Deep-dive : Stop Making Brilliant Engineers Into Mediocre Managers

This is The Future of Work. Welcome along to another podcast from Ian and the crew on The Future of Work. Let's join them now for the new episode. Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good grief, it's another podcast from The Future of Work Mastery. I'm Ian Banner and I'm joined today by Maria. Now, we normally have on our planned schedule the lovely Eric to be with us, but he's gone AWOL, so we'll find out why no doubt later, or you might find suddenly halfway through this, Eric's voice appears as we carry on talking, but that's all right. So, Maria, what I want to talk about today with you, and this is like a live-ish mentoring coaching thing, because what we're going to do is I'm going to talk through something with you and get your, you know, live reactions to it. And what is, is a few times this week I have been asked by people about the problem of how to work out how a team fits together well, how to get people to do work together. Now, interestingly enough, the original work on how teams could work together is in a classic management book called Management Teams: Why They Succeed and Fail by Meredith Belbin. Belbin is a data scientist in the days when we didn't know what that meant. So this work actually was done in the '70s and '80s. You'll see even probably the '60s. You'll see as I tell the story of it, really. And it's so far in advance of others. So this week, twice this week, I've gone back to the books to talk about something with people. And I realized again how good they are and how fantastic the teaching is. And I wanted to take you through it, if that's okay, Maria. Absolutely. And so in our prep for all the listeners, in our prep, I said, can we go through this live? Do you mind? And Maria said she'd do it. So that's what we're going to do. So Meredith Belbin, originally did his work at something in England that is quite iconic called Henley Management Academy. And I can't even describe to people who aren't in England how iconic that place is and was at the time when he did the work. And what essentially would happen was people would send, companies would send their brightest to go on to Henley Management for a week or two to do some training. And he had a team and he was very scientific about everything he did. And this is like, you get to the ski lodge where Agile was talked about for the first time, and you've got to rewind about 10 years before then to get this work sort of going, at least, if not 20, you'll see as I tell one of the stories. So basically, what he did was this, he was a scientist, he was learning how people work together and what management theory was. And so every week, not every week, actually, once a month, for one week, he would have about 50 people come on his training course sent by large companies, and there were people who were on career potential, you know, all those kind of people, very bright people. In all industries, yeah? This isn't specific? All industries. And he would teach and train them throughout the week, but he'd also, and it was residential, so they were there all week on the site, and he would also, first thing he'd do with everybody is give them some psychometric tests and some IQ tests. Then he would group them into teams to play a game that his team, his team had invented called The Company. Now, the nearest thing I can describe The Company as is like a simulation of stock trading and just-in-time process management. That's the nearest thing I could talk to it being, but it's a bit of that. And so it was called The Company. So every week, as well as all the training you do in the day, in the evenings, you'd play The Company. In teams. Now, just let me remind you again, there's no internet, there's no websites, there's no emails, you know, faxes, you know. So it was hard work and it took a lot of people to implement the company and do it well. But they would do this, you know, and, you know, they would do it and then at the end of the week, he would award success to the team that had done the best in the company game. And he sort of started to see how important teams were and at a time when no one else was. And if you read his books, Team Roles at Work, Management Teams: Why They Succeed and Fail, those are the two classics. If you read them, it's dripping with data, it's dripping with, we tried this, we tried that, we did this, this is what happened, this is what didn't work, this is what did work. And he tried to express to managers who were on the course a model for how they could understand all the psychometric work that was being done by his team and all the other things. And so he came up with what is now classically called the Meredith Belbin team roles on a theory that most people operate a couple of these 9 team roles really well, but they can flip between all of them when needed, usually. But sometimes there's one of these roles that you're really awful at and you shouldn't do it. So that's the basic theory. So it's not like, oh, I am this and that's it, never again. Because one of the things he showed was that you can— if a team is missing a a particular role, let me think of one example. There's a role he called Completer Finisher, a person who likes to dot the i's and cross the t's and make sure it's all deep and thorough and working completely and doesn't like it going out the door before then. If that person isn't on a team, the team will not do well, and therefore somebody on the team starts to pick that role up, either consciously or unconsciously that happens. So that's an example of one of the roles. So that's the basic idea of it. And I mean, there was a time when his books were He was the management guru to listen to on any subject, basically. So, so we're at Henley, they're doing the course, they're doing the, the company game, and the first experiment he tried was, what if I put the brightest together every time? What if I find out of everyone that comes to the course the brightest and most intelligent, perhaps even most charismatic people, and put them all on the same team? Now, you know, we're in 2026 now. We know that's a bad idea, but at that time they didn't know that. He was trying things out. And it was around the time of the Apollo moon missions. Hence, it gives you an age of how old they were, the Apollo moon missions. And essentially what happened was he would say to 10 of the best in each intake, he'd say, by the way, you're the 10 best. You should win this game. You know, you're the brightest. You