. So far, we have done it through gut feel…

My top Team Roles were Resource Investigator, Plant and Shaper.

Harry:

My top roles are Coordinator and Implementer. Actually, the Coordinator role I hadn’t really realised, but actually I had been naturally gravitating towards that over the last few months, and that helps me to know where my leadership style sits best. So, while Charlie’s more of a Shaper, I am more of a Coordinator and it’s great that we have seen we are good at different things.

I am amazed that certain members of the team had certain characteristics that I had no idea about. Now we will be able to send the right person off doing a bit more ‘Resource Investigating’ type of things, and we have other people we’ve realised that are actually really good at the detail, are strong Completer Finishers, so that’s massively helpful.

Charlie:

It might change how we might hire in the future, and how we look for a set of behavioural skills that we’re lacking, we don’t quite have yet. So before we make the next hire, we will use Belbin to help provide insights to who’s the right candidate for the role, and what behaviours are key for that role, and the overall team.

Watch the full interview, along with clips form the workshop here: