Create Balanced Contribution

You may think that high-intelligence teams always achieve better results. However, in today's collaborative environment, it's not just intelligence anymore. While intelligence is undoubtedly valuable, it is not the only determinant of team success. Team success more heavily depends on having members whose contributions are complementary and balanced, where each member's unique qualities are leveraged. By "contributions," I indicate both specialization (technical) skills and soft skills. Still, I put more emphasis on soft skills like objective thinking, critical thinking, problem-solving, bringing energy, result-orientation, teamwork, coordination of people, and creativity, which are challenging to earn but crucial to team success.

I see today's work environment as a cross-functional team game. Past specializations are now divided into different and more focused units and roles in organizations, and success is much more related to the cohesion between these units. In such an environment, the ability to bridge gaps between diverse functions and perspectives becomes a critical skill set. From this point of view, leaders shouldn't just focus on having individual high-performers but also create an environment where each member feels empowered to contribute their strengths while remaining open to learning from others. Today's teams that bring together varied expertise align on shared goals and maintain a balanced distribution of effort to achieve more success and have more ability to maintain their success. This balance fosters psychological safety, encourages risk-taking and ownership, and ultimately drives better outcomes through collective intelligence rather than isolated brains.

For example, at Logiwa, we needed a new tester for our team. Since meeting development commitments is crucial in the organization, and we lost one of our senior developers who is good at finalizing the work, we hired someone who excels as a Finisher. His name is Furkan. Furkan meticulously checked every detail, pushed the team to meet deadlines, and was exceptional at spotting errors. We were also a new team and still shaping the culture. Luckily, Furkan also brought energy to the team as a Shaper, helping accelerate progress while fostering a collaborative culture and accountability. The outcome? Furkan played a crucial role in our achievement of a 93% commitment rate across more than 40 development sprints—an impressive result that underscored the power of a well-balanced team.

Let's imagine a development team consisting of 7 people who are analysts, designers, developers, and testers. Do you want all team players to be creative? I don't because research shows that creative people might tend to be forgetful or even less analytical when compared with less creative people. However, despite these weaknesses, we need creative people in our team, right? Then, we can include a couple of creative people in our team and use the rest of our capacity for other types of people that our team seeks, for example, those who are more result-oriented or critical thinking.

This idea of balancing complementary skills within a team aligns closely with Belbin's research. Just as I recognized the need for a mix of creativity, results-oriented thinking, and analytical capabilities within my team, Belbin's team roles highlight the importance of diverse contributions.

Belbin's Research About Power of Difference

At Henley, Belbin gathered an interdisciplinary team of psychologists, an anthropologist, and a mathematician and conducted a project to understand how management teams worked in practice. Each year, he facilitated several business simulation games. (Belbin, 1981)

Belbin started the exercise with the hypothesis that high-intellect teams would succeed in the games and lower-intellect teams would not.?He found, however, from repeated examples, that teams of high-intellect individuals who were predicted (based on the psychometric testing) to be those who would succeed often would fail to fulfill their potential.?The core finding was that the breadth of contribution by team members was the key to team success. (Belbin.com).

Belbin's Nine Team Roles

From his research, Belbin identified nine distinct team roles that can help leaders evaluate and optimize the capabilities within their teams. Understanding these roles can guide us in recognizing the strengths that contribute to a team's success (Belbin, 2021):

Completer Finisher

• Role: Detail-oriented and deadline-driven, this role ensures that errors are spotted and timelines are met.
• Allowable Weakness: Can be inclined to worry unduly, and reluctant to delegate. They could be accused of taking their perfectionism to extremes.

Shaper

• Role: Bring energy and drive to the team, thriving under pressure and overcoming obstacles to keep the team on track.
• Allowable Weakness: They can tend to provocation and may sometimes offend people's feelings. Note that they could risk becoming aggressive and bad-humored in their attempts to get things done.

Specialist

• Role: Provides deep knowledge and expertise in a particular area, contributing essential insights to the team's success.
• Allowable Weakness: Tends to contribute on a narrow front and can dwell on the technicalities. They may overload you with information.

Plant

• Role: A creative problem solver, often innovative and imaginative, contributing original ideas.
• Allowable Weakness: Might ignore incidentals and may be too distracted to communicate effectively. They could be absent-minded or forgetful.

