Hello, my name's Joe Keeler. I'm the managing director here at Belbin. We're based just outside of Cambridge in the UK and we have been trading as a company for 35 years.

We're going to spend the next 45 minutes to an hour is talking about teams, talking about how can you understand them better, how you can harness the strength of your teams. And it's a really important subject because teamwork is hard. If it wasn't, if it was really, really easy, I wouldn't be needing to, one, record this webinar, and also two, our company, wouldn't be there.

Working with other people is really difficult. Working with lots of different people is difficult, and it's been made even more difficult over the last few years that we've had throughout the pandemic. This has happened because, you know, our levels of stress have been, a lot higher, and we, our personal life has really started to influence as well, our, professional lives.

So, teamwork is difficult anyway. It's been a lot more difficult over the last 2 or 3 years. And now we're finding people coming back, this.

The pandemic, if, if that's ever going to happen, and we have to start re-establishing those relationships within teams. We have to start looking again at how we can make the most out of working with one another to make sure that we get to the team's objectives. So I'm just gonna spend I said last 45, the next 45 minutes or so, going through some top tips of how you can hopefully make your team work better together.

So I'm just gonna share my screen here. OK, where am I? I think it's that one.

Perfect, there you go. So What's the first thing you need to do to make sure that your teams are more effective? Well, the first thing is to really understand what the team is there to achieve.

And we forget about this sometimes, we just talk about, I think about a team of people who physically work in the same space. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a team that could just be. A group of individuals all undergoing doing different things, different tasks.

A team, there needs to be a collective objective, everybody needs to understand what that objective of the team is and the part that they have to play. Now, one thing that we sometimes do on training courses here at Belbourne is when we start off with a team, we ask them, do you know what the objectives of your team is? Do you know what the team is there to achieve?

And everybody says, yes, yes, of course I do. And then we get them to write it down on a piece of paper, without conferring, without talking to anybody else. And then get to actually see what everybody has written.

And we are yet to find a team where everybody is verbatim, everybody says exactly the same thing. And that's because the objectives of the team are very much through our own lens, aren't they? Very much what we can get out of it sometimes.

So one of the key elements to teamwork is just to check that everybody understands what it is that the team is there to achieve and the can stay here. The better because the more details you can really discuss and get agreed upon, it could be like the duration, time scales, what does success look like? What help from other people are you going to need along the way?

All of these things, if you can get that nailed, then everything else is a lot easier. So the first thing the team needs is an objective. I think this has been personally, I think this has been quite difficult over the last 2 or 3 years.

I manage, the company here and when stress happens, when there's uncertainty happening, I personally tend to go into heads down mode, just get it done. You start concentrating on the day to day. And everybody else starts doing that as well, very much a heads down approach.

But because of that, we, we, we forget to lift our head and forget what it is that they're, we're there to do. We forget that bigger picture. So it is really easy, I said to be able to do a heads down, but you need to be able to raise those up and be able to communicate with the other people in the team to make sure you know where they are too.

So yes, it's hard, but taking time right at the very beginning is absolutely crucial. OK. So once you've done this, what, what's next, what's the next step?

I've got a quote here from Doctor Meredith Belvin, and he talks about a team not being a bunch of people with job titles, but a congregation of individuals, each of whom has a role which is understood by other members. Very often within organisations, we think of a team as exactly the job titles, who should be in this team, whose job title means that they should be involved. What's the hierarchy, who should we include within this team?

Politically, who should be within this team, and we start talking about it as a function, as opposed to actually the individuals themselves. And what they're contributing, not in terms of their job titles, but in terms of their strengths, etc. So it's really important.

To think of people other than job titles, cos they're being so much more than that, so much more than that to the role. People's strengths aren't defined by what's written on their business card or on their badges, their strengths can be defined in so many other ways. And this is where the language of Belbon comes in.

Because what Belbourne helps, it gives everybody a language to be able to talk about their strengths and weaknesses, what their role is, what their contribution is to the team, because otherwise it's quite difficult to articulate, and if you can't articulate something, it gets really, really confusing. So Belboin gives you that language. What is Belbin?

Well, Belpin really, it, it's, it's a description of the, it's not the noun of who you are, but it's the verb of what you do. It describes the contribution to a behaviour. Now, let me just come off here.

