Using Team Roles to Improve Collaboration

Team roles improve collaboration by helping leaders understand and balance the different contribution styles in a team, then design how the team works around its strengths. Team-role profiling is useful provided the labels never become limits on what people can do.

• Profile the work the team must perform. Start from what the work demands, then compare it with the contributions team members prefer to make.
• Discuss preferred contributions. Talk openly about how each person prefers to contribute. Stereotyping people and using profiles as fixed job descriptions are both named pitfalls.
• Identify gaps and overused strengths. In the article's example, a team strong in ideas but weak in completion changes its meeting roles and follow-through routines. Where ownership crosses boundaries, put these gaps on the shared agenda and keep the resulting commitment visible.
• Rotate responsibilities for development. Rotating responsibilities supports development. Profiles should not replace attention to technical and contextual competence, which still matters. Useful measures include team-role coverage, collaboration quality and decision diversity, read together rather than in isolation, with a short review of collaboration quality showing whether a change improved the whole service or merely moved work elsewhere.