Belbin Australia Representative - The Team Role of TEAMWORKER

 

The Teamworker is a socially oriented role equipped with great people skills and an inbuilt barometer for sensing the emotional feeling within the team.

 

Teamworkers are great listeners and very flexible in terms of who they can work with. They are wonderful at building harmony and relationships within the team and can work for difficult people, and alongside difficult people.

 

If there is a team member who has been over-talked or marginalised in a meeting, the Teamworker is often quick to spot that they are not feeling quite right and will help to avert unnecessary friction and clashes.

 

Around the water cooler they are the one who knows when someone might be a bit overworked, over pressured or just having a bad day and offer personal support. A team with no Teamworkers can be a bit “prickly”.

 

Their allowable weaknesses spring from their desire to build and maintain harmony, often to the extent where they will “sweep problems under the mat” until the mat ends up on the ceiling with nowhere to go.

 

The avoidance of conflict to keep harmony, ironically leads to unresolved conflict that can fester and get worse. They may also avoid situations where a hard decision will not please everyone.

 

The non allowable weakness is the total avoidance of necessary conflict that may be required to clear the air and allow people to move on, and failing to make crunch decisions when in a leadership role.