Let me just stop sharing a minute. So, a very, very brief history of Bel for those of you who haven't come across the terminology at all, is back in the 1960s and 1970s at Henley Management College, they used to run syndicate workings. They were the first European business school to actually instigate learning by syndicate workers working together as opposed to just being lectured to.

And they had a course which all of, those managers who were sort of earmarked for the higher echelons of management came along to, and they worked, in syndicates, and then at the end of it, like a mini MBA, they got a stamp on they're a really good manager, and they left. But what Henley found was when these people were working in syndicates, these were already good managers. Some teams, some syndicates worked really well, and some worked less well.

And they couldn't work out why. So, they got in contact with the Industrial Training Research Unit in Cambridge, which headed up to Eunice Balban OB. And she managed to get a team of researchers together, and a wonderful group of researchers, psychologists, anthropologists, chess champions, people interested in other people, and of that included her husband, Doctor Meredith Balvi.

And they spent the next 9 years going back and forth from Cambridge to Henley, it's a beautiful drive, I don't know if you've ever done that, checking to see what it was, trying to work out what it was that made some teams succeed and others fail. So over that period of time, what they did is they analysed the heck out of everybody, who attended. So they looked at their personality, they looked at their intelligence, they looked at their, views of, of, of life.

And they also devised a business game. And during this business game, everybody who took part, they were observed to see what type of contribution they were making. And they were observed every 30 seconds.

It's called Bay's analysis. I can't think of anything worse to do personally. But they got all of this data, all of this data together.

And I thought, right. Is it that makes a team successful. So they started off by putting all of those with really high intellect together because they thought that must be what makes a team successful.

And, lucky for us, immortals, it wasn't the case. And in fact, they found that those who were just high intellect worked together, they spent the whole time proposing an idea and then disagreeing with somebody else's, and that was it. They didn't go any further forward, and those teams didn't work very well at all.

They then decided to put teams together, people who have similar personalities. Again, they worked OK, but not brilliantly. And they went through this idea of working, thinking, could it be this?

And then no, and so on and so forth, until they found that the most successful teams were those who had diversity of behaviours. They were able to analyse these behaviours, and they found 9 clusters of useful behaviours. Which facil facilitated a team to go from A to B, that allowed the team to be really, really full.

Each of these clusters of behaviours was called a team role, and we got those behind me here, and we'll look at those in a bit more detail later. So what we're looking at here is not personality type, it's not a job title. What we're looking at is behaviour, the way in which you interact with others and the way in which you interact with your work.

Now, your behaviour can change. What we're not trying to say is that you have certain behaviours and that's it forever. We're saying that behaviour can change due to many different factors, different teams that you work in, different organisations, different practises, all of these things can affect the way that you behave.

But we know that for a team to be successful, we need access to all 9 of these team or behaviours at some point. All at the same time, but we'll come on to that in a sec. So let me just share my screen again, whereabouts were we up to, there we are.

OK. The behaviours, we're looking not at the noun of who you are, but the verb of what you do. And like I said, for behaviour is, influenced by many different things.

Your personality obviously has a, a bearing on your behaviour, your mental abilities, your values and motivations, your experience, external influences, or just COVID, and role learning as well. The more you understand about your behaviours, the more you can learn about them, and play them to better effect. So a team role is one of 9 clusters of behavioural attributes defined here by Doctor Meredith Dalvin, who's 96, and, he's just gone home actually, he's been in the office most of the day, to be able to affect in order to facilitate team progress.

So you need these 9 team roles. And that's what's critical, really, about teamwork, is it's really appreciating the diversity of behaviour. We talk about diversity a lot in teams, don't we?

But what we don't tend to talk about is the behavioural diversity and not just that diversity, but also accepting it and using it and respecting it as well. Let's talk a little bit about more about these team roles as as we go forward. Now there are 9 different team roles, 9 different clusters of behaviour.

I'm not here to give you loads and loads of information, you can download whatever you need, the handouts, etc. From our website at Belvin.com.

But here, I'm just gonna quickly go through those. So, one of those behaviours is that of a shaper. And the shapers are ones that are challenging, they've got high energy, they get to the objective.

They can be quite short, because they're not so bothered about the person, they're more, worried about the task, the objective being done. They're great at injecting energy when things perhaps are getting a little bit lackadaisical. With each of these two mos we have strengths, but we also have what we call allowable weaknesses, and it's the flip side of the coin, because if you're gonna be brilliant at something, something has to give.

