Different Workstyles in Teaching Teams: Strengths and Challenges

Walk into any academic department and you’ll find teachers with very different ways of working. One colleague dives headfirst into new ideas, another insists on getting every detail right before moving forward, a third keeps the whole team from falling apart during stressful periods. These aren’t personality clashes – they are distinct workstyles. And when a teaching team understands those differences, it can turn potential friction into genuine collaboration. The challenge is knowing which types of workers exist in your team, what each brings to the table, and how to make them work together effectively.

The framework: understanding workstyles through Belbin’s team roles
The nine worker types: who does what in a teaching team?
Thinking roles: the ideas and analysis contributors
Action roles: the doers and drivers
Social roles: the connectors and coordinators
Strengths and weaknesses of each workstyle
Balancing team dynamics in academic settings
Using workstyle awareness for better collaboration
Start with self-awareness
Match tasks to workstyles
Create space for all voices
Build shared norms around workstyle differences
Revisit roles as contexts change
Why this matters for teaching teams specifically

The framework: understanding workstyles through Belbin’s team roles

The most widely used framework for understanding workstyles in teams comes from British researcher Dr. Meredith Belbin. After nearly a decade of observation at Henley Management College, Belbin concluded that it was not intellect that determined whether a team succeeded – it was balance. Belbin defines a team role as a tendency to behave, contribute, and interrelate with others in a particular way. His research identified nine distinct team roles, grouped into three broad categories: Thinking Roles, Action Roles, and Social Roles.

Importantly, the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing notes that strength in one team role often comes at the expense of a perceived weakness in another. This is a key insight for teaching teams: no single workstyle is superior, and every role carries what Belbin calls allowable weaknesses – predictable downsides that the team should anticipate, not penalise.

Most people are comfortable with two or three of these roles, and those preferences can shift over time depending on experience, environment, and team context. In academic settings – where teachers collaborate on curriculum design, assessment, student support, and departmental planning – understanding these roles has significant practical value. Research on Belbin-based team formation in educational settings has demonstrated that balanced, role-aware teams show stronger performance and higher engagement than those formed without any deliberate attention to workstyle diversity.

The nine worker types: who does what in a teaching team?

To make sense of the nine roles, it helps to group them by what they primarily contribute. Here is how each type typically shows up in an academic team.

Thinking roles: the ideas and analysis contributors

The Plant is the idea generator. Creative, free-thinking, and unconventional, this is the colleague who proposes a completely new approach to teaching a difficult topic or redesigns an assessment from scratch. In a faculty meeting, the Plant is the one who says, “What if we tried something different entirely?” Their weakness: they can be absent-minded, may overlook practical constraints, and often struggle to communicate their ideas clearly to others.

The Monitor Evaluator is the critical thinker. According to Belbin, this role provides a logical eye, making impartial judgements and weighing up the team’s options in a dispassionate way. In a teaching team, the Monitor Evaluator is the one who slows things down before a decision is made – not out of stubbornness, but because they have spotted the flaw that everyone else missed. Their downside: they can come across as overly critical and may struggle to inspire enthusiasm in others.

The Specialist brings deep expertise in a specific domain. In higher education, this is often the subject matter expert – the person others turn to for technical accuracy or curriculum depth. Their limitation is that they tend to contribute narrowly, and may overwhelm colleagues with information that isn’t always immediately relevant to the task at hand.

Action roles: the doers and drivers

The Shaper provides momentum. Challenging, dynamic, and pressure-resistant, this person pushes the team forward when it risks stalling. In a curriculum development committee, the Shaper is the one who moves the group past endless deliberation toward an actual decision. The downside: Shapers can provoke tension and may unintentionally offend others in their drive to get things done.

The Implementer turns decisions into action. Cambridge’s IfM describes the Implementer as practical, reliable, and efficient – someone who organises what needs to be done and gets on with it. In a teaching team rolling out a new programme, the Implementer is essential. Their weakness: they can be inflexible and slow to adapt when the plan needs to change.