Monitor Evaluator

• Role: The team's objective thinker, who critically analyzes all options and judges accurately.
• Allowable Weakness: Sometimes lacks the drive and ability to inspire others and can be overly critical. They could be slow to come to decisions.

Coordinator

• Role: Focuses on the team's goals, drawing out contributions from others, and delegating appropriately.
• Allowable Weakness: They can be seen as manipulative and might offload their share of the work. They might over-delegate, leaving themselves little work to do.

Resource Investigator

• Role: In an outward-looking role, these individuals explore opportunities and make valuable external connections.
• Allowable Weakness:??Might be over-optimistic and can lose interest once the initial enthusiasm has passed.

Implementer

• Role: Task-focused and reliable, turning plans into actionable steps and ensuring tasks are completed.
• Allowable Weakness: Can be a bit inflexible and slow to respond to new possibilities.

Teamworker

• Role: The team's diplomat, focusing on minimizing friction and ensuring smooth collaboration among members.
• Allowable Weakness: Can be doubtful in crunch situations and tends to avoid conflict. They might be hesitant to make unpopular decisions.

Allowable Weakness

We can't expect team members to be perfect. Strengths come with weaknesses in other aspects. For example, being a good team player may come at the cost of avoiding conflict or agreeing too much. Therefore, we must also tolerate each other's allowable weaknesses within the group. We must be at peace with the idea that no one is perfect, everyone has weaknesses, and the most important thing is the composition we create together.

That's why when building a team and choosing talent, we must consider the competency gap between available resources and desired resources that will help us achieve company objectives and implement company strategies. We must then focus on motivating and energizing our team to execute their competencies in the best way and grow them.

In the same research, Belbin identifies a term called "Allowable Weakness". According to Belbin, while each individual or role has unique strengths, naturally, each role has some disadvantages. This means that the team can tolerate the weakness because the corresponding strength helps the team's performance. In other words, if you naturally prefer a specific type of activity, you will inevitably be less focused on another area of the team's work. For example, if you were a robust "Plant", very creative, and focused on ideas, this might lead to a lack of focus on execution. Leaders need to manage the balance of having team cohesion. Here are some key themes Belbin mentioned: Task versus Relationship, Focus Within versus Focus Outside, and Ideas Versus Execution. Leaders must focus on balancing these competencies.

When do weaknesses become non-allowable?

While every role in a team has its allowable weaknesses, they cross the line when they overshadow contributions, disrupt team cohesion, lower morale, or hinder goal achievement. Additionally, if a person can't perform to his strengths, which are required for team dynamics and performance, his weaknesses would become non-allowable. To maintain a high-performing team, it's essential to recognize, address, and minimize these non-allowable weaknesses through feedback and coaching.

Promoting Shared Leadership

Similarly, in today's complex and fast-paced work environment, no one should expect leaders to be able to know everything anymore, as it is unrealistic, and such expectations were unreasonable even in the past. Therefore, as leaders, we must also be at peace with the idea that we don't have to be the most intelligent person in the room; we need support from the team members as they need it from us. We must also be at peace with the idea of shared leadership. Sharing leadership is not a weakness for a leader. In fact, shared leadership promotes a sense of accountability and inclusion, where decision-making doesn't rest solely with a single person but is distributed across the team. This approach helps leverage the unique contributions of each member more.

Conclusion

High-intelligence teams sometimes guarantee success, but what really matters is the balance of complementary contributions from different team members. Each team member has unique skills and competencies, and we must leverage each strength.

So, leaders must have a good understanding of their own and team members' skills and competencies, where they are strong, and where they need support from each other. They must also be vulnerable and impose this attitude on the rest of the team.

While Belbin's research provides valuable insights into team dynamics, it's important to avoid rigidly categorizing people into single roles. It doesn't matter which categorization pattern we use; it is very dangerous for leaders to trust a categorization solely. Human behavior is fluid, and individuals often represent several roles at once, and those roles evolve over time. In reality, I observe that most people naturally shift between two or three of these roles depending on the organization or project stage. I even observe that when moving through the higher levels in the organizations, I see that these managers belong to more than three roles and are more balanced performing various roles.

Yet, understanding these behavioral patterns can serve as a helpful guide for shaping a balanced and effective team. Recognizing and appreciating the diversity of strengths within a team empowers leaders to create environments where contributions are complementary.

Resources

Belbin.com

Belbin-for-students

The Importance of Self-Awareness and Feedback