I have been a disciple of Patrick Lencioni since I first read Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I wholeheartedly agreed with his directive to build trust first through being vulnerably honest with one another. That instant connection led me to nine Lencioni books, applying them inside my organizations and ultimately achieving DMAP Accreditation with Distinction in the same year as winning a national organizational culture award. To me, this was validation that you can have structure and culture at the same time. Lencioni’s methods work and they work because they are not theory. They are a blueprint and if followed, will make your life considerably less stressful. Book ten came later and is actually a summary of one of the most impactful things “Uncle Pat” as the Visit Corpus Christi team used to call him, taught me.
In 2020, Lencioni rolled out The Six Types of Working Genius. Lencioni discovered there are six types of work that are required whether you’re working on launching a product, organizing your department, planning a vacation or going grocery shopping with the family. These six types help people discover their natural fits and thrive in their personal and professional lives. What is so different about this model vs Myers-Briggs, Birkman, DISC and others, is that The Working Genius assessment is 20% personality and 80% productivity. I have taken every personality test there is to determine who I am on the inside, how I act on the outside, my decision making during times of stress and many other variables that are very beneficial to know.
Where The Six Types is truly different is that it is more tactical in nature and therefore I believe easier to apply in a real-world office setting than personality assessments. That is not to say those types of assessments don’t have a place. I am a certified Birkman Method facilitator and it is something every human and every organization would benefit from. But if you ask Patrick Lencioni, here is how he describes his own model:
“The Working Genius helps people understand how they can contribute to work most effectively. It helps individuals, leaders and teams better leverage one another’s strengths and understand how to be both productive and fulfilled at work.”
For those that know me well and understand what I am trying to accomplish with OA, you will understand why I am drawn to this line of thinking. For those that do not understand yet, I am a manager at heart which is different than a leader. I also consider myself a leader and I believe others do as well, because I have taken the necessary steps to build rather than direct. One can’t be a real leader until they are a real manager. Managers understand how to develop processes and efficiencies within their teams and organizations that will help them reach their goals of being strong leaders for their people. The always cliché group rowing the boat with the leader at the front pointing the direction only happens when the team rowing believes that leader at the front has a full understanding of where they came from and what pushing ahead will benefit everyone in the boat.
What I have learned after years of using the Six Types of Working Genius with teams: most teams are not lazy.The work breaks down because the right kind of energy is missing from the room, and nobody can see it. The Working Genius model gives that invisible thing a name…WIDGET.
Every human alive can do all six but only two of those types fill you up. They are your Working Geniuses, and you could do that work all day. Two of them you are competent at, but they drain you over time. And two of them are your Working Frustrations. They are the ones that leave you exhausted and a little resentful by Thursday afternoon.
The Genius of Wonder (W)
The natural gift of pondering the possibility of greater potential and opportunity in a given situation. People with this genius are constantly curious and on the lookout for what could be improved.
The Genius of Invention (I)
The natural gift of creating original and novel ideas and solutions. People who have it love to generate new ideas and solutions to problems and are comfortable coming up with something out of nothing.
The Genius of Discernment (D)
The natural gift of intuitively and instinctively evaluating ideas and situations. People with this type of genius have a natural ability when it comes to evaluating or assessing a given idea or situation and providing guidance.
The Genius of Galvanizing (G)
The natural gift of rallying, inspiring and organizing others to take action. People who have it enjoy bringing energy and movement to an idea or decision.
The Genius of Enablement (E)
The natural gift of providing encouragement and assistance for an idea or project. People with this type of genius are quick to respond to the needs of others by offering their cooperation and help with a project, program or effort.
The Genius of Tenacity (T)
The natural gift of pushing projects or tasks to completion to achieve results. People who have this genius push for required standards of excellence and live to see the impact of their work.
The six definitions above are courtesy of The Table Group, Inc.
The trap is that most of us have built jobs and teams and even families that ignore all of this completely.
The term for my genius is the Evangelizing Innovator with the geniuses of Invention and Galvanizing. An excitable and convincing generator and promoter of new ideas, and I do this by combining curiosity and confidence with infectious enthusiasm. I will also be the first to admit I can be hasty to start selling an idea before I have fully thought through whether it is a good one. There are some people around the country right now nodding and smiling…oh the memories.