So with a shaper, although they may have high energy, very challenging, obviously they may be safe people. But this is OK as long as they can recover from that, with a thank you, with some humour to make sure that people stay with them the next time. Another action model is that of an implementer.

The implementers of the hard workers, the rolling up of the sleeves and just getting stuff done. They're the doers. They're the ones that say, my goodness, do we have to talk about this again?

What are we going to do to make it happen? Tend to love a gantard. Implementers love, Excel.

They love a process. They love things going from A to B to C, etc. They organise the work that needs to be done.

The allowable weakness of the implementer is sometimes they're not so great at change, say if something works, why fix it? But again, if you appreciate that, but you get the implementers involved right at the very beginning of some change programme, perhaps, they'll be able to design it for you. The other action role we have is that completed finisher, and the completed finisher is the one who has that internal anxiety and wants to make sure that everything is always.

Perfection, perfectionist, high standards, doesn't want to make any mistakes. Because of this, I think sometimes it should be called the completer polisher, as opposed to a completed finisher, because they're never actually finished. Things should always be that little bit better.

And so they allowyness is that they're not so great at delegating because nobody's gonna do as good a job as them, obviously. So there we have the action roles, the shaper, the implementer, complete a finisher. Now, if you can imagine when you're working with a team and the team is mainly filled with people who have preferences for these particular behaviours.

It's gonna be very task focused, isn't it? It's gonna be very much, quite vigorously adhering to procedure, very efficient, maybe hasn't got a great task for people or thinking. And imagine if you came into this kind of environment, if you had other teammos, how that may be quite jarring for you as well.

So let's have a look at the people, people, teams. Here we have the coordinator. So the coordinators of behaviour, they're like the conductor of an orchestra.

They know what the music's meant to sound like, and they bring everybody in to make sure, every instrument in to make sure this wonderful sound is heard. The big picture. They delegate brilliantly.

They really identify the strengths of others and bring them in. You never see them flap. They're always very calm, quite confident.

Allowable weakness is you wonder if they've delegated everything, what on earth are they doing with their feet up on the desk? But very much needed to be able to bring everybody together. The other team that brings everybody together is the teamworker, and they do it via empathy, through listening, through really caring for people because they're people.

They're the ones that know, birthdays, anniversaries, what you're going through, because they care. During the pandemic when we all suddenly ended up working from home, I know not. I made sure I was in contact with the person in our team who had the highest teamworker, score, because they could really give me a feel for how people were feeling.

Where did I need to concentrate my efforts. Allowable weakness, teamworkers sometimes don't want to upset people, and they don't want to make a decision. So it's a really good idea, to make sure you do things on a 1 to 1 as opposed to giving them, sort of like group sort of pressure to, to go a certain way.

We then never had the resource investigator, and they're the ones who like to go outside of the organisation, see what other people are doing. They're great at exploring opportunities. They're great negotiators, and they kind of know everybody.

And if they don't, they know somebody who does. So again, high energy, like with the shaper, but they're the ones who basically never in. You never know where they are because they're a conference, or perhaps they're doing this, or they're doing some networking their breakfast meeting, or they're just having a chat with somebody.

They bring the outside world in. They're allowable weaknesses sometimes they on that they do let you down, but that's OK. Make sure they just have something in place to make sure they don't let too many people down.

So we're here we have the people orientated roles, the ones that are interested in other human beings. Again, if you just had those people behaviours within a team. And nothing else.

It would be great, it'd be incredibly social, there'd be a lot of chatter, but would they get things done? You can see where you need those action roles in now as well, don't you, as well as the people roles. Let's have a look at the last 3 team roles here.

So we've got the thinking team role, the plant, the creative, the finding a different solution to a problem, great problem solvers. They come up with many, many, many ideas, but not all of them are any good, but it's not, that's fine. You're not looking for every one of their ideas to be brilliant, you're just looking for that one nugget.

They see things that a slightly different perspective to everybody else, which is just fantastic, cause you're fresh thinking. The Allowable weakness is sometimes they're so busy caught up with what's going on here, they're not communicating with others. Then you have the specialists.

Now the specialist one is that one with a love of learning. Really high professional standards. So we talk about the completed finisher with high standards.

