Team role theory is not rocket science, it is actually very, very simple.  And the title of today's blog puts it in a nutshell:

The foundation of success is doing the right thing at the right time

For example, if you are a fashion designer, then you need to include a lot of innovation and gut feel in your behaviour to be successful.  Trevor Creed, Senior Vice President of Design at Chrysler, once said "Producing a hit design.. is always trial and error.  At the end of the day, it is gut feel, you can't do it by any other means".

On the other hand, if the operator in the control room of a nuclear power station behaved creatively, made decisions by gut feel, tried new/innovative things or experimented using trial and error, then he or she would be acting illegally, and may very well cause a disaster.  Nuclear operators are required by law to follow procedures and make decisions based on factual information provided by all their instruments.

In 1990 the New York Times reported that the "Chernobyl.. disaster.. was the inevitable result of the sequence of simple operator errors".

It is often the "simple" errors that cause the most complex problems.

Using the Right Team Role

One of the key principles of MTR-i Team Role Theory is 'adaptation': you use whichever team role (or behavioural style) is the most appropriate for the situation you are in, ie: the one that will lead to greatest success.  It's a simple principle, yet teams may not follow it.  Instead, they use their preferred team roles, or the team roles determined by the team or business culture, or they are driven to use inappropriate team roles by the underlying team dynamics.

It is this last point where the Team Dynamics Assessment (TDA) can help - where the team are prevented from using the right team role for the situation because of an unhelpful team dynamic, ie: a team complex.  The TDA can help teams to recognise what is stopping them from doing the right thing at the right time.

Action Point

If you want to improve your team's performance, then look at the MTR-i team roles and ask the following questions:

1: Which role(s) should we be using most, to be most successful?

2: Which role(s) are we using most at the moment?

3: If there is a difference between (1) and (2), is there anything stopping us from using the most successful roles?

Then decide what you can do differently that will help your team to do the simple thing: choose to behave in a way that will lead to success.