The old story about the team and team players

Mantas Buta
2 min readSep 4, 2018

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.

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