Here we talk about professional high standards, tend to have lots of letters after their name. Love to have a deep dive into the area that really, really interests them. Allowable weakness is sometimes it's all they can talk about, they don't understand the bigger picture, but again that's OK cos you're wanting them to bring in just this particular level of detail.

Last but not least, we have the monitor evaluator, and the monitor evaluator is the one that takes the emotion out of the decision making process, looks at the pros and cons, weighs up, what should be done and always makes the right decision. They're very sober, they're very, . I'm trying to think what it's very strategic in their thinking.

They're allowable weaknesses sometimes they're not seen as emotional, but that's OK. You're not asking them to be inspirational, you're asking them to be right. So here we have the thinking roles.

And again, if you, if you just had thinking roles without the other two, again, would much stuff get done? Would there be any discussion? Would you, everybody should be sitting in their own little corners?

You need each of these 9 behaviours. We need to recognise and we really need to respect each of these 9 behaviours to make sure, that we can really make our teams as strong as possible. I've got this behind me, in my team circle.

I use it all the time, and it's a wonderful way of exploring the diversity of behaviours within your team, with everybody putting down where their strengths are, where their strengths lie, and to be able to discuss where the gaps are and where the overlaps are. Perhaps you've got a really strong task focus within your organisation, or perhaps a very focused, you know, towards, towards people. And it's actually, for the team to be really effective, you need to respect different types of behaviour and actually try and draw a whole variety of behaviours in to be truly successful.

So we started about 5 minutes ago talking about the fact, oh excuse me. And a team isn't just made up of people with job titles. It a team is, is made up of people, each of which has distinctive contribution, of which is known by everybody else in the team.

And what Belur does is allows you to have that language to say, this is my behavioural contribution that I'm making to the team. This is where my strength lies. And this is where you want to use people.

You want to try and align people's strengths with the work that needs to be done. Because after all, there's lots of research out there that says if people play to their strengths, at least once a day, they're gonna be 6 times more engaged. What does he, what does that mean?

They're gonna be happier. They're going to enjoy actually going to work more, they're gonna look for, they can escape out. Themselves because they want to be there, they're getting fulfilment whilst they're in their role, so to try and find their behavioural strength is a critical, but I think it is, obviously, and a lot of other people do, a critical importance.

But it's not just about having a whole range of diversity there. People really do need to understand theirs and each other's. They need to start talking about the strengths, using what I'd say, use this team circle to get those discussions going.

And to look at relationships within that, that really exploit those strengths and contain the weaknesses. OK. What else is really useful when you're trying to make a teamwork?

I love this quote from Meredith, a good team leader treats members of a team like actors on a stage. There need to be exits and entrances, not everybody is required to be on the stage at. I And this is quite true, isn't it, because sometimes we all feel we need to do everything together, or perhaps people don't know where they need to come on, they don't know when their queue is to come on stage, so they just stay on stage anyway, just in case.

But we don't need that at different parts. Remember going back to the beginning, what is the team's objective? What we need to be able to do is, once we've decided what the objective is, is to cut that down into chunks of work.

What needs to be done? What different pockets of work need to be done to reach that objective. And then what you need to do is make sure you're allocating the right people to the right tasks and like we said before, if you can align those with their strengths, brilliant, because it makes everybody feel like they're making, you know, worthwhile contribution.

So not everybody is needed all of the time, and I know this is difficult because sometimes it gets a bit political, doesn't it? You have to be seen to be including other people at the, you know, at various times, but. If we talk such behavioural contributions as opposed to job title, it's a little bit easier.

So which behaviours do you need at at at which time? What is it that you need? Well if we go through this, if you need new ideas, if you need to look at different perspectives, what you're looking at are people who have strengths as those plants, and with those unorthodox, ideas, these great problem solvers.

But who's gonna choose which of those ideas would work best? Well, at this point, you kind of want to have that plant behaviour and just get it out of the way cause they're gonna come up with another idea very soon. So what you want to do is get them off stage and then bring in that monitor evaluator, the one who is being able to judge which of those ideas should come next.

But you're not gonna want that monitor evaluated to then allocate different roles to different people. Who is that broad perspective? Who's then gonna organise the people to be able to achieve the work?

