Self Perception Inventory and Development Plan
Self Perception Inventory & Development Plan
First step of the Managing Team class was to complete Belbin's Team Role questionnaire do determine what type of team member I was. Here is the reflection I had regarding this test and its results.
Preconceived Ideas:
During our first week of intensive this year we followed a Talent course that aimed at refining our professional project better and while mentioning collective interviews had a quick look at Belbin's classification of team roles.
We did not performed the test but we asked to place ourselves in one or two roles according to their definition. I saw myself as in Implementor for I prefer doing than talking, I am a reliable team member & a Completer since I can concentrate myself easily on a task to do, and never hand a work without checking every detail of it.
During this session we also classified the role under 3 different approach as followed:
- Reflexion related roles: Plant (Concepteur), Implementor (Priseur), Specialist (Expert)
- Action related roles: Monitor (Organisateur), Shaper (Propulseur), Completer (Perfectionneur)
- Relation related roles: Resource Investigator (Promoteur), Coordinator, Team Worker (Support)
I thus did not see myself in the relational roles of the team but rather in the activity related ones or sometimes, the Reflexion related roles.
Concerns about the test itself:
It took me a while to understand how the Belbin test worked. Maybe it is because we are used to extensive questionnaires that use likert scales or straightforward MCQ options but I doubted the reliability of this 7 questions test and was close to abandon when seeing the final counting table.
Eventually I figured the whole process out and must admit the results were pretty coherent with my personality and the way I interact in teams.
Results:
Enough talking, what about the results Elise ?! DRUM ROLLS PLEASE !
Well it turns out I am more of:
At first I was a little bit disappointed: am I really the pain in the neck working in her corner to gather data and redo the whole project at the very end because it is not perfectly perfect ?
Well there is a bit of that but the picture needs to be tamed. Every team needs a finisher for they suppress the little bug that will turn you work from Good to Excellent ! Being picky on the deadline is not an option, it is mandatory.
I also recognized myself in this role because I indeed tend to like doing the work on my own. Being in charge and in control is sort of an obsession for me especially at work and I know I can trust myself hey !
I also recognize myself in the specialist role. It is not rare to hear me saying I am "always right", the thing is it is much more easy to say when you open your mouth only when you are 200% sure about what you say, that you have done extensive research on the subject and that you can even quote or give figures on the matter. In other words the adage "If you do something, do it well" is a life guidance in my case and pushes me to dig always deeper.
Very concrete example of a finisher behavior that I had is forcing team mates to put in writing (on a messenger conversation) when they would be done with their part of a group project. This way I felt they were bounded to deliver something by the date they had settled and I made sure we were on time.
My specialist side came up to me recently. While working on a case study about Patagonia HR practices, I spent hours and hours (and hours) reading articles about the company, searching for interviews from executive, surfing their website and I ended up buying the CEO's book because this subject caught my interests and I feel like I NEED to know more.
a Finisher & a Specialist
At first I was a little bit disappointed: am I really the pain in the neck working in her corner to gather data and redo the whole project at the very end because it is not perfectly perfect ?
Well there is a bit of that but the picture needs to be tamed. Every team needs a finisher for they suppress the little bug that will turn you work from Good to Excellent ! Being picky on the deadline is not an option, it is mandatory.
I also recognized myself in this role because I indeed tend to like doing the work on my own. Being in charge and in control is sort of an obsession for me especially at work and I know I can trust myself hey !
I also recognize myself in the specialist role. It is not rare to hear me saying I am "always right", the thing is it is much more easy to say when you open your mouth only when you are 200% sure about what you say, that you have done extensive research on the subject and that you can even quote or give figures on the matter. In other words the adage "If you do something, do it well" is a life guidance in my case and pushes me to dig always deeper.
Very concrete example of a finisher behavior that I had is forcing team mates to put in writing (on a messenger conversation) when they would be done with their part of a group project. This way I felt they were bounded to deliver something by the date they had settled and I made sure we were on time.
My specialist side came up to me recently. While working on a case study about Patagonia HR practices, I spent hours and hours (and hours) reading articles about the company, searching for interviews from executive, surfing their website and I ended up buying the CEO's book because this subject caught my interests and I feel like I NEED to know more.
Take-aways and development plan:
As you may guess there is not only positive aspects to those roles I fit in. The perfectionist has a tendency to not delegate and be over concentrated on details that might not matter. The specialist is often lacking a global overview due to his/her extreme specialization and have a terribly low self confidence when it comes to subject he/she does not master.
In order to develop myself I would thus like to improve in 2 domains:
- Be less autonomous. In order to be a better team player I want to include more interaction with other team members, showing them that I trust them and actually believing so. Taking the risk to hand in a work that I judge less qualitative for its content but more complete because it would rely on everyone. In order to do so I will banish the phrase "Don't worry I can do it" from my mind and replace it instead by "Work on it and I am still here if you need help".
- Go straight to the point. Having extensive knowledge on some subject is great but it take a tremendous amount of time. In the future, instead of focusing on small aspect of projects I will try to envision the bigger picture. To do so I will relate more on my coworkers asking them more frequently if I am missing something and taking a reflective time out of my research time to "zoom out" from my exploration and see the project globally.
