Week 6 - Working in Teams

This week when I was looking through the topics I had a lot of trouble choosing one. I don't have anything to write about on assignment 2, I couldn't think of any different topics to write about and I haven't worked in many teams before now. So I've chosen to talk about all three team role topics; what I think are my strongest roles, my weakest roles and where I stand with leadership roles.

My preferred Belbin team role is definitely a 'completer-finisher'. In the lecture for team roles the attributes assigned to this team role were an attention to detail, quality control, introverted and difficulty seeing the big picture. All of these apply to me and my approach to doing work. My second strongest role would be an 'implementer' (hardworking, needs guidance, rigid and hates change). However, this doesn't fit me as well; I am hardworking and do need guidance most of the time but I deal quite well with change. These two roles are both do-er roles; in what little team experience I do have I have always found myself to be one of the people who just gets on with doing the work as soon as I know what the work is.

My weakest roles are definitely those in the idea category. I'm really bad at coming up with my own ideas for things to do. I do much better if I'm told what I'm meant to be doing. This tendency can be seen pretty clearly with these blog posts; this post is the furthest I've wandered from the list of topics given to us and it's just a modified take on the topics. 'Plant' (innovative, creative, unrealistic, sensitive, get ideas from within) is probably my weakest team role. I struggle a lot with work when I have to come up with the idea and in previous team roles I've always left it to other people to do that. I also don't feel that I'm much of a 'resource investigator'. I'm not an extrovert and while I'm not horrible at communicating it's not really a strength of mine.

Leadership roles sit somewhere in the middle for me. I'm not really bad at being a leader but I'm also not first to put my hand up. I think I work best under a 'coordinator'. I don't need a 'shaper' to force me to do work but I do need someone to tell me what my role is and what I need to be doing. I think I'd work more poorly with a shaper as I wouldn't respond well to any pressure from their aggression. I think I would be okay working with a 'monitor evaluator' but I would work better with a coordinator.
If somehow I do end up being leader, which is usually when no one else will be, I'm a shaper. In my team experience I've only ever been a leader when no one will do any work and so being aggressive with an unmotivated team is where I've always sat with leading a team.

In saying all this I haven't worked in teams a lot and when I did they weren't really 'proper teams'. I'm only 19 so the last time before this course that I did team work was in high school and I managed to avoid it through the last 3 years so it was in the junior years of high school. At that age who did what was less to do with who would do the best job in which role and more to do with what social group each member of the team was a part of. In the few times I did do team work at that age I found myself as some form of do-er or as both a do-er and a leader because other members of the team didn't want to do any work. So to say I have any real experience in team work is generous, it was more often a case of doing work and putting everyone in the groups name on it.

So this is what I think I am. It will be interesting by the end of this assignment to see if any of my opinions have changed on what team roles best suit and don't suit me!