Belbin Australia Rep - Spotlight on the Role of SPECIALIST
Specialist is a thinking role that’s a bit like an Olympic athlete in their quest for absolute mastery and knowledge in a specialised field.
They love to be, and take great pride in being a subject matter expert in a field that you can tap them for knowledge that’s usually in rare supply. The sort of person who reads the iPhone manual back to front before turning it on to know all they can about it before turning it on.
They are generally highly dedicated to their field and looked upon by the team as the “expert” to go to when you need to know a really tricky bit of technical info about “that widget”, “that bit of legislation” or something that the Specialist as a “walking encyclopedia” on that field will happily tell you, and then some.
The allowable weakness springs from the passion for a field making them often a little intolerant of generalists, or not that keen to shoot the breeze on a multi-disciplinary or cross-functional team where they may need to have input on things they are not passionate about or fully expert in.
When asked a simple question, they can also be prone to overload you with unnecessary facts, data and information you don’t need and catch you up on small technicalities.
The non allowable weakness is giving no credit to or completely ignoring fields, capabilities or factors outside of what they love.