Well, that's where the in. Practical people who can realise these suggestions, remember we said the coordinator is sitting there with their feet up because they've delegated everything, who's actually doing the work, who's practical, that's where the implementers come in. You don't want to suddenly bring those, that plant behaviour back in at this point, because the implementers's already getting, some process involved, getting plans put together.

You don't need, more creativity to say, well, should we do it a different way instead. You see how demoralising that is for the team, and we see that quite a lot, is to demoralise people becoming demoralised because the wrong people are being asked to contribute at the wrong, at, at the wrong time. It's really visual when you go into teams, you can really see it happening.

You don't want those high standards, you don't want mistakes and especially in the industry that you're in, you really don't, you can't have mistakes. So you really need that high standards and that's where that completed finisher comes in. And they need to be given time to make sure that those standards can be achieved.

You need their anxiety to make sure you don't become lackadaisical and just go, yeah, whatever. You need them to be able to ensure that everything has been done to the highest possible standard. You also need people who are gonna be seeing things from elsewhere, so who, who are gonna make those contacts?

Well, wouldn't ask the monitor evaluator to do that. You need somebody who enjoys going out, so that's when you need to allocate that to the resource investigators. This is where they come on stage.

Who's gonna stop complacency. That's when you're asking the shaper to really take centre stage there and bring that energy in that direction to make sure that things happen as and when they should. Of course when it all perhaps starts going, it can get a little bit tetchy, that's when you really do need that teamworker, the one who can smooth, the water, he's, they're like the oil that keeps the team together.

And then he can get expert in a certain particular. Subject, he really knows about a particular area, that's where you need to find that specialist, you need to find that specialist there, not the generalist, you don't want the coordinator at this point, they're too general, they're too broad. They're off in the wings at this point, you need to bring in that person who has that high specialist behaviour, to be able to give the team the expertise they need.

So really learning how and when everybody should contribute will help your team work more effectively together. I'll give you an example here. This is, a project we worked with an organisation with, and they said, look, there's 4 different elements to the way that we work.

We first, we come up with ideas, we then evaluate them, work out which one to go best. We then actually do the work and implement it, then we complete and give it off to our, our customer. I don't know how well this would translate into your practises, but I'm sure you can think of a similar projects that you may have.

They were having problems because their projects never seemed to finish. It was constantly going over and over and over and over again. And that was because they realised that they had the ideas that that the behaviours of the plant and the resource investigator.

Always involved throughout the project. So it'd get so far and then they'd go, Oh, so and so's doing this. Should we look at that?

Should we do that? Or I've had another idea. Why don't we do something different?

And it used to really frustrate the heck out of all of the other people within the project because they never got past the finishing line. So they worked out which behaviours they needed and when, when they were coming on stage and when they weren't needed at all and told to just stay in the wings. So they did get the plants and resource investigators to the idea stage, but then they said thank you very much, that contribution is over, you can wear another hat, but we don't need that behaviour contribution again unless we particularly ask for it.

Then you had the monitor evaluators working out which of the ideas were any good. The implementer completed that those plans were implemented to a high standard, and then they would be able to hand over. The coordinator took that overview role to make sure that everything was happening, the right people were being used at the right time.

The shaper was only brought in as and when they needed a bit of energy, and the teamworker only as and when things started getting a bit fractious. And they brought the specialist in whenever they needed that specialist knowledge. The more you know about your team members, whether or not you manage a team or whether or not you're in a team, the more you can really understand where they are best placed.

It, you don't have to have a, a, a, a particular project, it could just be the day to day work that you have. If you have 2 or 3 people. In the same role as in the same job title, well, I'm sure that that they're not three, you know, they're not clones of each other.

I'm sure that they would have strengths in different ways and it's working out how to allocate the right work to those to those correct behaviours and everybody knowing that. Conflict can be a problem within teams, can't it? And I don't mean conflict, where you're fighting in the corridors.

I mean, sometimes when you just don't seem to get the other person, and you sometimes, when you know that a conversation is difficult, or when you know that that viewpoint, they're never gonna see it from your point of view. Sometimes we avoid those conversations, because it's just easier, isn't it? It's just easier rather than to actually have that confrontation.

Again, understanding our Belbin team of strengths can really help with that. It's really useful if we can understand the behaviours, not the person. We're not talking about a personality clash here.

