The old story about the team and team players

The new story about the team and team players just pop up in my news feed. It reminds me of mine old one.

In 2006 I was running a series of training for business analysts and business transformation consultants who were just promoted to team leaders. For the second training class, I have added team balancing exercise based on Belbin methodology.

Before the training, I have asked participants to fulfill Belbin test to know their roles in teamwork. It is important to mention that time I was running training always for 6 to 8 participants and practical tasks always were set for two teams 3–4 members each.

So using Belbin test results for the first team work I have split students into two extremely unbalanced teams. Unbalanced in this case means that people with the same work preferences were set to the same group. As I have expected the teams work results were bad enough. They managed to complete round to 50% from set tasks. But the mud was great and we were continuing.

For the second exercise I set balanced teams. Balanced means that team members have different work preferences to supplement each other in teamwork. The result was great. Teams performed round to 90% from set tasks and overperformed any teams I have trained before.