What Is Your Team Role?
Builder, finisher, glue, challenger or specialist
Put five capable people in a room and they will not do five versions of the same thing - they will distribute. Somebody starts, somebody finishes, somebody keeps everyone talking, somebody asks the awkward question, and somebody knows the one thing nobody else knows. Roles get taken quickly and then stick, often without anyone deciding. This is for fun, and the useful part is noticing which one you take by default, since the role you always take is the one you stop being able to see.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about what you actually end up doing in a group, not about your job title. Ten questions.
What it measures
Which of five recognisable jobs you take when nobody has assigned one. It is a description rather than a measurement - see the note at the end about why team-role questionnaires deserve less confidence than they usually get.
Possible results
The Starter
Things exist because you began them
The Finisher
You are why anything actually shipped
The Glue
The team works because you are in it
The Challenger
You ask the question everyone was avoiding
The Specialist
You know the one thing nobody else knows
Common questions
Can you be more than one?
Almost everyone is, and the more interesting fact is that the role is partly assigned by the room. Put a natural Starter in a team of four other Starters and within a month they are the one doing the finishing, because somebody has to. This is worth knowing if you dislike your result: it may be describing the gap in your current team rather than anything permanent about you.
What is the worst team to be on?
Five of the same, and each version fails differently. Five Starters produce a great deal of beginning. Five Finishers optimise something nobody needed. Five Glues agree warmly about nothing for a year. Five Challengers dismantle every idea including their own. Five Specialists do five excellent things that do not connect. The point of the list is not to find your type but to notice which one your team is short of, since it is almost never the one you are.
An honest note This is for entertainment, and team-role questionnaires deserve a specific warning that they rarely get. The best-known commercial one has been examined repeatedly by psychometricians and has come out badly - the roles it proposes do not separate cleanly, the results are not stable when people take it twice, and there is little evidence that assembling a team by its categories produces better work. The five here are a written description rather than a measurement, and they are offered on the same basis as any other useful shorthand: worth recognising yourself in, not worth organising a hiring decision around. What does have evidence behind it is simpler and less marketable - teams do better when people feel able to speak up, and that depends on how the group behaves rather than on which labels its members were assigned.