We're just talking about different ways that you approach work and different ways that you approach other people. So, Here we have here each of those 19 roles. And we call this the opposites.

Excuse me. So you have the shape of the lives, gets things done. You can imagine they're opposite, us can be completely different to them is the behaviour of that of a teamworker, the one that cares.

If you think about it, you've got a good cop, bad cop. And they can really rub each other up the wrong way, because it's a shame to say, Why do you care about people so much? We just need to get here.

The team worker says, but these are people, they have, they have feelings. Why do you, why do you always upset everyone? So you can see that there could be potentially some conflict between these two behaviours.

However, if they know that. And it's always a case of understanding ourselves and the impact we have on others, and then understanding others' behaviours as well. If we know that, we can start to form really strong relationships.

If the shape it knows. That the teamworker is there to support them, to ensure that people don't get too annoyed with them and actually want to come on board, and that's a really positive relationship. And if the teamworker realises that actually the shape is not, it's not personal, they, we, but we get to the end point there, things need to be done again, it's going to help the understanding of that relationship.

The coordinators always taking that general viewpoint and the specialist who's really got that deep dive into a particular subject area. Again, vastly different viewpoints. Does the, does the specialist respect the coordinator because they don't know everything that they know?

Does the coordinator, perhaps, cos they just don't get it, do they perhaps not give the specialists the time that they need? So again, two very, very different behaviours. But once they understand that each needs the other, it can be a wonderful working relationship.

The plant that's coming up with all of these different ideas, different ways of doing things, and the implementer saying, for goodness sake, we haven't even started to work on the last idea yet. What's the practical implication of what you're talking about? How, what does that look like in, in reality?

And I thought, I don't know what it's like. I just think it's an amazing idea. So again you've got these problems of two different behaviours, but the plant kind of needs to be implemented because otherwise none of their ideas are gonna ever see the light of day.

And again, the implementer needs to really understand that things will get quite dull, perhaps you, you do need to innovate, you do need different ideas to come through as well. So it's appreciating the what each party can bring to the relationship. The resource investigator.

Always starting new things and the completed finish year I always wanting them finished and never actually getting there, because the research invest has gone off again because they've gone to find something else to do. So again, in fact, this is where we see a lot of conflict within teams actually, why don't you just finish something? And why do you keep bothering about the details?

Look at the opportunity that might arise. Again, if they understood where each one was coming from. Perhaps they could talk about it.

Perhaps they could just, you know, devise a plan of how they are gonna best. We then have the monitor evaluated. And they're by themselves because they don't really have relationships with other people because they, they, they like to take the, the emotion out of the decision making process.

They don't wanna be, you know, they, they don't want feelings to cloud their judgement. However, They are very, very different to the shaper because the safer says, come on, we need a decision. And the monitor evaluators saying hang on a minute, I haven't had the time to think this through yet.

So there can be some problems there. Again, the resource investigator and the monitor evaluator can cause issues, cos the abuses came up with another great idea and the monitor evaluator said, have you thought it through? And they're saying, no, I haven't.

So you have some conflict that can happen there as well. Where else could there be conflict again between the plant? I've got another idea I wanted to evaluate it, does it work?

So between the monitor evaluator and the plant, the shape and resource investigator, there can be some problems, but again, it's that understanding that a waiter is involved, the wrong decision could be made. They need to be able to not come along with a collective enthusiasm, they need to be able to be completely impartial. Understanding these contributions of everybody within your team and having a language to be able to talk about them, will help you manage the team more effectively, but also helps the team understand their contributions, Better, allows them to have working relationships that really can, although at times may be quite difficult in the longer term can be really, really productive.

I think they say, isn't it, that we . We enjoy working with people who are very similar to us, but we're more productive when we work with people who are very different to us. But that's, that takes a bit of time.

It takes a bit of work. That's what I said right at the very beginning. Teamwork is hard, and it cause it's all about people.

It's all about communication and understanding and appreciating different. Knowing that absolutely every contribution is needed. So, let's just recap there, too much difficult.

Make sure you have an objective. The objective is really important, spend as much time as you can so that everybody understands what it is that they are there to achieve. It doesn't have to be some big, huge, sexy project.

It could be the day to day running of what you're doing. It could be, where do I need to contribute there, because the objective is to have a, a practise which has, you know, 0%, problems and runs effectively, etc. Etc.

