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Meredith Belbin is a Professor of business studies who developed a technique for behavioural analysis for people in leadership positions and team roles.

Meredith Belbin is 94 and still lecturing on the subject of business, he lectured last year in Nottingham.

I am reliably informed that the Belbin method of behavioural analysis is the only one of many such schemes which has actually made a profit and is recommended and used through industry.

It’s pretty simple, it’s an online questionnaire for £42 which takes about 20 minutes or less. If you want you can ask 6 individual people to fill out shorter questionnaires online to reference against how you see yourself; these are known as observers. The first questionnaire provides a self-perception indicator report and if you use the observers (recommended) it references against this to see if you’re talking nonsense about yourself.

I did such a test some time ago using the Colby system but recently I’ve enrolled on a Level 7 Leadership course at Nottingham Business School which consists of 6 days of leadership training.

Some of the leadership training relates to principles of leadership, delegation, teamwork, strategic HR, management of change, finance and other such subjects but on the first day one of the main things we did was a Belbin analysis. 

For some reason, I find this stuff absolutely fascinating and while it’s interesting and insightful it also has a really significant impact on how you organise yourself and the people around you at work.

When we did the initial questionnaire on the leadership course our tutor looked at my scores in front of the class and said “bloody hell you must be a nightmare to work with”. He suggested that every day with me was ground hog day where I would come into work with new ideas, sweeping the old ones from yesterday off the table and ploughing on in another different direction.

Left unregulated that would indeed be the case but I learned this years ago from Colby.

The trick with someone like me (called a plant or resource initiator in the Belbin score) is to surround yourself with people who have loads of the skills that you don’t possess.

It’s true, in a business sense, that I get excited at the start of projects and then fade as the project goes on. I am not a finisher and I am not a detailed guy in relation to business projects.

I am lucky enough within our organisation to have people who are great at these skills and we augment each other fantastically.

Belbin behavioral management is not about sacking people and employing different people with different skill sets, it’s about finding people to work with in a team environment who can augment your personality so that some of the parts have a greater impact on the individuals alone.  It is about looking at the skills your team has and using them the best way possible.

It looks pretty much like we will do this throughout the practice to help people understand where their advantages and disadvantages are and how they can use that insight to making the business better. I’ve already chatted to my senior leadership guys about this and they’re very keen to do the analysis for themselves to see as a group where we can all improve.

More of this to be discussed as we go through the Business Course with the delegates and try to encourage them to be involved in the same way. Stasis is death, and there is only forward movement or backward movement.

Blog post number: 1553