The Completer Finisher ensures quality at the end of a task. Detail-oriented and conscientious, this person checks the final version of a shared document, catches formatting errors in a policy draft, and makes sure the assignment rubric is watertight before it goes to students. They can, however, become paralysed by perfectionism and find delegation difficult.

The Co-ordinator keeps the team focused on its objectives. Mature and confident, this role identifies what each person does best and allocates tasks accordingly. In a teaching team, the Co-ordinator is often (though not always) the formal team leader – but their real value lies in drawing out quieter members and clarifying shared goals. They can occasionally be seen as manipulative or prone to over-delegating.

The Teamworker holds the group together. Cooperative, diplomatic, and perceptive, this person listens, smooths over friction, and keeps interpersonal relationships functional. Belbin describes the Teamworker as someone who uses versatility to identify the work required and complete it on behalf of the team. Their weakness: they can avoid difficult decisions and may be indecisive in moments of conflict.

The Resource Investigator brings external energy and contacts. Outgoing and enthusiastic, this person networks, finds new opportunities, and brings back fresh ideas from outside the team. In academic teams, the Resource Investigator might be the one who returns from a conference with a new pedagogical approach or who establishes a partnership with another institution. Their limitation: they can be over-optimistic and may lose focus once the initial excitement has passed.

Strengths and weaknesses of each workstyle

One of the most useful insights from Belbin’s framework is that every workstyle comes as a package – strengths and weaknesses are linked, not separate. The IfM at Cambridge points out that this is why Belbin refers to “allowable weaknesses” – they are the predictable flipside of genuine strengths, and a well-functioning team learns to work with them rather than treat them as failures.

For teaching teams, this means recognising that the Plant who generates your best curriculum ideas may also be the person who forgets to submit the paperwork. The Completer Finisher who ensures your assessment criteria are flawless may slow down a process that needs to move quickly. The Shaper who finally gets everyone to commit to a decision may leave someone feeling steamrolled. None of these are character flaws – they are workstyle patterns that can be anticipated and managed.

The practical takeaway is that teams should assign tasks with workstyle fit in mind. Initial brainstorming sessions benefit from Plants and Resource Investigators. Evaluation and quality checks need Monitor Evaluators and Completer Finishers. Implementation phases call for Implementers and Shapers. And throughout it all, Teamworkers and Co-ordinators are needed to hold the relational fabric of the team together.

Balancing team dynamics in academic settings

According to the Cambridge IfM, an effective team ideally includes a strong Co-ordinator, a Plant, a Monitor Evaluator, and one or more Implementers, Teamworkers, Resource Investigators, or Completer Finishers. A Shaper should function as an alternative to a Co-ordinator rather than existing alongside one. In practice, however, most teaching teams do not have nine people, each perfectly covering one role.

The good news is that Belbin’s own research confirms that most people are comfortable with two or three roles, and roles can shift to fill gaps. If a team has no Plant, someone else often steps into that creative function – even if it isn’t their natural preference. If a role is absent, it tends to be filled by whoever in the team has the closest secondary tendency. Recognising this dynamic helps teams be more deliberate: when you know a particular role is missing, you can consciously ask someone to step into it, or adjust your working process to compensate.

Managing workstyle differences is also one of the most frequently cited challenges in team teaching. Research published in ERIC on team teaching in higher education identifies managing individual differences as one of the most significant challenges teams face, with tensions often arising from differing values, communication styles, and working preferences. Awareness of workstyle types gives teams a shared, non-judgmental language to address these tensions before they escalate.

Research on teamwork in higher education also highlights the value of flexible grouping – allowing team members to contribute through different configurations based on their strengths. In practice, this might mean involving different subsets of your teaching team in different phases of a project, rather than expecting everyone to contribute equally to every part of it.

Using workstyle awareness for better collaboration

Workstyle awareness only creates value when it shapes how a team actually works together – not just when it’s discussed in a meeting and then forgotten. Here are practical ways academic teams can put this knowledge to use.