Etc. So these are the things that you need to be able to have. Make sure everybody understands them.

Then make sure people aren't just involved because of their job titles. Make sure that people understand what it is that they're contributing. And you know that you need these 9 team roles, these 9 different types of behaviour to be truly, truly effective.

Find out where they are within your team. Find out which members of the team are contributing which behaviours, and then try and allocate the right work to them. Because that will make people more engaged, and we need that right now because it's been so tough over the last few years.

I say a few years, it just feels like it's going on forever, doesn't it? . And then once people understand what it is that they're bringing to the team, and they understand and appreciate the difference in behaviour, look at those working relationships.

Just, just, just think for a second. Is it because we're seeing things from different viewpoints? Using the language of Belbo really helps you there.

It really helps you to be able to form far stronger working relationships. What else is important to help you with your teams? Let's just get this next slide up here.

OK. Here we go. Sure.

Next, never underestimate the importance of size. And this is something that is over time and time again, you very rarely see articles or research, etc. That looks at the importance of how many people you have within a team, what's the critical number of people that you need.

It's quite interesting, you could look at it, from the perspective of of a dinner party, you know, when we, when we had those, I don't know if everybody's gone back to normal yet, but. If you think about how many people, when you invite them out to dinner, or if you go out to a restaurant, how many people can stay on the same conversation? And at what point do you get a breakaway?

Do you get another conversation going on on the table? In fact, there's two conversations going on. At that point, that team isn't working together.

They're not all contributing towards the same thing. I tend to think anything more than 678 is when you tend to get that. Definitely double figures.

When you start having more than 8, 10 people involved, it's, that's not really a team. Because nobody really understands what is their unique contribution. There's too many contributions happen, nobody's voice is being heard.

Jeff Bezos from . Amazon. He talks about the fact that he has a 2 pizza rule.

If he sees more than 2 pizzas going into a meeting room, there are just too many people involved. Obviously, you can, you know, I don't know if that's the best analogy, but I think it makes the point, doesn't it? What you want is everybody to feel that they are being.

The their viewpoint is listened to, that their contribution is as valid as everybody else's. Increase the numbers too much, you, you're just, you're just another person. You're not making that unique contribution.

If you increase the numbers too much, you also start getting groupthink. You people are no longer wanting to challenge perhaps what's going on. People are a bit too scared to raise their hand and ask a question cos they don't quite understand.

If you want to have conformity, if you want everybody to agree with you, just get big numbers. Just get big numbers and therefore, that's the environment of where you get that conformity. But if you do want to have different people, contributing at different times, if you do want people to feel like a valued member of the team, get those numbers right down.

Meredith Belbo's ideal team size is 4. A lot of the research at Henley with teams of 4 and teams of 6. In fact, the teams of 6 is a little bit better, if I remember rightly, but it's that team of 4, which means that actually, everybody's voice is, is, is heard, everybody's contribution is needed.

And at that point, at 4, what you can have is more of a rotating leadership. So you're not always, relying on that one person to make the. Decisions or to decide the future or the vision of the team, you can actually rotate it depending on where you are when it comes to the team's objectives.

So if you have 4, the rotating need to happen. What Meredith does say is that he really likes an even number because if you have an even number, it means that you don't have one person, who is able to have that casting vote. Everything, therefore has to be far more, collective, more and more collaborative, because you'll have to keep talking things through.

And I agree with him, to a point that sometimes the decision just needs to be made, so sometimes it is quite nice to have that odd number. Other researchers 56, but yeah, it, it's keeping it small to be really productive. And you might say well, we're all of the same team, and, you know, there, there, there's 15 of us.

You hear that quite a lot. Well, actually, you've got 15 in the group, but you could probably break that down into 2 or maybe 3 separate teams if you thought about actually what the day to day working is. And it's making sure that you have teams within a bigger group, which will make sure people feel that they are contributing.

OK. So, keep your team, so that everybody knows what they're doing. Don't feel inclined.

And we did that a little bit. If those of you, if you were working from home, is that we just keep adding people to the zoom screen, adding an extra rectangle, that didn't work so well. Because people really were on their phone and they weren't contributing to the meeting at all.

Right. So, what else is really useful when working with a team? I'll just share my screen a sec, get here, share, next slide.

