This post explores three practical tools — Belbin, MBTI and Insights Discovery — and how they can help leaders understand team dynamics, identify strengths and challenges, and create better conversations about how their teams work together.
Target audience
- Team leaders, managers and HR/L&D professionals who want to better understand their teams and create the conditions for stronger collaboration and performance.
Here’s a question we sometimes put in front of our training participants: What do you get when you put capable individuals in a group and give them a common goal? The answer isn’t necessarily ‘a capable team’. Individual capability does not automatically translate into team success. A team’s performance depends on how well its members work together — how they communicate, make decisions, handle differences, build trust and hold each other accountable. The main challenge for many teams is to create the conditions that allow individual capability to become collective performance.
Fortunately, there are a range of practical tools that give teams different ways to explore dynamics, identify strengths and potential challenges, and create a shared language for talking about team performance.
Belbin Team Inventory
Belbin Team Roles gives teams a useful way to explore how different people contribute to a team. Rather than focusing simply on individual strengths, it looks at the different roles and contributions a team needs to work effectively. It can help teams identify where they have strengths, where there may be gaps, and how different ways of contributing can complement each other.
Belbin team roles can be very useful in a team-development context, but it works best when treated as a conversation starter rather than a diagnosis of team members. Its biggest practical value is that it gives a team a shared language for talking about how people contribute. It’s based around nine team roles — patterns of contribution such as Coordinator, Shaper, Plant, Implementer, Completer Finisher, Teamworker, Resource Investigator, Monitor Evaluator, and Specialist.
For example, a team might discover that:
- several people naturally generate ideas, but nobody enjoys turning them into action;
- important details regularly fall through the cracks;
- everyone wants to lead, creating unnecessary friction;
- some contributions are undervalued because they are less visible.
Those are useful conversations. The value isn’t necessarily whether someone is really a “Shaper” or a “Plant”; it’s that the framework can help people step back from their usual roles and ask “What does this team need, and what are we currently missing?” It’s also useful because it shifts the conversation away from simply asking “Who is good at what?” and toward “What does the team need from its members at different points in its work?”
Belbin is not, however, a blueprint for building a successful team. People are not fixed into a single role, and a team with a good balance of roles does not automatically work well together. Communication, trust, leadership, accountability and the team’s context all matter. Belbin is most useful as a starting point — a way to generate insight and conversation that can help a team make better use of the capabilities it already has.
A team doesn’t necessarily need nine different roles. It needs enough of the right contributions at the right time.
Where it falls short
The first limitation is that people can easily take the roles too literally. Someone might score strongly as a Plant and conclude, “I’m the creative one.” Or a manager might start thinking, “She’s our Coordinator, so she should handle the coordination of every project. That’s where a useful framework can turn into a set of labels. People are more flexible than that. Their contribution changes according to the situation, the task, their experience and the people around them.
There are also questions about the psychometric strength and empirical basis of Belbin’s role model. It shouldn’t be treated like a clinical or scientifically definitive personality assessment. The roles are better understood as a practical framework for exploring team contribution than as objective descriptions of someone’s underlying personality.
And there’s a bigger limitation: Belbin tells you relatively little about whether a team actually functions well. You can have a beautifully balanced collection of Belbin roles and still have a team with poor communication, low trust, unclear goals, weak accountability or unresolved conflict.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) gives teams a framework for exploring differences in how people prefer to take in information, make decisions and interact with the world around them. It can help team members understand why colleagues may approach the same situation differently — and why a way of working that feels natural to one person may be less comfortable for another.
In a team-development context, one of the biggest benefits of MBTI is the language it provides for talking about these differences. A team might discover, for example, that some people want time to reflect before making a decision while others prefer to think things through out loud. Some may focus naturally on facts and practical details, while others are more interested in possibilities and the bigger picture. Understanding these preferences can make it easier to adapt communication, reduce unnecessary friction and make better use of the different perspectives within a team.
The real value of MBTI is the conversation it can create: How do we prefer to work? Where might our preferences differ? And what do we need to do to work effectively with people who approach things differently?
As with any personality framework, MBTI works best as a starting point for conversation rather than a set of labels. Being an “ENTJ” or an “ISFP” does not explain everything about how someone behaves, and people are not limited to a fixed way of working. Context, experience, relationships and the demands of a particular situation all influence how we behave.
It is also important not to confuse personality preferences with capability. A preference for one way of working does not mean that someone cannot work effectively in another way. Nor does a collection of different MBTI types automatically make a high-performing team.
MBTI can provide one useful lens on team dynamics, but it is only one part of the picture. Trust, communication, leadership, accountability and a clear common purpose remain fundamental to team performance.
MBTI Team Types
MBTI can also be used to look at the team as a whole. By combining the individual preferences of team members, we can create a picture of the team’s collective preferences. This can highlight behaviours and approaches that come naturally to the team, as well as areas that may require more conscious effort.
Here’s an example of a team with combined profile ESTJ. The first graphic explains the combined strengths of the team members – these are the behaviours that come naturally to them.
