It should always be remembered that the tool helps to describe an individual's preferred team roles and is designed to indicate how you would ideally operate in a team environment.

Strength in one team role is often at the expense of what might be seen as a weakness in another context.

An ideal team should ideally have a healthy balance of all 9 team roles.

Strong teams normally have:

  • a strong coordinator
  • a plant
  • a monitor evaluator
  • one or more implementers
  • one or more team workers
  • one or more resource investigators
  • one or more completer finishers

A shaper should be an alternative to a coordinator rather than having both.

In practice, the ideal is rarely the case, and it can be beneficial for a team to know which of the team roles are either over represented or absent and to understand individual's secondary roles.

Team roles tend to develop and mature and may change with experience and conscious attention.

If a role is absent from the team, then it is often filled by someone who has not recognised this role as a dominant one.

The team should share their team roles to increase understanding and enable mutual expectations to be met.