During my first week here Jo, my manager, wrote a blog called Keeping Up Appearances focusing on how long someone can keep up their best behaviour in their new role and she questioned how long it would be before the team here saw the real me?
I am now four months into my new role at Belbin as their Client Relationship Executive – a new role created for me with the slightly scary tag of “Make it your own!”
Coming from a Sales/Business development background in Early Careers, I certainly wasn’t a Belbin guru and didn’t have any prior Belbin experience. I was offered my new role after three interviews and various profiling tests. Thankfully, according to the Belbin reports and the very charming team here, I was the right fit! Now the hard part came in proving it!
During my first few days, I was certainly a bunny in the headlights, mostly feeling like an awkward child, paddling slightly out of her depth. On day two, my new and extremely enthusiastic boss cheerily waved me off into the training room for a day and a half of intensive coaching to become Belbin Accredited. Gulp!
As I broke out into a sweat, I wondered if I should just bolt there and then and find a solitary corner to weep pitifully and resign myself to a life of in-depth conversations with my cats. BUT, ladies and gentlemen...you will be glad to hear I didn’t! I walked into the training room, acting confident; yet hoping the trainer would be kind.... or perhaps just pity me at least.
The next day I emerged from my exam like a dishevelled Miss Hannigan (minus the gin) but with my head held high – I had passed! Hurrah!
The next few weeks flew by. I was still on my best behaviour, keen to have an impact and in true Resource Investigator style - brimming with enthusiasm, trying to run before I can walk and multi-tasking within an inch of my life! Sticky notes were positioned haphazardly around my desk to prompt me on any valuable information that I might forget. I stumbled on occasion, but I was keen to absorb as much Belbin knowledge as I could put into practice. My newly found confidence was key to me instigating conversations with new clients, giving them detailed versions of how they could use the Belbin reports, recommending creative session ideas with quip little anecdotes!
However, two of my least preferred Team Roles are Monitor Evaluator and Completer Finisher. I am, you could say, not a detail person! We get many technical query phone calls here in the office, some which need deep delving into our system to retrieve long lost information – a task our technical Monitor Evaluators in the office thrive on. Me? Well, let’s just say, eyes glazing over is an understatement! The first month or so, I used the “I am so sorry I am new” excuse more than I had had hot dinners and I passed these queries on to other, much more experienced staff. But there came a point where it was frustrating even myself that I couldn’t answer some of these questions, so I forced myself to try and take an active interest and learn how to tackle these queries. So my (very tiny) Monitor Evaluator hat went on!
As a small team here, it is important that we can cover each others’ roles to an extent and I hope that trying to do a role that doesn’t come naturally to me will broaden my skills and be appreciated by my team.
Well, nearly four months in and I think they have quite seen the good, the bad and the ugly. The good - that I am conscientious, hard working and always keen to take on new responsibilities. The bad – I’ve made a couple of clangers (but learnt from my mistakes!!) And the ugly - well, 3 glasses of wine on a works night out was never going to end well....
My new team have yet to do their Belbin Observer Assessments on me... I think they have a pretty good grasp of my strengths and weaknesses now...but, probably best to leave it a couple more months (just in case!)