Start with self-awareness

The starting point is for individual team members to understand their own preferred roles. Belbin’s own documentation on higher education use emphasises that understanding your strengths and weaknesses – and how they compare with your colleagues’ perceptions of you – is the foundation for more effective team behaviour. This kind of structured self-reflection is not about labelling people; it is about building a shared map of who contributes what.

Match tasks to workstyles

Teaching teams carry out a wide range of tasks: designing new courses, revising assessment policies, mentoring junior colleagues, liaising with administration, and coordinating student support. Not all of these tasks suit the same workstyle. Assigning curriculum innovation work to your team’s Plants and Resource Investigators, policy review to Monitor Evaluators, and execution to Implementers and Completer Finishers is not just logical – it reduces friction and increases output quality.

Create space for all voices

Research on inclusive teamwork in education underscores the importance of recognising each team member’s tacit knowledge and experience, including those in supporting roles. Teamworkers and Specialists, for example, may not dominate team meetings – but their contributions are critical. Structured discussion formats that give quieter members the opportunity to contribute (such as written input before a meeting, or rotating facilitation) help ensure that all workstyles have a genuine voice in team decisions.

Build shared norms around workstyle differences

A framework published in Frontiers in Education recommends that effective academic teams develop a team charter – a shared agreement that sets expectations, clarifies each person’s contributions, and establishes how conflicts will be managed. When workstyle differences are made explicit from the start, teams are better equipped to handle the moments when a Shaper’s directness clashes with a Teamworker’s preference for harmony, or when a Plant’s big idea runs up against a Completer Finisher’s concern for accuracy.

Revisit roles as contexts change

Belbin’s framework recognises that team roles are not fixed. As teaching teams take on new projects, face new pressures, or welcome new members, the distribution of workstyles may need to shift. Regular check-ins – even brief ones – that ask team members to reflect on how they have been contributing and whether the team’s needs have changed can keep the team’s dynamic responsive and healthy.

Why this matters for teaching teams specifically

Teaching is inherently collaborative work – even when it doesn’t feel that way. Curriculum decisions, student welfare concerns, departmental reviews, and accreditation processes all require teachers to work together effectively. Yet most teachers receive little to no formal preparation for working as part of a team. A review published in CBE-Life Sciences Education notes that instructors who wish to incorporate teamwork into their practice rarely have formal training in how to do so effectively. The same gap applies to teaching staff themselves as team members.

Understanding workstyle diversity does not require everyone to become an expert in organisational psychology. It simply requires a shared willingness to recognise that people work differently, that those differences have patterns, and that a team which maps its own strengths honestly is far better placed to collaborate than one that assumes everyone is (or should be) working in the same way. Published research on diversity in higher education teams affirms that leveraging diverse perspectives, experiences, and working styles is directly linked to better academic outcomes, stronger institutional culture, and more innovative teaching.

The Belbin framework does not tell you who someone is. It tells you how they tend to behave in a team – and that is exactly the kind of information that turns a group of individuals into a genuinely effective teaching team.

What do you think? Does your teaching team have a good mix of workstyles, or does it tend to be dominated by one or two types – and what difference has that made to how well you collaborate? If you were to identify your own dominant workstyle, do you think your team tasks currently reflect what you do best?

References

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Table of Contents

The framework: understanding workstyles through Belbin’s team roles 🔗

The nine worker types: who does what in a teaching team? 🔗

Thinking roles: the ideas and analysis contributors 🔗

Action roles: the doers and drivers 🔗

Social roles: the connectors and coordinators 🔗

Strengths and weaknesses of each workstyle 🔗

Balancing team dynamics in academic settings 🔗

Using workstyle awareness for better collaboration 🔗

Start with self-awareness 🔗

Match tasks to workstyles 🔗

Create space for all voices 🔗

Build shared norms around workstyle differences 🔗

Revisit roles as contexts change 🔗

Why this matters for teaching teams specifically 🔗