Meredith Belbin’s Death Reminds Us Why Your Law Firm Can’t Get Out of Its Own Way
The passing of Dr. Meredith Belbin should force us all to pause and consider an uncomfortable truth: most law firms aren’t stuck because of external market forces or competitor activity. They’re stuck because of the people sitting around their partners’ meeting table.
This isn’t my opinion. It’s just mathematics.
Belbin’s Legacy Goes Beyond Team Building
For those who don’t know Belbin, he was a proper academic who spent decades developing one of the most effective frameworks for understanding team dynamics. Not the usual personality test nonsense that HR departments love to waste time on, but a rigorous, evidence-based approach to why some leadership teams soar while others remain perpetually grounded.
I trained as a Belbin practitioner 20 years ago with a couple of other guys who were behind a growth-focused compensation practice, that later became of 3 of the largest in the country. The connection between Belbin and these 2 guys harding-baking it into their DNA isn’t coincidental.
The Real Handbrake on Your Legal Practice
Let’s be honest. Law firms aren’t struggling with AI adoption, or any other thing because the technology or whatever it is, is too complex. They’re struggling because their leadership teams are compositionally ineffective.
When I review stagnant legal practices, I consistently observe the same pattern: homogeneous thinking at the top. Here’s what that typically looks like:
- A Managing Partner with brilliant ideas surrounded exclusively by detail-obsessed colleagues who strangle innovation through excessive scrutiny
- A driven, action-oriented Managing Partner without anyone capable of strategic thinking or opportunity identification
- A perfectionist Managing Partner who creates analysis paralysis, where every new initiative is investigated to death before it can breathe
Your people know what’s wrong. Mid-level associates talk about it over drinks. But the leadership dynamics prevent forward movement.
Belbin’s Nine Roles Are Non-Negotiable
Unlike the personality profiling industry (which is essentially the corporate equivalent of horoscopes), Belbin identified nine concrete roles that must function together for a team to succeed.
This isn’t about accommodating different personality quirks. It’s about ensuring you have the right skills mix to execute your strategy. Like a football team, you need different specialists in different positions. A team of strikers won’t win matches, regardless of their individual brilliance.
Leadership Composition Dictates Performance
The market performance gap between firms isn’t primarily about brand power, marketing budget, or even talent quality. It’s about whether your leadership team has the right composition to capitalise on opportunities.
That tech-driven competitor who’s eating your lunch? They probably don’t have smarter lawyers. They likely have a better-balanced leadership team without the crippling blind spots that plague most legal partnerships.
The Belbin Acid Test
Here’s a simple test: At your next partners’ meeting, notice how discussions unfold. Do new initiatives get immediately:
- Met with excessive questions about implementation details?
- Accepted without any planning for execution?
- Diverted by endless tangential discussions?
- Killed by an overemphasis on risk?
If any of these patterns emerge consistently, you’re witnessing a Belbin imbalance in action.
Most Law Firms Are Operating With Half a Team
The brutal reality is that most legal practices are trying to compete with incomplete leadership compositions. It’s like trying to play chess without your queen and bishops, then wondering why your strategy isn’t working.
Belbin’s work has transformed organisations from British Airways to TikTok, not because it’s a nice framework, but because it addresses the fundamental composition issue that determines whether strategy can be executed.
A Final Thought
Meredith Belbin’s legacy isn’t just about understanding team dynamics—it’s about recognising that leadership composition is a strategic imperative, not an HR nicety.
For law firms serious about growth, the most important strategic question isn’t about which markets to enter or which services to launch. It’s much simpler: Do we have the right roles represented to actually get anything done?
The honest answer to that question explains more about your firm’s performance than all your strategic planning sessions combined.