know, he set them up.. And typically, they had to choose a name for their team, and Apollo was one of the names they used a lot because they were, you know, they'd just been told they were the best. And what he found over many, many, many years of doing the game is the Apollo team never won. They never actually performed well in the game. And in the books, you can go scatter graphs, you can see statistics that show this. The Apollo teams, the people who were an Apollo team full of the best of the best, never won, never ever won apart from once. And in that case, there was an exception because that team had been given some information about this whole idea of team roles and realized they were all Apollo and realized that if they stayed together doing the same thing all the time, they'd lose badly. So they took on all these alternate roles they could take and they're the only team that ever won doing that. So it's very interesting. They cheated, so it's not a win. It's not really a win because, well, he would argue that with the the information they had in front of them, they evolved how they worked. They weren't boxed in one way. They didn't have to behave in a certain way. And they sort of worked out how to do it. And they knew what was needed. So it's really interesting. So anyway, the first, so therefore we thought, I want to describe this person who is essentially, shall I say, they're pushed forward. They are very charismatic. They thrive under pressure. They deliver results. They're very communicative. People follow them well. That's the kind of person they are. And he decided to call it shaper, a person who shapes a team, a person who gives a team a strong direction. Classic examples of shapers might be Steve Jobs is a classic shaper idea. Maybe in films, Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada, that's being redone. They're very in control. They're very followed. They know what they're doing. They're usually quite charismatic. People have said of Steve Jobs, for example, he has a reality, he had a reality distortion field around him. When you're in his room, his world was the world you saw and that was it. So shaper. And what he worked out with the Apollo problem was essentially if you put a bunch of shapers together, they never win because they tend to spend their time arguing over who's the shaper. It's like, which one of us is the alpha male in the room? All of us are. And then he worked out there was another almost complementary role, but didn't have that sort of charismatic side that he would call, he called it a Chairman. And it was the same kind of idea, but it was like, I might say, they clarify things, they delegate well, they draw out talent, They're sort of quite organized. But certainly, his first book, it was called Chairman. So, the two roles, the alternates were shaper chairman. But actually, these days, I think he changed it to chairperson. And now, it's usually in the books, it's called coordinator. I might even say facilitator these days. So, you've got these two— A coach. I mean, you're kind of describing somebody who's trying to bring out the best in others. That's 100% what we try to do as coaches. Brilliant, Maria. It's exactly the reason I wanted to talk it through with you because you see these insights and can comment on them quite correctly. Yes, absolutely. That is exactly a coach role. But we don't really— I mean, in those days, we didn't even have that language in sport, let alone in business. So he came up with these— that were the first two he came up with, which was a shaper and its sort of non-charismatic equivalent. And the reason he worked out— I'm going to call it chairman just because that's how I originally got taught it. The reason he worked out there was a difference was because he started to see that if you put all the shapers together, it never works. But he also realized, put shapers with this other thing and it didn't work. And he worked out it was, oh, it's this other role. It's instinctively people who want to chair meetings and all those things. So, they were the two he did first, which was the shaper and what we might call the coordinator. Well, both work external of each other. Right? Like, that's a commonality I see is their function is to do something outside of themselves to an idea or a person. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're the team leads, usually something that's organizing a team and helping it. Sometimes teams get asked to, if team self-organizing teams does not mean non-organized teams, it just means the team organized. I'm using some of our normal language now. Therefore, you will find that somebody in that kind of Shaper or Chairman or Facilitator role tends to start facilitating or organizing and others let them. So that's the first two he came up with. He then came up with the next one he immediately went to, having seen the Shaper role so strong, he then said, well, what's the opposite of a shaper? And he went, okay, well, there are a couple of roles that could be that. And I'll mention the second one a little later, but the immediate one he found was someone who essentially dots the i's, crosses the t's, makes sure everything's completely full all the time, makes sure everything's, you know, detail matters. The finisher. Yeah, they're conscientious, they deliver quality, they can worry, they can nitpick, they can, but they're very, very strong on this finishing, completing, finishing role. Jeff Bezos is legendary for detail, knowing exactly how it comes out, an example. It's in kitchens. I like to— there's a show called The Bear. I'm really interested in it. And, you know, MasterChef or Kitchen Confidential, whatever it is. But there's this place in a kitchen where before the plates go out into the dining room, there's somebody who's there, like you said, you know, putting the final garnishes on, wiping any smears so the plate's super clean. That's exactly what comes to mind when you're describing this. Finishers. Yeah, absolutely. And actually, if you're a shaper, particularly if you're a shaper, the advice that Meredith Belbin gives, and I follow this like you wouldn't believe, is if you're a strong shaper and you don't have a completer finisher near you, it's going to go wrong. You're going to drop the ball, you're going to get things wrong, you're going to lose your attention to detail because that's it. And particularly, there's a particular kind of role where if you do— because there are tests you can take on this— where you are heavily shaper and