And then there’s the flipside. The same team profiles as being INFP. This graphic shows the areas this team needs to be aware of because its team members don’t naturally exhibit them.
Where MBTI falls short
The categories can feel more absolute than they are
MBTI places people into either/or preferences — for example, Introversion or Extraversion, Thinking or Feeling. In reality, people often fall somewhere along a continuum and may behave differently depending on the situation.
People can turn the types into labels
Once someone identifies as an “ENTJ” or “ISFP”, there’s a risk of using the type to explain or excuse behaviour: “That’s just how I am.” In teams, that’s potentially unhelpful. The purpose should be to understand differences and increase flexibility, not put people in boxes.
It doesn’t tell you how capable someone is
MBTI doesn’t describe competence. Being a particular type doesn’t make someone a better leader, communicator, decision-maker or team player. It also doesn’t tell you whether someone will perform well in a particular role.
The underlying psychometrics are contested
There has been substantial criticism of MBTI’s reliability and validity, particularly around the use of categorical types and the idea that people can be cleanly classified into one of two preferences on each dimension. So it is better presented as a practical framework for reflection and discussion than as a definitive assessment of personality.
Insights Discovery
Insights Discovery gives teams a simple way to explore differences in how people prefer to communicate and work with others. The model uses four colour energies — Fiery Red, Sunshine Yellow, Earth Green and Cool Blue — to help people understand their own preferences and recognise different approaches in the people around them. Everyone has a mix of all four colour energies, with some preferences being more natural or energising than others.
Its particular strength in team development is its accessibility. The colour language gives teams a shared vocabulary for talking about differences that might otherwise be difficult to articulate. A team might discover, for example, that some colleagues prefer a direct and decisive approach, while others place more emphasis on discussion and relationships. Some may want detailed information before moving forward, while others are more energised by possibilities and interaction. Recognising these preferences can help people adapt how they communicate and work together.
For a leader, this can provide a useful way of asking questions such as: How are we communicating? What might different people need from each other? Where might our preferences create friction? And where could we adapt our approach to get better results?
As with Belbin and MBTI, the value of Insights Discovery is not in putting people into boxes. The four colour energies are intended to describe preferences, and people can draw on different energies depending on the situation and environment. The framework is most useful when it increases self-awareness and encourages people to flex their behaviour, rather than when it becomes a shorthand for explaining everything about a colleague.
Where Insights Discovery falls short
The simplicity that makes Insights Discovery accessible can also be its limitation. Colour language is memorable, but it can easily become shorthand: “He’s Red” or “She’s a Blue.” This can turn a nuanced profile into a label and encourage assumptions about how someone will behave.
It is also important to distinguish preference from capability. A preference for one colour energy does not mean that someone cannot behave differently or develop their ability to do so. Nor does having a particular mix of colour energies tell you whether someone will be an effective leader or team member.
And, like the other tools, Insights Discovery does not measure team effectiveness directly.
Three tools, three different perspectives
Belbin, MBTI and Insights Discovery all help teams explore differences between people, but they do so from different perspectives. The right choice of tool for your team depends on what you want the team to understand and what conversation you want to create.
Belbin focuses on contribution. It asks: What roles and contributions do we need from people for the team to get its work done? It is particularly useful when a team wants to look at how work gets shared, where strengths and gaps exist, and whether important contributions are being overlooked.
MBTI focuses on preferences. It asks: How do we naturally tend to direct our energy, take in information and make decisions? It can help team members understand why colleagues may approach the same situation differently and why certain ways of working feel more natural to some people than to others.
Insights Discovery focuses particularly on communication and relationships. It asks: How do our behavioural preferences affect the way we communicate and interact with each other? Its accessible colour language can make differences easy to recognise and discuss, and can encourage people to think about how they adapt their approach when working with others.
There is inevitably some overlap. All three can increase self-awareness, provide a common language and help teams appreciate differences. None of them, however, provides a complete picture of team performance. The tools are lenses. They help leaders and teams see things they might otherwise miss, create better conversations and identify opportunities to work differently. The real work begins with what the team does with those insights.
Key takeaways
- Individual capability doesn’t automatically create team performance. A group of talented people still needs to develop the ways of working that allow them to perform well together.
- Different tools give you different lenses. Belbin looks at team contributions, MBTI at preferences, and Insights Discovery at communication and behavioural preferences.
- Use the tool to start a conversation, not end one. The value comes from what teams learn, discuss and change as a result of using the tool.
- Don’t put people in boxes. Profiles describe preferences or patterns; they don’t define what someone can do or how they will behave in every situation.
- Self-awareness is only the beginning. Understanding differences matters, but high-performing teams also need trust, clear goals, effective communication, accountability and the ability to adapt.
- Choose the tool based on the question you want to explore. The most useful tool is the one that helps your team have the conversation it needs to have.
For trust to “work” in the workplace, it requires high scores in the first three elements (C, R, I) but a low score in the final one (S). In other words, the Trust Equation tells us that high self-orientation undermines the other elements that are essential for trust.
