The skills which are needed to take on task-focused team roles include:

Organising and Planning Skills

Being organised is essential to getting tasks done.

If you don’t know what needs to be done, and by when, it’s quite hard to make it happen by your deadline.  Shapers, Implementers and Completer-Finishers are all characterised by good organising skills and can usually be relied upon to put in place strong systems for managing projects well.

Decision-Making

Being able to make decisions is also crucial to moving things forward.

Although it may be important to take time to gather information to ensure that the decision is right, there may come a time when any decision is better than none.

Group decision-making often requires compromise, and sometimes a willingness to give up one’s own point of view in favor of the group’s shared decision.

Shapers and Monitor-Evaluators are both good decision-makers.

Shapers, however, tend to make their own decisions quickly and then may struggle to compromise.

Monitor-Evaluators tend to look for the right decision from the available evidence and may be slow to make a decision if there is a shortage of evidence.

Problem-solving

Task-focused people are often adept at problem-solving, especially if the problem relates to the task.

Plants look for innovative ideas to solve the problem, and Implementers will turn ideas into practical action.

Shapers will see the ‘big picture’ and the plan, making sure that the solution to the problem does not result in a change of direction.