miserably not at all completer finisher. And most of the time, people are balanced. They can do most roles if they're asked to. They've got some tendencies that they like. There's a couple that they're not great at. But, you know, so my profile in this is very, very strong shaper. That's no surprise to anyone who knows me and abysmally bad at complete finisher, you know. So I have to— so that's 3. Let's take a pause. What do you think of it so far? I like these. I, you know, as you're talking through, I did a little bit of pre-reading, just not very deep, but getting a high-level sense of what the roles are. So I'm going into this pretty cold. And my initial reaction is, oh, God, not another archetype, you know, a Jung, a Myers-Briggs, a DISC. There's just so many. And so my immediate— I was very skeptical. At first because, you know, having done some of these assessments professionally and personally, I don't want to— I don't— the danger of these is that people are going to get stuck in these archetypes, right? They're going to use it as a way, an identity, a way to categorize themselves. And in my personal opinion, these types of assessments are only valuable as a tool to widen our perspective so that we can do something else. And, you know, so that we can create a balance, understand what the situation calls from us, and respond appropriately. So it's, it's a tool for building your awareness, for expanding your perspective, and through that, being able to respond to situations appropriately. Or from a coaching and development perspective, understand where you have more strengths versus more weaknesses so that you can find the right people to partner and observing these qualities in them. And generally just to— how do I say it? Approach situations with a little bit of humility, right? Like Steve Jobs is a shaper, but Steve Jobs has a terrible reputation. Well, yeah. And so just be aware of that and be a little bit more human about it, right? Like, hey guys, these are my strengths. I'm going to push you. I'm really going to drive you. I'm really good at that. But I'm going to welcome somebody who's going to look for the perfection, to which eye is missing a dot. Right. And it invites partnership in that way. You've made some brilliant points and I just want to make one of them. So if you do any of the work on this Belbin roles, you can just look them up. Every one of these roles is listed with weaknesses as well. And the point of the weaknesses is if you are a person who operates that role sometimes, you must be aware of these weaknesses and you must do something about it. And Belbin's view was you cover your weaknesses with the rest of the team doing things. But he also made it very clear that you can't validate your bad behavior by this role. He always used to say that, you know, it doesn't— being a shaper. So, for example, what's called in the books the allowable weaknesses. I'm not sure allowable is the right word, frankly, but the weaknesses for a shaper, for example, they can be abrasive, they can be impatient with other people. And he teaches very clearly, validating yourself as a shaper, is not a license to behave badly. You need humility about these things. And I'd say you put it very, very well. One of the comments I want to react to, this was the original teamwork. I mean, the first, and it's scientific. So Myers-Briggs, I like DiSC as well. I like DiSC. I don't like Myers-Briggs, but I like DiSC. It's not bad. It's good as a communicative sort of way of working out how you work with other people. But all of it comes from this. This is the source. There's only two pieces of work that really, really stand out scientifically. As experimental, repeating experimental. There's this word from evidence-based. Meredith Belbin's work, Team Roles, and then Leadership Circle Profile. Both of those, you get into it and you get given scattergraphs to look at instantly. You want, they insist, if you're a practitioner on either of those, they insist that your job is not to sort of be, shall I say, socially aware of it. It's to know the scientific background to why this is what it is and how it works. Okay, let's move on. So I've done 3 of them. So actually, when he did the original work, he only did 8, by the way, and there's a reason for that. And about 5 years later, he posted a 9th in. So why don't I mention the 9th now? And that is what he called Specialist. So remember, these were the days— frankly, these were the days before many people had computers, if I'm honest, let alone emails and things. And so he added Specialist later. So let me talk about that one now. Deep Expert. You know, they bring depth of knowledge, they bring rare skills. Their weaknesses can be narrow focus. They can sometimes lack the big picture because they're in the detail so much, you know. These days in our IT professions, there's a lot of people who are that kind of specialist role. There are even companies where the head of the company, Chief Data Officer, runs the company. It's a specialist role. The reason he didn't find this when he did his original development work, of course, was because the game, the company, there was no need for anyone to be a specialist. You all worked out what to do throughout the week. That was the point of the game. And he admitted later that, you know, that's why he missed it, because it didn't need— the role didn't need to be seen in that set at the time. So that's a specialist. And nowadays you can go and— I mean, it's about £60, I think. Not— this is not an advert for Belbin's tests or anything, but, you know, for that kind of price, you get reports and things like that about what you are and how it works. Now, remember, the big thing here is not I am, a Shaper or whatever it is, I operate this role within our team. And where are the other roles? Who else is operating their roles? And can I validate them? Can I allow them to be who they are? Can they be safe to be that role that they like to be? I don't want to be a Shaper who insists everyone else has got to be a Shaper. Nor is it a good idea to be a Completer Finisher insisting everyone else is a Completer Finisher. We've got different roles. If I was thinking of soccer, I would say, and to some degree it's true in soccer, it's my analogy for a minute here or metaphor for a minute. So soccer roughly has some skills that are similar. So if you're a midfield player, you could perhaps be a striker in an instant when you need to be or a defender. However, some roles are really very different. So in soccer, the