Reflection Leadership

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

I’ve been writing quite a bit lately about teams and I wanted to continue with a look at different roles that team members take during team interactions.

When we work on something collaboratively in a team setting we are all trying to accomplish a shared goal. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the best ways to promote teamwork and to create a high performing team is to be a better team member. Part of being a good team member is identifying the appropriate role that needs to be played at any given time.

Jim Clawsen, who is a professor at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, has identified four general roles that individual team members take during team interactions. These roles align along two axis with each pair being polar opposites. The roles Clawsen has identified include:

Task Driver: This is the person that keeps the group focused on the ultimate goal. Part of the Task Driver role is to bring the team back to its purpose when the group starts to stray to far afield.

Process Facilitator: As a counterpart to the Task Driver, the Process Facilitator’s job is to monitor the interactions of the team and keep the group on track by focusing on how they work together.

Creative Visionary: The Creative Visionary is the risk taker. This person is always open to new and different ideas, no matter how far out they actually are. The Creative Visionary is needed to help the team get unstuck from set thinking that gets in the way of progress.

Practicality Pusher: As counterpart to the Creative Visionary, the Practicality Pusher’s job is to keep the team focused on the realities of the assigned task. While the Creative Visionary comes up with creative solutions, the Practicality Pusher keeps the group grounded to the practicality of their solutions.

Each of these roles play out in needed ways as the team sets out to complete its work. For instance, if there is a strong Process Facilitator the group will get bogged down in deciding how to accomplish their work. At this point the Task Driver is needed to remind the team that they are here to accomplish a task, just not figure out how to interact together.

Likewise if the Creative Visionary is strong and takes the group on multiple tangents through brainstorming, it will take the Practicality Pusher to ask what these great creative ideas can bring to the task at hand.

Sometimes cross polar roles are needed to counterbalance someone in a strong role. As an example, if the team has a dominant Task Driver who constantly keeps the group focused just on getting things done, it will take a strong Creative Visionary to point out creative alternatives that may be best for the team in the long run.

As individuals, we all naturally tend towards one of these four role types. But at any given time we each have the ability to take on any of these four roles. In fact, it is not unheard of to have a single individual move between each of these roles in the course of a single team meeting if that’s what the team needs.

In a high performing team, these roles are perfectly balanced out so that the team doesn’t drift too far towards any one area. So, if the team is overloaded with individuals who tend towards being say a Task Driver, then assignments will have to be made requiring some team members to take on different roles to keep the team balanced.

While team roles transcend the actual work that needs to be done by each individual, they are important none the less. Leaders need to be able to not only understand each of these roles but be able to insure that the team roles remain balanced. Assigning individuals to different team roles is needed when they are out of balance, but in the immediacy of any moment the leader also needs to be able to step into a role to keep the team from heading too far in one direction.

Leader’s Reflection: Leaders need to understand the importance of the Task Driver, Process Facilitator, Creative Visionary and Practicality Pusher as distinct roles needed in high performing team.

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

In a previous article I looked at some of the challenges to being a team. Many of the challenges that I looked at were related to the creation, care, and feeding of a team. While we’ve all heard that “there is no ‘I’ in team” teams are absolutely made up of individuals. The one individual on the team in particular that I want to look at is ourselves. There are things we can do as individuals to help us be better team members, which will lead to better and stronger teams.

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