Role diagnosis can be used to: build a new team, incorporate a new member into the team, or increase team effectiveness. Each role presents individuals with their strengths and weaknesses. As a manager, you can better assign tasks to employees when you know their strengths and weaknesses.
In the initial research, eight team-role behavioural styles were identified — Chairman, Shaper, Plant, Monitor-Evaluator, Company Worker, Resource Investigator, Team Worker, and Completer-Finisher. The current model has been refined to include a ninth style — Specialist; and in addition has renamed the Chairman style Co-ordinator and the Company Worker style Implementer.
Each person can find their place in several types of roles. We assume certain roles depending on the situation we find ourselves in. However, it’s always possible to distinguish a dominant role, one we prefer, as well as others we don’t readily assume.
How to conduct a team test?
Introduce the team to the exercise
Hold a meeting with the team and explain why you want to do this exercise. There may be several reasons:
- Learning about your individual role and the specifics of working within the group
- Learning about the roles of others and thus getting to know each other
- Team integration through discussion and sharing results
- Analyzing team roles: who do we have and who are we missing to ensure a diverse team?
Give everyone a quiz
In the online version, you can complete the quiz in a document, PDF, or Google Docs. In the on-site version, print out the questionnaire for everyone.
Time to complete the quiz
Completing the quiz should take about 10-15 minutes.
Explain
Each person should define their role, present it to the team, and explain it to the team.
Conduct an analysis
As the leader, it’s worth analyzing the results. This can be done in the same meeting (or even better, in a subsequent meeting). You can create a simple Excel matrix that shows the team’s roles. You can also propose a hypothesis: “What roles are we missing?”
