Page 322 - Effective Communication Soft Skills Strategies For Success by Nitin Bhatnagar, Mamta Bhatnagar

Project Name: Manual for Soft Skills
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Team Roles
According to Dr Meredith Belbin’s analysis of how teams work, as well as the
job functions they perform, each team member can take on a role within the
team. Teams require the following basic roles to succeed:

• Creators: to originate and discover ideas
• Leaders: to organize, manage, and direct the team
• Implementers: to build and support the team and find practical appli-
cations of ideas
• Completers: to evaluate and test ideas critically and in detail.

Working in a Team
It is important for each member of the team to understand and accept their
role and responsibility in contributing to the group effort. Ideally, the team
should contain people capable of balancing these different roles. People are
generally naturally suited to one role more than others, though they may
have to take on other roles in order to sympathize with and balance the team.
Members of a team should take their responsibilities seriously, or they risk
generating resentment from other team members. Team workers should:

• Maintain their customer service attitude, to treat their colleagues
with respect
• Contribute fully to the team, while remaining open to others’ ideas

• Be prompt when attending meetings and meeting deadlines.
When working in a team, it must be realized that your own failures or poor
behaviour will affect everyone else in the team. It is important for team mem-
bers to be aware of the roles and tasks that other people are playing. This can be
achieved by maintaining proper documentation of tasks and progress and by
mentoring (one-to-one instruction). This contributes to the rapport within the
team, and in a practical sense, allows someone to takeover in the case where a
critical team member is ill or on vacation. It also helps to induct new members
into the team, allowing them to contribute to the group effort more quickly.

TEAM-BUILDING

A team is a group of people working towards a common goal. Team-building
is the process of enabling that group of people to reach their goal. In its simplest
terms, the stages involved in team-building are:
• To clarify the team goals.
• To identify those issues which inhibit the team from reaching their goals.

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