Belbin Team Roles and Self-awareness
A data-driven, people-centred framework
Belbin is a data-driven, people-centred framework for celebrating your strengths, discovering hidden talents and devising your personal development strategy.
Belbin enhances self-awareness by helping you to reflect on your own behaviours in different scenarios, and then inviting those you work with to provide observations of your contributions in the team.
The Belbin questionnaires are carefully composed to analyse your strengths, and to filter out social desirability and other influencing factors. When it comes to your others’ views of you, our algorithms ensure that feedback is discerning, balanced and constructive, and that one person is not allowed to influence your results unduly.
Your Belbin Individual report collates all this data, comparing your strengths according to your self-perception and to the contributions that others see.
This tailored report offers unique insights into your Team Role strengths, which can help you to clearly define your preferred working styles, better understand how others experience your behaviour, and create a personal development strategy to align the two.
How can Belbin help self-awareness?
The Belbin Individual reports and the importance of asking for feedback
Belbin Individual reports
Identifying our behavioural styles is the first step towards increasing self-understanding and building more effective working practices. Each individual needs to understand their key strengths and how to articulate how they prefer to work.
Why Observer feedback matters
To learn and understand ourselves better, we need to broaden our perspective – to look at ourselves through a new lens. It may sound obvious, but we need to move beyond what we already know. It’s important that we’re open to receiving new information; that we look for this information in the right places, and that we interpret it correctly, so we can act on it.
“We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.”
Anaïs Nin
What is self-awareness?
But first, let’s begin by asking exactly what we mean by self-awareness.
Self-awareness involves being aware of different aspects of ourselves, including our characteristics, behaviours and feelings.
Self-aware individuals are more aware of the effects of their thoughts, emotions and actions.
They can objectively evaluate themselves, manage their emotions more effectively, align their behaviour with their values, and gain a deeper understanding of how they are perceived by others.
This makes room for growth and change which increase personal effectiveness.
Organisational psychologist and researcher, Tasha Eurich, explains that there are two different kinds of self-awareness: internal and external.
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Internal (or private) self-awareness is the ability to reflect on our own internal state. It represents how clearly we understand our own values, thoughts, aspirations, reactions and behaviours. Internal self-awareness requires an introspective focus, approaching our own feelings and reactions with curiosity.
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External (or public) self-awareness means understanding how we can appear to others. This is the kind of self-awareness which encourages us to behave within social norms, in ways that are socially acceptable.
We need both types. With only internal self-awareness, we become too introspective and fail to see our own weak spots. With only the external, we become people-pleasers and overlook what really matters to us.
In Eurich’s study, people who were more self-aware also experienced greater job satisfaction and a sense of personal and social control.
Leaders with higher external self-awareness tended to build stronger relationships, and were seens as more empathetic and effective in their role.
Those whose self-perception matched the views of others were more likely to empower, include and recognise others.
“Self-awareness isn’t one truth. It’s a delicate balance of two distinct, even competing, viewpoints.”
Tasha Eurich
The benefits of self-awareness
People who are self-aware:
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Build stronger relationships
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Experience greater job satisfaction
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Benefit from greater self-esteem
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Demonstrate greater levels of empathy
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Make better, more informed decisions
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Have a greater understanding of different perspectives
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Are freer from assumption and bias
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Are more proficient at regulating emotions
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Experience lower levels of stress
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Enjoy greater control over outcomes
The self-awareness gap and the limitations of self-reporting
Many personality tests (or psychometric tests) rely solely on self-reporting – asking the individual to answer questions relating to their personality traits or characteristics. But there are limitations to this approach when it comes to increasing self-awareness.
Although most people believe they are self-aware, only 10-15% of the people studied by the Eurich group actually fitted the criteria. This is called the self-awareness gap.
Results from self-reporting tests simply reflect the individual’s own view back at them.
Because of the self-awareness gap, this view is likely to be distorted, or at least, accurate but limited.
A report of this kind might reinforce the individual’s ideas about themselves – creating a kind of echo chamber – but offers fewer opportunities for learning and growth.
Belbin is different
Belbin is different, because it focuses on behaviour, which can be observed by others.
As part of the Belbin process, individuals ask others for feedback via the Observer Assessments.
This evidence-based approach situates behaviour in a work context and makes the findings more applicable from the outset, since behaviour can be readily monitored and changed where desired.
Research shows that power hinders self-awareness too: the further we progress in our careers, the more difficult it becomes for those who work for us to provide candid feedback.
Why we use Belbin
"The Observer Assessments are essential, I think for the programme that we use it on the most, a big part of it is raising self awareness. We've used lots of tools over the years and we had to go back to using Belbin because with the behavioural element, the observations, it just heightens peoples self-awareness." Gary Shewan.
Belbin is a strengths-based tool
Belbin is a strengths-based tool which delivers feedback in terms of the nine Belbin Team Roles – nine clusters of behaviour needed to facilitate team performance.
As well as our top Team Role strengths, we each have a number of manageable roles – sometimes ‘hidden talents’ – which can be cultivated as and when required.
We also have a number of roles that we don’t tend to adopt, because they fall well outside our comfort zone.
Rather than insisting that each person play all roles, the Belbin methodology and reports are focused on honing strengths and developing strategies to mitigate our weaknesses, such as seeking out team members with complementary strengths.
This approach makes for more effective use of the ‘talent capital’ within the team, as well as promoting an understanding of behavioural diversity and the value of different approaches.
Belbin’s democratic, evidence-based approach puts the focus on behaviour
Belbin reports are derived from, and centred on, the team, so that personal growth and more effective collaboration are within the team’s locus of control.
There are plenty of opportunities for personal development, but situated within a working context. This makes the findings easier to apply, and ensures that individuals can better understand the contribution they make to the team as a whole.
This boosts engagement in both the Belbin process and any resulting strategies.
It encourages individuals to consider how they present themselves, and how internal and external self-awareness might be aligned to make them more effective at what they do.
How to use Belbin reports to raise self-awareness and increase personal effectiveness
Everyone has something to contribute to a team, but it can be difficult to establish and articulate exactly what that contribution might be. During this 45-minute webinar we take you through the NEW Belbin Individual report step by step, and explain how you can use it to help improve self-awareness and personal effectiveness.
This webinar will be useful if you use (or are thinking of using) the Belbin reports to help others identify and build on their strengths, and also for your own self-development.
Next steps
If you are ready to help your people, teams and organisation start on the journey of self-awareness, take a look at the Belbin reports and Belbin Accreditation.
Belbin Accreditation
Whether you're an HR, L&D or training professional, or an independent facilitator, coach or management consultant, becoming Belbin accredited will give you a solid grounding in Belbin theory, and confidence in delivering report feedback and team workshops.
Add Belbin to your tool kit. Become Belbin Accredited.
Belbin Reports
Identifying our behavioural styles is the first step towards increasing self-understanding and building more effective working practices.
Each individual needs to understand their key strengths and how to articulate how they prefer to work.It start s with the Belbin Individual reports.
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