What is Contribute?

Contribute is the more Team Role-focused of the two Belbin team building exercises. It is designed to demonstrate the strengths and contributions of each of the nine Belbin Team Roles, developing the team’s understanding of the roles within a learning environment.

Contribute is made up of nine different tasks, involving everything from caption writing to guiding other members of the team onto a sheep pen. Each exercise corresponds with a Team Role and the team must decide who should perform each task. The team’s objective is to collect all nine Team Role awards within a certain time limit.

Contribute helps the team explore its strengths and weaknesses. What did they do when they realised they had no Completer Finishers and five Shapers? How will they overcome the gaps and overlaps in their team when back at work?

How can it be used?

Contribute has been used to help thousands of teams in a variety of ways including:

• Understanding their strengths and potential weaknesses;
• Developing a non-confrontational Team Role language;
• Transforming from an OK team into a high performing team;
• Highlighting differences in Team Role behaviour and resolving conflict;
• Enabling newly formed teams to 'hit the ground running'.

How long does it take? What else do I need to know?

Contribute can be run with 4-9 participants, and takes approximately one hour. The feedback and debrief can take as long as required. It is strongly recommended that each participant has completed their Self-Perception Inventory, and obtained a minimum of four Observer Assessments prior to commencing the exercise.

The reports play an important part in allocating the nine tasks, and so time should be set aside to ensure that each participant has had the opportunity to read through their Belbin Individual report beforehand.

When you purchase Contribute, you also receive nine Belbin Individual reports, worth £315, free of charge.

The facilitator’s manual contains pointers for observation and feedback to the team, so it can be used by Team Role novices and Belbin accredited practitioners alike. Questions to be raised after completing the Contribute exercise can include:

• How were the tasks allocated? Did everyone share their Team Role strengths?
• Were there any gaps? How did the team overcome this?
• How did the team resolve any problems arising from more than one person having a particular Team Role strength?
• How can this be related to a recent situation faced by the team?
• Now that everyone has shared their Belbin strengths and weaknesses, would this have changed the recent project outcomes?

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Watch it being played!

Meredith Belbin's seminal book 'Management Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail', was recently launched in Shanghai and Beijing. Our Distributors in China had 80+ delegates at each launch and ran seven Contribute exercises simultaneously! This enabled the delegates to 1. Understand more about the nine Belbin Team Roles and 2. Why it's so important to understand your and each others Belbin Team Role strengths!

One member of an unsuccessful Contribute team made an astute observation that:

"If you don't know your strengths you won't know why you fail."

See the clips below to see how they got on:

The Shaper Task

The Thinking (Plant, Monitor Evaluator and Specialist) Tasks

Seven Contribute Exercises being Played!

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