Week 9: Role play

Has the end of this course finally arrived?  You mean no more epic Skype meetings?  Or frantic emails to Pete, checking that we're doing something the right way.  It couldn't possibly be the time to write the last blog entry...

It is? Okay, I'll take it.

Working as part of a team for a distance paper has been a pretty challenging experience - I thank the Communications in Science (Sciences?  Communications within the Sciences?) gods for gifting me a fantastic team of hard-working, but realistic women.  I can only imagine how frustrating this whole exercise would have been had I been part of a group of 'Cs get degrees' types or those who 'broke-down' and needed uni staff to step in and sort things out.

Something that was a real plus was that we all fulfilled different roles within our group.  If I use Belbin's (2015) roles, I would say that Meg fits most naturally with the roles of  Resource Investigator, Coordinator and  Team Worker.  Meg is much like myself - we like to establish a plan of action and plow on through.  Meg was a real team player and actually a great leader of our team.  She rallied us and kept our momentum moving forward. When we all flopped down at the end of Assignment 2 (none more so than our amazing editor Liz, I'm sure), Meg was the one that said 'right guys, I'll make a start on this seminar planning'.  Meg was great at coordinating-  formulating a plan of action for our meetings to helps us progress with our assignments, and making sure we were meeting regularly.

Liz is an ideas person.  She really knows her stuff which allows her to put forward ideas that are creative and new.  Liz would often listen to the likes of myself blab on before putting forward yet another insightful point of view.  By fulfilling her role of Plant (Belbin, 2015), Liz helped us to shape our ideas and solve problems.

Like Liz, Emma thinks outside the box.  She was the one that would throw in a new idea or perspective just as we had decided on something - that's a great thing by the way!  She made us reflect on our decisions and widen our perspectives.  For these reasons she appears to fit best with Belbin's (2015) Plant; creative and original.  Like Meg, Liz and myself, Emma is also a Teamworker and Coordinator.

Along with Meg, I fit most naturally within the roles of Team Worker, Coordinator and Resource Investigator (Belbin, 20115).  What I lack in original ideas and insights, I make up for by being an excellent team player, meeting deadlines and getting stuff done.  Within this new world of science, I feel most comfortable in this role; one day in the future I may have the confidence to take on a different role.

The only role which wasn't necessarily fulfilled was that of Specialist (Belbin, 2015).  While we all brought our own knowledge and experience to the table, none of us would claim to be an expert in any of these fields, or in communicating in science.  For the nature of this assignment this was probably a positive - we were all muddling through and learning as we went along.  Also, we were dealing with a range of subjects/topics so we needed broad knowledge and team work rather than expertise..

A strength of our team was our support for one another.  During the course of this paper we all had times when things were going on, things that meant we couldn't make a meeting or something along those lines.  We supported each other through these times and kept moving forward which was awesome.  In terms of leadership, we had a distributed leadership approach.  Although I was officially the 'group leader' - by default - this didn't really mean, or require, a whole lot.  This was most likely because we were a group of like-minded, conscientious people who knew what we needed to do to get the job done.

Belbin Associates (2015). Belbin Team Roles Retrieved from http://www.belbin.com/about/belbin-team-roles/