belbin-team-roles

Read [runtime](../../content/RUNTIME.md) and [advisory rules](../../content/policies/advisory.md) before applying this skill. Other Foreman layers and the catalog are in `../../content/`, relative to this SKILL.md. # Belbin Team Roles In 2004, the United States assembled a basketball team for the Athens Olympics that included LeBron James, Tim Duncan, Allen Iverson, and Carmelo Anthony -- arguable the most talented collection of individual players ever put on a court together. They lost three games and settled for bronze. Eight years later, a Spanish national team with no single player approaching that caliber won silver and pushed the Americans to the limit. The pattern repeats across every team sport, every corporate acquisition of "star" talent, and every startup that hires exclusively from elite pedigrees: assembling the best individuals does not produce the best team. Meredith Belbin spent nine years at Henley Management College studying why some teams of brilliant people underperformed while other teams of average individuals consistently excelled. His research, published in *Management Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail* (1981), produced a taxonomy of nine team roles -- behavioral patterns that individuals adopt in group settings -- and a principle that has survived four decades of scrutiny: balanced teams outperform unbalanced teams, regardless of the individual talent level within them. --- ## The Framework Belbin's nine roles cluster into three categories: Think...