Frequently Asked Questions
Getting started
What happens when I click "Get Your Assessment"?
You land on our Assessment page where you can purchase a Belbin Team Roles Assessment directly. After purchase, you receive an email with a link to the online questionnaire. You complete it in about 20 minutes, then invite four to six colleagues as observers. Once the feedback is in, your individual Belbin report is generated automatically. If you want a deeper interpretation - Team & Leadership Dynamics by Soomre - that's the next step, and we'll talk about it.
How do I get started with coaching or training?
Write to mats@soomre.com or use the contact form. Tell me about your team and what you're hoping to achieve. I'll respond personally. The first conversation is about understanding whether this is the right approach for your situation - not about selling a programme.
How much does it cost?
A Belbin Individual Report is €72 including VAT. A Team Report is €144. A Working Relationship Report for pairs is €36. For Team & Leadership Dynamics by Soomre, workshop, training, and team coaching, pricing depends on scope - team size, number of sessions, location. Write to mats@soomre.com with your situation. You'll receive a clear proposal. No hidden fees.
Online or face to face?
Both. Face to face is preferable for team coaching and intensive trainings - body language, energy, and silence tell me as much as words do. For geographically distributed teams, Zoom works well. Individual consultations, report debriefs, and follow-up sessions run perfectly online. We agree the format based on what makes sense for your team.
Where are you based?
Tallinn, Estonia. I work internationally across Europe and worldwide online. Estonia has the highest number of Belbin profiles per capita in the world - that's 20 years of work. Travel for face-to-face engagements is part of the coaching contract.
What if we've done Belbin before?
Profiles can be updated, and context changes over time. But even with the same data, interpretation makes the difference. A standard report tells you your top roles. A practitioner with 28 years of experience reads the full pattern - the tensions between roles, the hidden potential in your weaker scores, the behavioural dynamics that only become visible when you look at the whole picture. Same data. Different interpretation.
Belbin Assessment
What are Belbin Team Roles?
A behavioural model based on decades of research by Dr Meredith Belbin at Cambridge. It identifies nine distinct ways people contribute in teams - how they think, communicate, and act. Not a personality test. Personality describes who you are. Belbin describes what you do when working with others. Behaviour changes depending on your role, your colleagues, and your environment. That's why measuring behaviour is more useful than measuring personality - it gives you something you can act on.
How does the Belbin assessment work?
You complete a self-perception inventory online - about 20 minutes. Then you invite four to six people who know you in a work context to fill in a short observer assessment (5-6 minutes each). The combination is what makes Belbin unusually accurate. Most tools rely on self-report alone. Belbin adds the view of people who actually work with you. The gap between how you see yourself and how others experience you is often where the real insight sits.
Why should I add observer feedback?
Research shows people accurately assess only 10-20% of their own behavioural tendencies. The rest is blind spots - strengths you don't recognise and weaknesses you don't see. Four to six observers close that gap. Observer responses are used to build a fuller picture in your report, but are never attributed to specific individuals. Without observers, a Belbin profile is interesting. With observers, it becomes actionable.
How is Belbin different from MBTI, DISC, or StrengthsFinder?
Most assessment tools describe personality or character preferences. Belbin measures what you contribute in a team - observable behaviour, validated by people who work with you. MBTI tells you you're an introvert. Belbin tells you that you generate ideas quietly and need time before speaking, but when you do speak, the team changes direction. The practical difference: Belbin gives your manager and teammates something they can act on, not just a label to remember.
What if my team is sceptical about assessments?
Good. Scepticism is a behavioural strength - it protects teams from rushing into things that don't work. I don't ask teams to believe in Belbin before they've experienced it. I ask them to fill in the questionnaire honestly and let the results speak. In 28 years and 20,000 people, I've yet to meet a team where the sceptic wasn't the first to say "this is surprisingly accurate." The data earns its own trust.
Can Belbin be used for recruitment?
Yes, but not as a filter. Belbin should never be used to screen people out. It works best for assessing fit - does this person's behavioural profile suit the role, the team, and the context? The right question is not "does this candidate score high enough?" but "does this person's natural contribution match what the team actually needs?" Suitability over eligibility. That's the principle.
Workshop, COACHING, TRAINING
What is team coaching?
A structured process where a coach works with an intact team over time to improve how it functions as a unit. Not a workshop. Not a team-building event. The coach observes real behavioural patterns - how the team communicates, decides, avoids, and trusts - and creates conditions for the team to change its own dynamics. The real work happens between sessions, not during them.
