Summer School Teamwork

As a Completer Finisher, I took all your commas out. Sorry team.

The Completer Finisher role is definitely me. I’m a real fuss-pot with written work, polishing and re-polishing. I love to square everything away (folding washing, correcting your spelling, fixing lumpy grammar), but much as I like to take control of the editing, as a Team Worker (strength number two) I’ll always try not to be a cow about it.

No student is an island.     Photo credit: AIP

Actually, Completer Finisher is not even in my top three strengths in the Belbin range, and this illustrates the ‘needs must’ aspect of the theory: if a role or task needs filling in your group, different aspects of your talents and traits may emerge.

My top Belbin strength is Plant, so luckily we had a couple of Resource Investigators to have the sensible ideas. My magpie imagination is not always useful (although in my defence when I have ridiculous ideas I do complete and finish them. Actually this is not always useful either).  It became clear that Emma also had Plant in her strengths (#3), when she put forward alternative ideas for possum control that included installing high-frequency-emitting, possum-repelling deterrents around wilderness areas. I think her teamwork attitude extended to the possums themselves! (It’s a fair bet the possums are Implementers. And maybe Specialists.)

Meg, with Implementer and Monitor Evaluator as numbers five and six, provided practicality and planning strengths with both assignments, and a sensible, critical evaluation of our report structure.

An advantage for our team was that we all have both Team Worker and Coordinator in our top three. Combined with our other, complementary strengths, this made us a

  That's me at the back. Broke a nail.
Photo credit: National Geographic

very cooperative and helpful team, each willing to listen to ideas and help where we could. People volunteered for tasks rather than needing to have them allocated, and we all just got on with it. We were fortunate to have Catherine in the team leader role, steering us through this in a diplomatic, collaborative way with her Coordinator strength, and also Emma with her sneaky Shaper tendencies which came to the fore after Assignment 2 was finished and we all ran out of steam a little (or maybe that was just me). Organising skills and a dose of enthusiasm at just the right time.

Less than ideal in our team was having an editor who was also a Team Worker and Coordinator – a more autocratic approach would have been more efficient. Also, having more than one Completer Finisher on board is difficult at the revision and editing stages, as it can lead to re-work and double handling.  But as a whole our team was a good balance of Belbin strengths – nothing was missing apart from a strong Shaper, who would have been unhelpful in the mix as we were all capable and self-motivated; anyone trying to boss us would have caused a clash.

Especially lucky for me probably, that no one had Shaper as their Number 1 strength.  I might have had to back off and leave those commas alone.