I also have two competencies. Things that if made responsible for too long, can get burned out. They are Wonder and Discernment, and although sitting by myself pondering the meaning of whatever is in front of me and poking holes in all the possible solutions to a problem are things I can do, they are not what fills me up at the end of the day.
Finally, we have our frustrations. The way I have always described it to staff and clients is this. If you show up to work at 8am and I give you 8 coins and tell you to turn one in for every hour of work you do not like doing, and keep a coin for every hour you spend on things you love and are good at, the goal would be to end the day with as many coins as possible. When you go home and someone asks how your day was, you pull your hands out of your pockets full of coins, and you say, “great.” Pull out lint instead, and that was a lousy day full of work that did not fill you up because you are a combination of not good at it and not really interested in it. We have all been there; sometimes for than others.
And for me, fortunately, I have the golden ticket of proof that this system works. My two working frustrations are Enablement and Tenacity. To describe this is easy; I don’t like doing the work. Helping, reviewing, typing, studying, crossing the t’s and being responsible for putting the box in the mail does not interest me at all. If that was my job long term…I quit.
“Brett, did you really tell your employees that you don’t like doing the work?” Hell yes I did and they accepted it with open arms. Because guess what, not everyone has the same working genius as me. Some people love to be trusted workers and don’t want to brainstorm ideas, don’t want to stand up on top of a table and rally everyone together, take the mayor out for lunch, or speak at Rotary. If communicating correctly, The Working Genius offers fair trades.
The Working Genius helps you build trust; sometimes quickly. I remember Meredith Darden telling me in front of multiple people a couple hours before our annual meeting, “Stop inventing”. At a different time, I remember telling Meredith, “I don’t like doing this. You do it”. She knew what my strengths were and I knew hers. Our Geniuses were the complete opposite. The beauty of The Working Genius is that it teaches teams how to become more cohesive by giving people a pass, by acknowledging what fills their cup and what makes it runneth over.
The Working Genius is also relevant and impactful in your personal life. My wife Amber and I don’t share any similarities in our geniuses. It wasn’t until we both took The Working Genius that we realized we have different joys and strengths and frustrations. As an inventor, I can happily come up with ideas for improving anything or for planning the perfect trip. My constant brainstorming stressed Amber out, because as someone with discernment and tenacity she took everything I said literally and tried to figure out how to make it all a reality. Amber’s top genius is tenacity, so she is naturally someone who is ready to get things done. It is my biggest frustration, and therefore doing the laundry is the last thing I want to do. But I will invent 20 ways to get out of it.
When I implemented the Six Types into my teams, patterns showed up fast. A marketing team full of tenacity but no inventors needed outside help for brainstorming. A team with no Tenacity had a whiteboard full of plans but no concept of how to make them a reality. Employees that seemed burned out were in fact drained because they were doing things that don’t bring joy to their lives.
The result of The Working Genius implementation is a team that finally understands why some work feels effortless and some work feels like rowing against the current. Once people can name the issue, they can work around it. They stop apologizing for the work that drains them and start trading for the work that wakes them up.
That is the quiet power of this model. It does not ask people to change who they are. It gives them permission to be who they are, and it gives the team a shared language for filling the gaps on purpose instead of by accident.
Imagine if every company, every department, every family knew the areas of genius, competency, and frustration of their people and organized them for success.
There are so many other aspects to the model that are impactful as well. Things like the three stages of work, learning who is responsive vs disruptive, understanding how to handle guilt and judgement, and finding out where your team’s altitude falls. Then there is my personal favorite, one I have communicated with Lencioni about directly. I call it the 360 degrees of genius. Based upon someone’s full results, two people may approach the same genius at very different levels. For instance, the same marketing campaign may be discerned by strategy or by tactic depending on who is doing the discerning.
If your team is busy and stuck at the same time, if your best people seem tired in a way that does not add up, if great ideas keep dying somewhere between the brainstorm and the finish line, the answer is probably not more effort. It is alignment. It is naming the genius you already have and putting it where it belongs.
I am a Working Genius Master Facilitator, and I run sessions that take a team from confused and depleted to clear and energized in a single day. We map the team. We find the missing geniuses. We get people out of their frustrations and back into the work that fills them up.
If you want that for your team to be more happy and fulfilled, lets talk.