goalkeeper is very different skill. You literally have to stay in your box. You literally, and you have to be able to stretch your arms and it's just very different. And it's a bit like that with these. Most people can do several, but there's probably one they can't do very well because it can be that. And I would argue, if I was using the team analogy, the goalkeeper is the specialist because they've got a specialist skill. They've got deep knowledge in one particular thing. And you know, that's it. So I've done specialist. How are we doing for time? Just check my time. Okay, we're at 20 minutes. Not bad. I thought this might take longer. So we're doing well. Thank you very much. So I want to go now to a couple of others that are really interesting. The monitor evaluator is a role he noticed around. Monitor evaluators are always saying things like, how are we doing? Are we all getting this? Janice, is this making sense to you? They want to check how they're doing pulse work all the time. They're working out what's going on with the team. They can be logical. Project manager. Yeah, they can be logical. That is exactly true, by the way. They can be very objective. They can see pros and cons clearly. Again, they tend to be overcritical sometimes, and they can take a long time to make decisions. Now, I think the way we're going with how, you know, how fast things are going, the art of being able to pause to make a good decision is being lost these days. In fact, I'm writing something for where I work now about increasing our decision velocity. To keep up with the market. We have to make decisions quicker than we're making them. So, monitor-evaluator celebrities, Warren Buffett is like that, Spock in Star Trek kind of thing, you know, that's the kind of people they're, they're very analytical about what they look at. Can they lead a team? Actually, nearly every role can lead. It's, that's not the issue. The issue is, the rest of the team fitting around you correctly and you being able to see your role in others. So I think I've done 3 more now. I've done Plant. I'll do one more. I'll do one more. This one I've never quite got the name of, if I'm honest. The name he gave it was Plant. And what it really is, it's a sort of creative innovator. I don't know why he didn't call it innovator, frankly, or creative person. I think it might have been related to the idea of seeds and planting and growth. I don't really quite know, but he called it plant. It didn't mean the other use of the word plant, which is to do with heavy machinery or anything like that, you know. So they can generate original thoughts, they can put two and two together and make eight, they can see something somewhere else and bring it in and do a coalescence, join the dots of ideas very well. Sometimes we think, oh, they must be in the innovation department, but actually that's not quite the right place to put them. They need peppering through the organization, not being kept in a little bit of a silo. And you put, again, you put a bunch of plants together and they can't deliver. But they will come up with great ideas, but they'll never do anything with them. So, it's that kind of thing again. Celebrities, Elon Musk is a great example of a plant, whatever you think of the politics involved there. He's a great example of a plant. Doc Brown, great Scott, from Back to the Future, which is about to have its 40th anniversary. My favorite. Is it? Yeah, that film is being re-released in England, especially in the next month. So we're all going to go and see it again. It's lovely on the big screen now. Superb. Anyway, so they're kind of plants. So they're creative. They're innovative. You wouldn't know. They plant the seed, but they don't really— they need a lot of nurturing and support. Yeah. To really blossom and produce fruit, it sounds like. Yeah. Well, I've never actually heard anyone react to it like that. So that's probably where it comes from. They plant the seed. I've never thought of it quite so. Clearly. So that's good. So that's another 3. So we're through 6 of them now, Maria. What's your thoughts now? What do you want? Let's take a pause again. We've kind of touched on this, but I really want to bring it forward and maybe expand further. But how would one apply this and not apply it? And as well, is this something that executive and senior leadership should be applying? Is that the better place to start? Or is this best started by somebody on the team, like a team leader or something? You've got some great questions there. Let's start with the big one, which was at the end. Is this just for management? Is it just for exec teams? And the honest answer to that is, when it came out, it was. It was the pioneering work of the time, and it was only shared with execs and C-suite members at the time. It was branded as that kind of you know, management teams, why they succeed or fail, you know. He sort of moved a little bit away from that when he wrote the follow-up book, Team Roles at Work, which, you know, did bring it down a little bit more. Where would we be on it now? I think, you may have heard me say this many times on other things, Maria, any tool is best used by you giving it to a team and getting them to use it themselves rather than doing it separately. And you can't actually use any of these Belbin management packs or language packs where execs do it to the team. There can only be the team do it to themselves and show the results. So where would I— so where I would not do it, I would not do it in that way I've just said, which is, 'Oh, I'm a manager, you know, I'm the lead exec, I've got no humility. I'm gonna buttonhole and box and put inside everyone on my team 'in certain categories that I observe,' because, you know, let's face it, I'm very arrogant, so I assume what I observe is the whole truth of the world. And I'm observing this person is a Completer-Finisher, so I'm only going to give them Completer-Finisher things to do. I'm going to tell them, 'By the way, I've judged you. You're a Completer-Finisher.' That is how not to use this at all. Pigeonholing, right? Not at all. What I might do though is say, 'Look, a good thing for teams to do is to be aware of this framework and think about where they think they might be in it and why they tend to gravitate to certain ways of working. Why is it that, you know, Completer-Finishers like to be Completer-Finishers? Why do Monitor-Evaluators like to be Monitor-Evaluators? And if I fast forward nearly 4 decades, you get to Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety and you get the idea that people are safe to be who they are. And, you know, I'm safe to be a Monitor/Evaluator. I'm safe to be, and I think that's a real great circle to have gone through. So, hey, I am validating I like this kind of thing in how I work. That's fine. I'm validating that. I'm happy with it. Don't buttonhole me though. I want to stretch out. I want to try a few other things, but, you know, I'm happy. So that's how I might use it, and that's how I might not use it. But I am about to go into doing it with a whole layer of what I might call the next gen of leadership at a company where I'm going to help them all to see it. How I'm teaching them to use it is, first of all, I say to them, what do you think you are in these models? And then I'm saying, how would you, if you had to work with a Completer-Finisher, what kind of language should you use that allows a Completer-Finisher to connect and engage with what you're saying. That's interesting. Let me give you a classic example of that. I am a manager and I've got to get a particular piece of Excel finished. And I go to a Completer Finisher and I say, George, I hope you can help with this. I'm a bit short of time. I've done a lot of this work, but it really needs all the I's, all the T's across, all the I's dotting. It needs a bit of a QA. Do you mind doing that, please? And George goes, "Yeah, I don't mind doing that. I like doing that." Now let's rewind that out and say I'm going to do exactly the same thing to a monitor evaluator. I might go, "Fred, I'm short of time. I don't know if you're interested in this. Could you give this the once-over and tell me what you think of it? Tell me what I'm missing. Tell me what needs to be different. And if you've got a bit of time, could you, if there's something missing, could you have a look at it, please?" So here's my point: same task, different language of communication. As with all of these language of communications, you've got to be on the right side of not manipulative but doing it for everyone to win. If you're just manipulative, people notice that very quickly in the end. What do you think of all that, Maria, before I move on? I like it. Some of my thoughts so far is what's helping me digest this is not calling it a role. It is a function. Oh, good idea. Because especially, I don't believe anybody fits in one box 100% of the time. And so even just trying to apply what you've described so far to myself, I see, I can think of situations where I am one role versus another, and that's helping me reframe it as this is the function. And there's two ways that I'm seeing it. Potentially being applied is, you know, we're talking about the team level, but it might also be at a project level or program level. Like when people are talking about roles and responsibilities, it's usually, I'm going to deliver X, Y, Z, and somebody's going to take it and do X, Y, and Z. And so this helps reflect on who's doing the thing. Is there another person that's better to do the thing? And from a people management perspective, the other thing that's coming to mind is not to use this during performance reviews. Like, I don't want any listener here to think that, you know, this person's responsibility and their role is to be the plant. But instead of the plant, they're being a specialist. You know, something that seems very different from a plant. We're a finisher. We need you to innovate and come up with ideas, but you're over here editing and revising other people's ideas. That's not exactly what we meant. But that's the fodder that the potential I see in this is as being the fodder to, again, widen our perspective a little bit. You made another great point, I think, which is when the original books were written, remember, because they were at the time of the Apollo moon mission, you can date this work, '60s, early '70s. Our use of the word role, I think, has changed significantly since he wrote the original books, Team Roles at Work and Management Teams. So, it's good you brought this out because I actually don't think I'd use the word role now. I might even use the word shape. And it's interesting. Function, yeah, I know. I've realized in other conversations, you said that as well. So the important thing is it's flex. It's in this situation because of the team that's together, this is what I need to do to give the team all its functions. And actually, I'm just starting a piece of work on AI, which is the idea is if you're short of a role on your team and you're using AI, let's say you're short of a monitor evaluator, can you instruct your AI agent to do the role that way. So, not only are they, I don't know, an HR specialist of 20 years' experience, as it always says whenever you write any scripts, but you can say, I want you to take on the context of Meredith Belbin's Monitor/Evaluator. Make sure you research that, please, and make sure you understand it. Play that back to me so I know you've got it. Now, I want you to take that idea and that role— I'm sorry, it's the word role there— that function and I want you to reply in that function. And I think I'm going to see some experiments on that in the next month, and we can report them back via the podcast. How did that go? Did that help? You know, there's a famous saying I have with, there's a, I'm part of one of my teams is a team of two. There's two of us, and now we've said there's three of us. There's me, this other person, and our AI, which we call Mango. I won't even go into why our AI system is called Mango. It's a long story to do with pineapples and mangoes. And, you know, we don't need to go there because it's a long story. But the idea is now we're going to go, okay, let's say from now on when we get Mango to do things, we're going to give Mango the role, the function, as you call it, that they have to do to fit in with us. And where are we on this? Which one of us can do the the shaper role in this idea. I see this being useful at the team level, but I actually see a lot of application of this at the leader level. For the exact scenario you described in terms of that Apollo experiment, when everybody's in the room trying to say what needs to be done, then you walk away with a lot of things to be done without prioritization, without capacity, without any semblance of reality baked into it. Like, we're just going to fly to Saturn next week. Okay. In your dreams. Yeah, go ahead. I was going to say the biggest challenge exec coaches have is to create and claim the space to allow you, the coach, to do the job