Also by this author Team Roles at Work The Coming Shape of Organization Changing the Way We Work Beyond the Team Managing Without Power Butterworth-Heinemann is an imprint of Elsevier Linacre House, Jordan Hill, Oxford OX2 8DP, UK 30 Corporate Drive, Suite 400, Burlington, MA 01803, USA First edition 1981 Reprinted 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993 (twice), 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002 (twice) Second edition 2004 Reprinted 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 Third edition 2010 Copyright Ó 2010, Meredith Belbin. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved The right of Meredith Belbin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher Permissions may be sought directly from Elsevier’s Science & Technology Rights Department in Oxford, UK: phone: (+44) 1865 843830, fax: (+44) 1865 853333, E-mail: [email protected]. Alternatively you can submit your request online by visiting the Elsevier web site at http://elsevier.com/locate/permissions, and selecting Obtaining permission to use Elsevier material Notice No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN: 978-1-85617-807-5 For information on all Butterworth-Heinemann publications visit our Web site at www.books.elsevier.com Printed and bound in Great Britain 10 11 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 Preface to the third edition The original Management Teams was published almost 30 years ago, and the staying power of the book has been marked by its continued sales. Perhaps this is due to the ever-increasing interest in the structure of work teams and how they are selected. The development of an approach to Team Management based on team-role theory is a long running saga. It began as a tentative academic experiment. It was academic in the sense that the setting was artificial. Henley Management College, as it is now called, ran a course for senior managers during which the participants were exposed to a business game designed to simulate the interacting effect of team-based business decisions on business outcomes. The experiment was also academic in the sense that, as far as possible, the input and process variables were measured and tightly controlled. The business exercise was designed to yield insights into how certain combinations of colleagues are prone to bring about certain effects, in this case a financial outcome. Ultimately, the big question is whether an experiment carried out in a rarefied atmosphere can have any bearing on real-life strategies. Such an ambitious experiment needed time if it was to achieve anything. As it happened, we were able to keep the experiment running for nine years. As the experiments continued, ideas changed and developed. Team-role theory emerged gradually until sufficient understanding was gained into the dynamics of team working to allow predictions to be made – predictions that could be evaluated against outcomes. Even when the Henley experiments came to an end, progress still continued. New techniques were developed for assessing team members. This book puts on record the classic Henley experiments as they occurred. I have been often asked if I would care to present them in a revised edition. But of course I cannot. Retrospection would risk distorting the reality of the experience. For events are best recorded when or shortly after they have happened. The Preface to the third edition of this book replaces that to the second edition where some of the detail relevant decades ago hardly merits repeating. The main changes in this edition are two fold. The first relates to the case studies at the end of the book where we have reported ever- widening application of the ideas and methods that have grown with experience. The second refers to the way the book is structured which now directly addresses the likely interests of the reader. Here I am indebted to Gytha Lodge for the editing and updating. But I am ever mindful of the many colleagues who have contributed to research throughout and to those involved with the experimental trials over the years. Finally I would like to express my appreciation to Sir Antony Jay who wrote the original Foreword that is retained in this edition. Meredith Belbin Cambridge 2009 Foreword Meredith Belbin’s research into the nature, structure and behaviour of teams makes for fascinating reading about the contrasting but complementary roles of the indi- viduals who compose them. But Meredith’s work is more than fascinating; it is also extremely timely. For too many years the search for successful management has been seen almost exclusively as a search for the right individual. Organisations have been preoccupied with the qualifications, experience, and achievement of individuals; they have discussed and debated the strengths and weaknesses of individuals; and yet all of us know in our hearts that the ideal individual for a given job cannot be found. He cannot be found because he cannot exist. Any attempt to list the qualities of a good manager demonstrates why he cannot exist: far too many of them are mutually exclusive. He must be highly intelligent and he must not be too clever. He must be forceful and he must be sensitive to people’s feelings. He must be a fluent communicator and a good listener. He must be decisive and he must be reflective and so on. And if you do find this jewel amongst managers, this paragon of mutually incompatible characteristics, what will you do when he steps under a bus or goes to live abroad for the sake of his wife’s health, or leaves to take up a better job from your principle competitor? But if no individual can combine all these qualities, a team of individuals certainly can – and often does; moreover, the whole team is unlikely to step under a bus simultaneously. This is why it is not the individual but the team that is the instrument of sustained and enduring success in management. A team can renew and regenerate itself by new recruitment as individual team members leave or retire, and it can find within itself all those conflicting characteristics that cannot be united in any single individual. It can build up a store of shared and collectively owned experience, information and judgement, and this store can be passed on as seniors depart and juniors arrive. And it can be in ten places at once. Many of us must have perceived something of the truth about teams from our own experience. We know how often someone who has been highly successful within a team becomes a great disappointment when moved out of it. We have seen effective teams destroyed by the promotion of individuals, while nobody ever considered the alternative possibility of promoting the whole team, or enlarging its scope and responsibility. And we have also seen teams produce a quality and quantity of work far higher than the sum of what the separate individuals could have produced on their own. This is a truth known to all of us who have ever worked in successful teams. The corollary is that, while not ignoring or neglecting the individual, we should devote far x Foreword more thought to teams: to the selection, development and training of teams, to the qualifications, experience, and achievements of teams, and above all to the psychology, motivation, composition, and behaviour of teams. But how? The trouble is that by comparison with our knowledge of individual psychology, individual motivation, and individual behaviour, our knowledge of what makes a successful team is tiny. It is because Dr Belbin has not only asked this question but come up with such a fascinating convincing and extensively documented answer that I believe his work to be the most important single contribution of the past decade to our under- standing of how human organisations work, and how to make them work better. His researches have brought forth a rare addition to that tiny number of management classics-book that every working manager should be forced to read, if necessary at pistol-point. Anthony Jay Chapter 1 Making teams effective The best way of beginning a book is perhaps to interest the reader of the route they are about to take. Management Teams Why They Succeed Or Fail is a journey of a language I developed in order to express how individuals should contribute effectively in work teams. It was to be the language of Team Roles. In the beginning I knew nothing of such a language – I simply was intrigued how human beings interact in the workplace having personally had a background in Industrial Psychology. Furthermore I was absorbed in the selection of individuals having spent half my life helping in recruitment, with the aid of a variety of psychometric tests. 2 Management Teams What transpired 40 years later is the language of Team Roles regularly used world-wide in large organisations. It gave a method of measuring and advising individuals, teams, and organisations about their behavioural propensities.