To get the initial planning in place, you may have been working with quite a small core team, which will need expansion to get the project started. The kinds of people you approach about their possible involvement in the project will often be dictated by factors outside your control, for example their particular expertise or their availability for the project.

Do you want a collection of brilliant minds or a brilliant collection of minds?

R Meredith Belbin (www)

Nevertheless, your views and input are important. How well do you know the person concerned? Are they likely to be enthusiastic about the project, or half-hearted? Will they get on with other team members? Are they bringing the right skills to the project?

Regardless of the activities they will carry out on the project, every successful team will have members who have one or more distinct team roles to play, whether they are aware of this or not. On his website, Meredith Belbin defines a team role as, a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way . Over a period of several years, Belbin and his researchers studied the behaviour of managers from all over the world, who were given psychometric tests and also studied for their behaviour within teams of varying composition. Over time, different clusters of behaviour were identified as underlying the success of the teams, and nine clear team roles emerged:

• action-oriented roles: shaper, implementer and completer finisher

• people-oriented roles: co-ordinator, teamworker and...