The team is important if not vital to any business success and the entrepreneurial business is not an outlier in this process.

Some key reasons to develop a team are to;

• build productive working relationships in a business
• widen the skill base
• develop high performance
• raise self-awareness and personal development, provide each player with stretch
• create mutual trust
• aid further recruitment

An essential part of this is to ensure the team, thereby created are moving at the same pace and are extremely unified in their objectives.

Any player working outside or even against the team’s objectives will be obvious and needs to be ejected from the team if not brought into line almost immediately. There is no scope for working against the team.

Dr Belbin’s teams are made up of;

• the co-ordinator or chairman
• the plant
• the specialist
• the shaper
• the resource investigator
• the completer/finisher
• the team worker
• the implementer
• the monitor and evaluator

It is worth considering each of these roles as we go forward, however, where does the entrepreneur fit.

It is probably easier to say which roles are entrepreneurial. They would be; the co-ordinator, the plant and the specialist.

We discuss these roles in further detail next month.