of leading, if you see what I mean, in that loose sense of the word. I always say this on courses, you know, you won't get listened to unless you've got credibility. You don't get credibility without experience at that level. There are other levels where it's not the same, but the exec level, you have to have been there, done that, and are worth listening to. And usually on an exec team, there are 10 or 15, and every one of them has to be convinced of that for you to do the job. And it's quite hard. And honestly, you know, the first few months of any engagement for me is getting that established. First and foremost, because of that issue, which is, you know, I'm in a room with 9 people and they're all shapers. Absolutely. How do I claim the shaper role when they're all grabbing it? Everybody wants it. Draw straws or something, man. I don't know. But we've got 3 more left. What are the final 3? All right. Yeah. Let's go through them. Now, let me see. I'm telling them in different order. So let's go. So we've done shaper. We've done The Coordinator. We've done the Finisher, the Specialist, the Monitor, and the Creative Innovator. Lovely. Thank you for that reminder. That means you are either a Completer, Finisher, or a Monitor, Evaluator because you got there before I did. Yeah, where's Notetaker in this? I'm Notetaker. Okay, let's get through the others then. So another one that's very popular with seen as a sort of manager role is one he called the implementer, the practical organizer, the person who breaks it down, turns ideas into actions, makes it relatable, can be very disciplined. They can organize, they can take the elephant and they can work out how to break it down into smaller tasks and get everyone to eat it. And you probably want 80% of your staff in the company to be this kind of person, right? You do, yeah. Particularly in the mid-range, particularly in the mid-range organization, you do because Because what you really need is people who can take a huge problem and go, 'Okay, well, we can do like this, this, and this. We can take it apart like this. We can do this. We can do that. We can make it like this.' And again, it's an influencing role. You've got to be able to convince people that it's the right thing to do. I would say about any role, any of these functions, let's use your language, any of them, you cannot claim them. You have to earn them on a team. You have to say, even at the start, you would say, oh, shall I do this? Is that okay with everyone? Then they get used to, oh, Ian is the guy that does this every time, that's fine. But you can't say, excuse me, I was on this Meredith Belbin course and apparently I'm the implementer, so I'll do that job. And everyone else is going, what course is that? I don't know what's going on here. Because teams are complex adaptive systems where the nodes interact with each other all the time. You know this, it's the interactions that matter, not the notes. So how we as a team, how we talk to each other, how we interact with each other is far more important than who, who suddenly a new person arrives. It's far more important how you interact. So the implementer is one of these, as I say, practical organizers. Weaknesses, they can be resistant to change because once they come up with a plan, they don't like it changing that quickly. Examples of implementers that are really well known, Tim Cook is a classic of this break it down, get it done kind of guy. Someone said to me a few days ago, if Steve Jobs was around, Apple would be doing folding phones and had been doing so for years. It's interesting, that idea, isn't it? That might have been what Steve Jobs, who was a plant and a shaper and a, you know, that— But he was also a perfecter because he was very specific about like, go on. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Again, you can go and look this up. You will go and find a lot of types who will tell you what roles Belbin roles Tim Cook and all of the exec leaders at Elon, all of them, you can go and look them up. So now then, the next two, one I'm going to leave, the next one is called the Resource Investigator. And it's essentially the person who goes away and sort of connects things together and works out how to do things. It's a connector person. A great example of this, they've got a lot of energy, they explore. In the old days, I could give you an example of this before Google Maps, which is if I was in a car and I didn't know where I was, I'd stop, wind the window down and say to someone, 'Oh, do you live near here?' 'Yeah.' 'What road is this and how do I get to the hospital, please?' And you know, I would stop and I would find someone to help. I once did one of these potential centres and one of the questions, we're like an orienteering course, one of the questions was, 'What's the brook you are standing over?' called? And you go, well, I immediately walked into the post office that was just around the corner and said, do you live in here? And I went, what's that brook called? And the person said, actually, I don't work here. I'm subbing in, but let me get a map out. Oh, it's called this. It's called Clearview Brook. Thanks very much. That is a classic resource initiator. Now, these days, most resource initiators grab their phones and sort of put the question into chat and Google and, you know, that kind of thing. And it's very difficult to tell them apart, but that's a resource initiator. But even so, even the fact that they get asked a question and they whip out a search agent to be able to figure out the answer instead of saying, I don't know, you should Google it, is evidence that they're probably more dominant in this role. When my family all go and watch a film, we're watching a film and someone, we're watching at home, not cinema, someone says something like, what else has she been in? We all get our phones out and start looking and comparing and saying, you know, what's she been in that one? It's like resource initiator, you know, and occasionally one of our sons goes, no Googling. What was she in? And we all go, oh my God, as we're trying to remember it. And finally, like almost like a Tourette's thing, I'll suddenly shout out somewhere in my brain, it's registered correctly. So, but Resource Initiator or Resource Investigator. Now, that leaves just one, just one left. And it is— the reason I've left it till the end is it's probably the one that it's like the glue of the team. He called it Teamworker. And when it originally came out, his responses from all the management teams was