Professional Styles (Work Roles Report)
The Work Roles Report scores a Professional Styles profile against eight typical team-role types - how someone naturally operates when working with others - showing their strongest and weakest fits and where teamwork will cost them more effort than it shows on paper.
Role fit runs through four connected boxes, ending in a note on where extra support will help most.
Reach for this when…
- Someone strong on paper is quietly struggling in a role that fights their natural style.
- You're restructuring a team and need more than gut feel for who goes where.
- A high performer wants to know if a stretch role is a genuine fit or just a bigger title.
How to run it
- Review the Work Roles Report against the coachee's actual current role.
- Identify where their natural style and the role's real demands line up.
- Flag roles or tasks where they'll be working against their own grain.
- Use it to inform role design, team assignments, and where development effort will pay off.
A worked example
Situation. Bat-Erdene Tsogtbaatar ran programmes for a small agricultural NGO in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and was about to put his strongest field officer at the centre of a new cross-team project group, expecting her to facilitate and coordinate the other members.
Applied. The Work Roles Report flagged a clear mismatch: her strongest team roles were direct, hands-on delivery roles, not the facilitating, coordinating role he had in mind, so he kept her on execution and gave the coordinating role to someone whose profile actually fit it.
Result. She joined the project group doing the delivery work she was strongest at, with a named coordinator alongside her, instead of being pushed into a role that fought her natural style.
The catch
Role-fit reports describe tendencies, not ceilings - people stretch outside their natural style all the time, sometimes very well. Used rigidly, it narrows someone's opportunities rather than opening them, and its 'typical work roles' are generic categories that don't always map cleanly onto one specific job in one specific organisation.
Fit is a starting hypothesis for the conversation, not a ceiling on what someone can do.
Origin: Saville Assessment (Wave Professional Styles)