I found this on Twitter, I don't know, to be perfectly honest, how legitimate it is, cos everything on Twitter, I think you have to fact check several times, but I think the point is there is that Richard Branson says treat people as you'd like to be treated and they'll do their best work. Well, actually, I don't think that's true. You should treat people how they would like to be treated and they do their best work.

We make this assumption, don't we, that everybody's like us. Everybody has the same values, same motivations, and that if we just how we would expect somebody to be to us, then they all should find a. And that's not actually the case because we're all different.

If I was to treat some people in the office how I would like to be treated, I mean, I, I don't think we'd have a team to be perfectly honest, I'm quite direct, I'm quite thick skinned, and I'd like things to be done quickly. So if somebody just says, Joe, can you do that now? I'm like, yeah, of course I can, off I go.

But if somebody had different behavioural strengths to me, perhaps they're a higher team worker, perhaps I'd like to think things through a bit more, being told that you're doing something now. That that that's not a useful way to be treated. So as a manager, and we all have responsibility for the team to work well, it's anybody within the team.

Work out how that other person would prefer to be treated. And do your best to be able to do that. I'll tell you what, it makes a heck of a difference.

It really does. And it could be that you don't quite understand it, but that's OK. You're not there to understand.

You're just there to believe. That is how they prefer to be. You're gonna get the best out of them.

You don't have to challenge that. You don't have to be puzzled by it. Just find out what it is and do it, and then you will find that you are able to manage everybody.

A lot better. So find out other people's strengths, manage to those strengths, treat people accordingly, and you will have a far more effective team. I'm just gonna say thank you at this point, to listen to me drone on, for this amount of time.

If you did want to link in with me and you wanted to continue the conversation, please do. I'll go to Belvin.com for more information about Belbin.

I'll just stop sharing there. Going back to the beginning of the presentation, how do I better understand and harness the strengths of my team? Well, first of all, it's not easy.

Let's go back, let's not say this is something that can be done overnight. It's not, it takes a lot of work and it takes continual work as well. It's never done, about managing a team is there's never a point where you can tick the box because there's always other things that are happening.

So to be able to truly understand the behavioural contributions you have in your team, to perhaps use the language of Belbourne, to be able to talk about them, to be able to talk about them openly and freely, is, is what you need to do, and you need to keep doing it on a regular basis. Remember, we're more than just our job titles, we're more than just how long we've been in an organisation. We, each of us have unique strengths that we can bring to the team.

And no, we're not just one trick ponies either. We tend to have 2 or 3 of these Belbourne team so it's been played really, really well. Tend to have 2 or 3, which we're OK at, and we can, perhaps if, if needed, we, we can use those as well.

And then we have 2 or 3 that we really should delegate and not go on a training course to try and fix, because there'll be somebody in the team who has that as a strength and that's what we need to find out and that's where we need to use them. So what we need to do is not worry about job titles, find out people's behavioural strengths. Cos we need that.

Don't we? We need that diversity within the team to be successful. Once you've found out these strengths, get people to talk about them.

Communication is key here. Get people to understand why there may be problems when people are looking at things completely different viewpoint than you. Make sure that you involve the right people at the right time.

Allow people to align their strengths with the work that they are doing. Make sure that everybody's on the stage all of the time, cos it's just gets confusing. Nobody knows what the play is that you're meant to be watching.

Make sure people are in the wings and they know when it is that they're coming in. Make sure that you keep your team small. You don't want 100 people on that stage, you just want the selected players to be able to do that, to ensure that that dialogue and that communication is as strong as possible.

Don't, don't underestimate the importance of size. And then for you to be able to manage the job but whether or not you're in a team as well, for the people to be able to. We'll just basically treat people how they want to be treated, understand that we are all different and therefore there isn't just one approach that fits all.

We need to adapt and adjust our approaches depending on the people that we are working with. Whew. It's, it's, it's, it's hard work, but there are the tools, there are the things there that can help you, that can help you get the most from each, each person.

And it's like I said right at the very beginning, it's, it's been a real tough time recently, and I think morale can be quite low. And the best way of getting that up is to be able to have that communication with the people that you work with, to be able to appreciate that difference, and to be able to talk about the contributions that you can make to make the team really successful for the future. Thank you very, very much.

Please do contact me at Belin.com or link in with me. My name's Joe Keeler.

Thank you very much. Goodbye.