that nobody wanted to be the Teamworker because they thought it was boring and it wasn't very charismatic and they wouldn't It's not glamorous. It's not glamorous. All of those things came out of it. And if I'm being really honest, some of the early work was fairly male-dominated, if I'm honest about the people who went on the course. We were where we were in the '60s, I think. They should do another round with just women, just for comparison, and then mix it up, do a co-ed session. Yeah. So team supporter or diplomat would be another one. They build trust. They resolve tension, they support the group completely. Their weaknesses, they tend to avoid making tough calls sometimes because the team matters to them so much. So if you're a mid-range manager and you've got to give a really tough message to someone at the performance review time, if you're a team worker, you can't, it's nearly impossible to do, you just can't, it's not in you, you just can't do it. And actually, I'm doing a piece of work now for a company where I'm prepping all the mid-range people where tough, crucial conversations are being needed in the end of performance reviews with role play and modeling and all kinds of things to help them get themselves ready for this job. And in the end, if someone said, 'Look, I really cannot tell that particular person they need to be downgraded and paid less. I can't do it.' Then we'll support them with someone else to I think in the end, but you get the idea. So that kind of person, team workers. So Samwise Gamgee is a classic example from Lord of the Rings of a teamwork, you know, will do whatever he can for the team, help the team succeed, do those kind of things. Now I've got a question that arose for me, slipped my mind. Okay, you hold it, I'll come back. So Remember, the idea here is there's one or two, there's two kinds of people that seem to come out of this work in the research and the tests. There's a kind of person that has a couple that they're really good at and one they're really bad at. And there's another bunch that they can do more or less all of them. The key is which ones do they want to do in a particular team and why they do it. Now, I said that, you know, my big ones by some margin are Implementer and Shaper. And fairly near that, Resource Investigator. Those are my 3. And I have got, if you do the test, it's no joke, I always get 0 on Completer Finisher. However, when it's time for my company, which is myself and my wife, to do our end-of-year tax accounts, there's only one person in my family that is a worse Completer Finisher than I am, and that's my blessed wife, who I love deeply, but she's worse at it than I am, so I do them. Right. And there's a point there, which is, you know, you can step in and do these roles when you need to. And that's the key. So I mentioned mine and I don't mind declaring them. Now, just to say, if anyone is interested in this kind of area and they want to do more, you can go to Meredith Belbin's site, but get in touch with me as well. I can help you with some of the stuff as well if you're interested in that. And we're at 40 minutes, Maria. So what's your final thoughts on this? I want to leave you the end story. What do you think? So a question for you, I remembered it, is, as you were describing this, what kind of came to my head is your Cadet Model. For listeners who are not aware of the Cadet Model, it's fantastic. Even just in my day-to-day at work, I reference it to help me navigate a situation appropriately. And I see some parallels between it. And I wonder if this can be turned into a cadet-like model where you can highlight a couple of things and say, here's what I'm strongest in. And what do you need me to be in this situation? Wow, that's good. I like that a lot. So I'm going to take 15% of your commission. 15%, okay, fair enough. It'll be worth it, frankly. No, no, no. But as you point out in the cadet model, I always say, these are all the things I could be. What do you want me to be? Yeah, that would— I've never thought of this, but that would be a great question on this, which is, here are all these roles that he came up with. What do you need? What is the situation called? What does this team need from me? What does this project need from me? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you do his work, by the way, there's individual and there's team, because he can't— he couldn't possibly not have a team profiling tool that you can buy for teams. Of course he wouldn't, because he was the first person to talk about teams. And I just want to give a— I do want your final thoughts, but a shout out to all the people that went to Henley, like me, all the people who went and were experimented on by him and, you know, went in to expect to come out excelling and failed because he deliberately put people together to prove a scientific point. So anyone who was ever at Henley and did any of Belbin's experimental work, I want to give you a shout out. Many of you will not be alive now, I know, but, or your children perhaps, because, you know, he was quite ruthless about experimenting with people who were being paid a lot of, their company were paying a lot of money for them to be at Henley, and he was very academic, let's leave it at that. So, and kudos to his family as well, who've kept his work going very well. Sorry, Maria, your, any final thoughts? Yeah, final thoughts. As you were describing these roles, it helped me build a little bit more empathy for how much is being put on any one person in an organization at any given moment, right? The other question that, you know, I interrupted you to ask, then it slipped my mind, is what's the max capacity? Because I imagine people can't be really 100% at all 9 of these things. You know, I think of somebody who— the plant that you describe. If you are blessed with the neurodiversity of ADHD, you know, one of the common things with ADHD is having trouble finishing something but really good at starting things. You know, starting 40 projects in a day and finishing zero. So when we think about tech, One trend I have noticed is that where there used to be specialist roles, QA to test, you know, DevOps, SRE for infrastructure and monitoring, more of those types of job functions or project functions are being pushed onto engineers. And even within engineers, you know, used to have DBA, the database admin, and that was a specialist role. Used to have frontend engineers and backend engineers and, you know, very specific kinds of focuses. And there's been an increased