Profiles that identify individual and team behavioural styles create a base of awareness – individual, interpersonal and team. This provides a starting point and firm base on which to build the full architecture of a team. The Team Architect workshop aims to build on this base by working a team through the elements of team architecture.

• First step is to identify the priority development areas by running the Team Performance Check Sheet across the team.
• Development actions can then be focussed on areas where skill growth will give the greatest performance improvement return. How much is undertaken within the initial workshop will depend on the time available.
• Identified and priority ranked in the initial performance check, the components of the team architecture that can become development topics include;
  • The team goal
  • Team knowledge of functional and team roles
  • Guiding principles for team interactions
  • The leadership style and focus
  • Team performance measures
  • Performance review processes
  • Recognition and reward of individual and team performance
  • Assignment of work within the team
  • Team culture development
• Action learning processes are used to work on the selected performance development areas – with the aim of building team members’ commitment and ownership of the architecture.
• It is common for these initial actions to lead on further sessions that work the team through the identified development actions – team coaching – aiming to build the knowledge of and skill in establishing an effective team architecture.
• Drawing on Team Roles knowledge and using the common performance language it generates, the architecture is built on a known and consistent foundation – the benefit of 'Building on a Belbin Base'.

There is technique in team work and good teams constantly work to improve team technique.

Once the Team Architecture is established teams will, at varying rates, move into the performance maintenance phase. Here, the focus tends towards dealing with issues that ‘crop up’ – unplanned remedial actions that need to be attended to – and the known team maintenance tasks. The ongoing tasks include the team regularly reviewing its own team performance, periodically reviewing the actual measures it uses, welcoming and farewelling team members.

Here the Belbin Toolbox – that draws on team members’ Team Roles knowledge – can be used to good effect.

The Toolbox has a modular structure where each ‘tool’ provides a strategy for dealing with one of a number of common performance improvement topics – e.g. decision making, conflict management, meeting procedure, growing the team, giving feedback... The tools can be used in workshop situations, in coaching or for self-managed development.

As in the Team Architect area, a feature of all these performance improvement and maintenance tasks is that they draw on the common language and knowledge that comes with consistent use of the Belbin model and tools – a good return on the people development investment. It’s all about 'Building on a Belbin Base'.

A half day or one day workshop to work an established team through periodic review to evaluate how it is working as a team.

• Review team performance against established criteria
• Revisit Team Roles allocations and on-the-job use with the intention of fine tuning.
• As a team, work on a significant performance issue - identifying improvement actions and setting specific measures to facilitate accurate evaluation of progress at future review session.

Aiming to embed a regular process for reviewing ‘how’ the team is performing (its processes) to balance the more frequent content (what) focused meetings.