Team composition and roles: the pieces of a jigsaw

Our next team focused section considers roles and responsibilities:

  •  Who is involved?
  • What roles do they play?
  • What are they responsible for?
  • Are there any gaps in the team?

At first sight exploring your team roles probably seems like an obvious and potentially simple area to address, but in some ways,  it is a bit like playing three dimensional chess. It involves:

  • Formal team roles, usually assigned by job title
  • Informal roles determined by behaviours in the group, which includes personal traits and learned social behaviours
  • The life stage of the team

Formal Roles:

In most mature teams job titles and roles are usually reasonably well-established and recognised. This can help things work effectively but it can also mean that things are taken for granted. You might want to think about testing how well you understand your own role and those of others:

  1. Before you come together as a group ask everyone to think about their roles and those of the others in the team. Get everyone to write down:
    1. What they think their responsibilities are
    2. What they think the responsibilities of other roles are
    3. Any responsibilities that don’t appear to have an obvious home
  2. When you come together ask the role holder to describe what they think their responsibilities are first, then ask others to share what they thought:
    1. Ensure your team feels safe enough to have an open, non-judgemental conversation
    2. Ask someone to take notes
    3. Think about using a shared online platform like MIRO to make it interactive in real time (if you are working remotely)
  3. As a group discuss any ‘unassigned’ responsibilities:
    1. How important are these responsibilities?
    2. Can someone in the team take them up as part of their role?
    3. Why have they been unassigned, and what implications has that had if any?
  4. Ask everyone to decide the top five priorities for their responsibilities
  5. Review any job/role descriptions as necessary
  6. Have an update meeting after three months to see how things are working

Informal roles

Aside from your formal roles, there are obviously the process and informal roles that help keep a team functioning well. You may have come across inventories like Belbin’s Team roles, and there are a range of other approaches you can also use:

These kinds of inventories tend to focus on individual psychological traits and preferences and how they come together to help support a balanced team. There are lots of debates about the validity of the different models and it is always important to question the basis on which a theory has been developed. My experience is that it is generally the conversations and the reflections that happen around doing this work collectively that are most important, the tool often helps facilitate awareness raising but it is not an end in itself.

More recent research suggests that while understanding different personality traits is useful, our social learning also has an impact. Things like how we have experienced leadership, teams, problem solving and collaboration in the past. Team role expectations and orientation are as much a part of the mix as personality. Using an inventory can be really helpful but you might also discuss:

  • Individual experiences of being part of a team in the past
  • Expectations team members have of being part of the team
  • The attributes you’d all like to have as a team
  • The different informal roles people have adopted – who is the problem solver, who do people go to if they need support, who is willing to tackle the tricky stuff and so on

Life stage of the team

Another important part of the jigsaw is the lifecycle of your team, how your roles and processes work in a well-established team will be different from a brand new group. Equally when new people join an established team there will be an impact on team dynamics. You may be familiar with Tuckman’s very well established team stages, but may not have come across Edison’s addition which picks up on potential dysfunctions in a team’s lifecycle.

Diagram with a curve from forming to deforming for team development
Source: Edison T. The Team Development Life Cycle: A New Look. In: Defense AT&L.

Tuckman’s stages guide us through the team coming together, finding its way, having its differences, and moving towards effective performance. Edison takes this further:

  • Informing: this is where the team is sharing experiences, success and failures, and new ideas
  • Conforming: the team performance is starting to dip, there are fewer fresh perspectives and new ideas, things have possibly become a bit stale or too familiar
  • Transforming: if the dysfunction in conforming is recognised early enough it becomes a turning point
  • Deforming: team members lose their motivation; the spark is gone and people are less committed
  • Disbandment: the team has outlived its useful live and can no longer function

Would you feel able to talk to your team about where they see the team on the Tuckman/Edison curves?

If you’re looking to refresh or rethink your team taking into account each of these three areas will hopefully help. You might find you’re already great in one area but that others don’t get as much attention. You might also find that the things you thought were clear, like the formal roles, have been disrupted during the pandemic restrictions and taking time to review will help avoid challenges further down the line.

Dawn & Susan