Improve Your Communication Skills, 2nd Edition

28 Improve your Communication Skills
example, they will tend to converse with you in that role. If they 
know that your informal role is usually the devil’s advocate, or 
mediator, or licensed fool, they will adapt their conversation to 
that role. Seeing people in terms of roles can often lead us to label 
them with that role. As a result, our conversations can be limited 
by our mental models about those roles.
Liking 
Conversations can fail because we dislike each other. But they 
can also go wrong because we like each other a lot! 
Meredith Belbin’s team roles
Thousands of managers have now used Belbin’s 
questionnaire to locate themselves among his categories of:
• 
chair/co-ordinator;
• 
shaper/team leader;
• 
plant/innovator or creative thinker;
• 
monitor-evaluator/critical thinker;
• 
company worker/implementer;
• 
team worker/team builder;
• 
finisher/detail checker and pusher;
• 
resource investigator/researcher outside the team;
• 
expert.
The danger is that people may label themselves with a role 
and start to operate exclusively within it. Our conversations 
could then be limited by our perceived roles.
‘A team is not a bunch of people with job titles, but a 
congregation of individuals, each of whom has a role that is 
understood by other members.’
(Meredith Belbin,
Management teams: why they succeed or 
fail
, Heinemann, 1981)
( c) 2011 Kogan Page L imited, All Rights Reserved.

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29 How Conversations Work
The simple distinction between liking and disliking seems 
crude. We can find people attractive in many different ways or 
take against them in ways we may not be able – or willing – to 
articulate. Liking can become an emotional entanglement or 
even a fully-fledged relationship; dislike can turn a conversation 
into a vendetta or a curious, half-coded game of tit-for-tat. 
These four factors – status, power, role and liking – affect the 
territorial relationship in the conversation. A successful 
conversation seeks out the shared territory, the common ground 
between us. But we guard our own territory carefully. As a result, 
many conversational rules are about how we ask and give 
permission for the other person to enter our territory. 
The success of a conversation may depend on whether you 
give or ask clearly for such permission. People often ask for or 
give permission in code; you may only receive the subtlest hint, 
or feel inhibited from giving more than a clue of your intentions. 
Often, it’s only when the person reacts that you realise you have 
intruded on private territory.