How is team coaching different from training?
Training delivers knowledge and skills in a concentrated session. It builds awareness. Team coaching addresses what persists after the training ends: the conversations the team avoids, the roles people are stuck in, the trust gaps no workshop fixes in a day. Training is an event. Team coaching is a process. Most teams need both.
What happens in a team coaching session?
No slides. No lectures. Structured conversations, exercises that surface patterns, pair and team reflections, practical agreements. I observe dynamics in real time - who speaks, who stays silent, how decisions form, where tension sits. Those observations become material for the team's learning. Sometimes uncomfortable. Always grounded in what is actually happening in the room.
What makes your trainings different?
Purely interactive. People think, argue, practise, and confront their own assumptions. I don't present information - I create situations where people experience the insight themselves. Words after experience become wisdom. Words before experience become decoration. That's the design principle. Participants regularly say it's unlike any training they've attended. Some find it uncomfortable. That's where growth starts.
What is Team & Leadership Dynamics by Soomre?
A narrative behavioural analysis I create after working with a team - based on what I observe in sessions, what I hear in conversations, the behavioural data I collect, and 28 years of reading patterns in how people work together. Individual reports become behavioural portraits. Pair reports reveal chemistry - where it works, where it cracks. Team-level analysis maps the whole system: strengths, friction, missing contributions, and what to do about it. Every report is written for one specific team.
How is Team & Leadership Dynamics different from a standard assessment report?
A standard report gives you data - roles, percentiles, observer words. Useful, but it doesn't tell you why your team's meetings feel stuck, or why two strong people keep clashing on the same topic, or where someone's hidden potential sits that nobody has noticed. Team & Leadership Dynamics interprets the patterns behind the numbers and turns them into something a team can actually use - in language people remember, not in spreadsheet format.
WORKING WITH SOOMRE
Who is Mats Soomre?
Belbin Accredited Team Coach, founder of Belbin Estonia, and a leadership and teamwork trainer with 28 years of active experience. Over 20,000 people trained. Over 1,500 trainings and workshops delivered. Lecturer at the Estonian Entrepreneurship University of Applied Sciences, visiting lecturer at TalTech and the University of Tartu. Member of the Association for Coaching (UK). My approach is strengths-based, behaviour-first, and direct. Clients describe my style as provocative, engaging, and sometimes uncomfortable - but effective.
What is your accreditation?
Belbin Team Roles Accredited Professional since 2005, including the right to deliver official Belbin accreditation courses. First Belbin distributor worldwide to complete the Belbin Accredited Team Coaching Programme. Member of the Association for Coaching (UK), pursuing Accredited Team Coach certification. In practice, this means I've been verified by Belbin Associates to interpret and apply the methodology at the highest professional level - and to train others to do the same.
What topics do you cover in trainings?
Teamwork and team dynamics, leadership and shared leadership, communication and behavioural differences, trust and psychological safety, strengths-based development, conflict. Three things run through every session: understanding yourself - your strengths, your hidden gear, your weaknesses, and how to use and manage them. Understanding others - how your team members think, communicate, and act differently from you. And finding how to combine these people into a team that makes the best use of everyone's strengths, balances what's missing, and reveals potential nobody expected. Every session is built around the participants and their real context. There is no standard slide deck because there are no standard teams.
Do you offer leadership training separately?
Yes. The focus is on how leaders can understand their own behavioural strengths and blind spots, recognise what different team members need, and lead from strengths rather than trying to fix weaknesses. A key theme: leadership is increasingly a shared function. Not one person at the top, but a team capability that depends on how roles are distributed and used.
How long does a team coaching engagement last?
Typically three to six sessions over several months. The first session maps the team's behavioural landscape and builds trust with the coach. Subsequent sessions go deeper. Some teams continue with periodic check-ins. The pace follows the team's readiness, not a fixed programme. We agree the structure together at the start and adjust as we go.
Can I buy an assessment without coaching or training?
Yes. Individual Belbin Team Roles Assessments can be purchased directly through the Assessment page. You complete the questionnaire, invite your observers, and receive your report. If you want help interpreting the results, I offer individual debrief sessions online or face to face. For teams, Team & Leadership Dynamics by Soomre adds the practitioner interpretation layer that turns raw data into actionable insight.