prevalence for full-stack engineers, people who can traverse across. And so, when we are thinking about these functions, right, like QA is someone who's very good at scrutinizing the details and is probably also someone who's more of a resource investigator. Let me— and maybe a little bit of an innovator too, of like, let me just click this button and see if it happens. Oh, it took me to, you know, an error page. That shouldn't be it. And so, from a leadership perspective, the utility I see here is a way to validate whether you're asking for too much out of any one role in your company. It's a great question. It's a superb question, I think. Let me give you some thoughts on this. So, there is a trend going on now about making everybody, even coders, T-shaped. That's the sort of phrase that's used. Right, yes, that's the term. T-shaped. T-shaped. Actually, I think companies need to have a mix of, even in the coding area, some T-shapers that can do a bit of each, understand this interaction can be a shaper and an implementer. But what we have to not do is get rid of the very valid need for a very, very deep specialist to be that and continue to be that all the time. So this move towards everybody needs to be able to do anything is not right. It just isn't right because what's happening with that move is what you're doing is you're taking people who are brilliant and turning them into average at everything. It just doesn't help. The soccer analogy would be an ideal analogy. Some people are good enough, talented enough to play midfielder and attack or midfield and defense, but there's some roles— goalkeeper— that is specialist, and it's very difficult for that role to be that good if it's a generalist. And therefore, I think capacity is interesting. I think we need— when a person is really, really, really— gosh, they're super— I'm gonna think of Ricardo, my great friend. Just the deep dive specialist that he is, is, you know, just beyond. I could never get anything like that. And certainly when you're— the more of the kind of autism spectrum kind of people you are, the more early life forced you to be a generalist. You had to be good at school at everything. And the more later life can let you excel at what you're brilliant at. And I think there's— that you still need to have space for brilliant people who are really deep and stay there and we validate them. And one of the big problems in HR companies is how do you take someone who is an individual contributor at that level and still allow them to progress up the ranks without telling them that to get that next pay grade, you've got to become a people manager, which is the worst thing you could do to that kind of person. What do you think of that? I like that. I like the application of these onto career ladders. I think that's a really, really valuable use of this framework. Yeah. I, I think I also sense a little bit of frustration within myself because there's certain patterns globally in the tech industry and in manufacturing in general. I think it's hitting a lot of companies right now where you're expected to do more with less.. And so we think that will— our short-term gains, or like cost savings from a reduced workforce, is going to maintain or exceed our previous metrics. And I think this is a useful way to kind of break that cognitive dissonance almost, right? You're expecting less— more to do less and to get more. And just the math doesn't math there for me. Well said. Well said. It's not a precise way of measuring it. And it's going to be, you know, lagging indicators. It's stuff you can only measure after you've made the change and let it bake for a certain time period. But yeah, I'm going to try this out for myself. I'm also curious, listeners out there, if you have experience with this, if you've tried it out within your teams, and especially if you're a leader who have been thinking about this, like, definitely share your thoughts. And if you're comfortable to go this far, like, come on the podcast and talk to us about it. And I have promised two reports back to you. And the big one is, did I improve the AI teams that I'm in, or the mixed teams that I'm in, by using these kind of ideas for how I asked the, our AI partner in the teams to behave? Because I think that's a very interesting area to come out. And the other to-do is I'm going to look at the CADET framework and this and see some similarities and wonder about putting something out that does that as as well. Yeah. What's the role that makes other people do more work? Because I'm noticing over the past couple of weeks, I've just given you homework inadvertently. I did it last week on my job too. I'm very good. I don't know. I'm very good. I got something for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I ain't going to do that ever. Maria, I got a few hours. Oh, crikey. Just been downloaded again. Maria, can I just thank you for your insight? As always, brilliant. We missed Eric. Likewise. In one sense, we missed Eric. Maybe we'll repeat this with Eric separately as we move forward. But seriously, the thing I've noticed is there's some— this is not new to me, but you've made it fresh. You've made it newer by how you've asked me certain questions. It's really worked for me. Oh, I'm glad. And as Maria, my co-host, said, if this resonates with you, get in touch, get in touch, get in touch. Touch. Now it's time for the very boring end of podcast man, which is me. Sorry. Well, today's crew consisted of myself, Ian Banner, and Marie MacLeod. When we get together, we cover knowledge work areas related to the use of AI, transformation skills, coaching, leadership, lean, business agility, and teamwork. You can go to our site, futureofwork.co.uk, site from where you can get show notes, some brilliant, easy-to-read extended articles based on this podcast content. You can go to Linktree. There's a Linktree slash Ian Banner where you can get more as well. We aim to produce at least one podcast a week, and that usually goes out over the weekend so you can listen to it while you're walking your dog or catching a plane. If you like the podcast, please do one thing thing, as they say, please tell your friends, send them a link. It's for free. We do it for free because we love doing it. And honestly, we learn from talking to each other in a synthesis kind of way. So thank you very much for listening again, Maria. It is my honor to talk these through with you. Thank you very much. Again, Maria, thanks very much. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.