If you’ve heard of the 6 Types of Working Genius framework but aren’t sure how it will benefit you and your team, you’re in the right spot.
In this post, I’ll share how the Working Genius model has helped me personally and tell you what it’s done for my coworkers and clients too.
And I’ll point you to more resources so you can learn even more.
Before I start sharing, let’s start with a question that’s may be on your mind.
What is the 6 Types of Working Genius model?
Great question!
I get asked this all the time.
Many business leaders know it’s Patrick Lencioni’s latest creation.
And they know Lencioni also wrote The Five Dysfunctions of a Team which has had an incredible positive impact on millions of people throughout the world.
But they don’t know much about the 6 Types of Working Genius framework and what it can do for their organization.
If that describes you, here’s a quick summary:
- The Working Genius assessment is the fastest and simplest way to discover your natural talents at work.
- The 6 Types of Working Genius framework combines personal assessment reports, team maps, and many other resources into an easy-to-understand and simple-to-use tool kit for leaders in a wide variety of businesses and organizations.
- The Working Genius model is a productivity tool that feels like a personality assessment because it promotes self-awareness that leads to higher personal and team performance.
- The Working Genius resources equip individuals, leaders, and teams to better leverage one another’s strengths while identifying and managing weaknesses that bring frustrating and inefficiency.
This list only touches the surface of the many benefits The 6 Types of Working Genius tool provides individuals and teams.
So if you’re curious about what else the Working Genius model can do for you and the people you work with, keep reading!
I’ve done my best to capture the most important benefits I’ve experienced using the Working Genius resources myself as a business leader and with my clients as a Certified Working Genius Facilitator with hands-on training from the Table Group team who built the model.
Let’s dive in!
The best Working Genius benefit: Self-awareness
I’ve experienced so many of the Working Genius benefits that it’s nearly impossible for me to pick the best one.
But, if I’m forced to, I’m going with self-awareness.
Because whether we’re leading a team or leading ourselves as an individual contributor, we all need more self-awareness.
So how do we get this highly valuable information?
Self-awareness comes with time and maturity for most people which means one answer is to simply wait and observe.
But there’s a better way.
You can invest about 10 minutes to take the 6 Types of Working Genius Assessment because it gives you an “instant understanding of yourself”.
That’s according to Patrick Lencioni and the team who created the model. They discuss this topic in the first two and half minutes of Episode 26 of The Working Genius podcast.
I’ve experienced that personally and with the dozens of people I’ve worked with.
The instant self-discovery that comes within seconds of reading your personal Six Types of Working Genius assessment report is frankly amazing.
My coworkers and clients say things like:
“Spot on. It totally nailed who I am.”
“No wonder I get so frustrated with that part of my work.”
“The report perfectly described what I love (and hate) about doing in my job.”
“I bet that’s why my wife and I always end up arguing when we’re planning a trip!”
I’ve seen this Working Genius benefit make an immediate impact on my coworkers and my clients in the business world.
And, I’ve watched my friends and family members develop a deeper understanding of the type of tasks that bring them joy, energy, and fulfillment too.
Knowing who we are and what we are designed to do is incredibly valuable.
This is especially true if you lead people – and the Working Genius model will help you in this area too.
Working Genius Benefits for you as a leader
Awareness of yourself
Self-awareness is critical for leaders.
That’s one of the reasons I described it earlier as the best working genius benefit.
One of my favorite leadership mottos highlights the value of self-awareness for all leaders:
“The best leader is the most self-aware leader.”
That’s why I am continually recommending the 6 Types of Working Genius framework to the business leaders I know.
But, the self-awareness from the assessment isn’t the only Working Genius benefit the model provides.
Awareness of others
Self-awareness is critical for leaders. And others-awareness is only slightly behind it as a leadership requirement.
Awareness of your direct reports
If you’re like me, you want to position your direct reports for success whenever you can.
Part of doing that is placing them in roles that bring them joy, energy, and fulfillment.
And, you want to avoid assigning them tasks that bring them frustration.
That’s no easy task because you can’t make those decisions without data.
Sadly, most leaders don’t have access to this information about their employees and they don’t know how to get it.
Sure they could ask their team members directly.
But most people don’t have the self-awareness or the language to describe the categories of work they most enjoy or despise.
Thankfully, Patrick Lencioni created a solution to this dilemma.
The Six Types of Working Genius Assessment and model equips the people reporting to you to tell you EXACTLY what you need to know as their supervisor.
And, this Working Genius benefit isn’t just for leaders with direct reports.
Awareness of teammates who don’t report to you
For instance, if you’re a project manager leading a cross-functional team, you’ll want to know how to best leverage your team members at each of the 3 stages of work throughout the project.
For example:
- In the initial Ideation phase, you’ll need people with the Working Geniuses of Wonder and Invention.
- During the Activation stage, team members with the Working Geniuses of Discernment and Galvanizing will shine.
- In the final Implementation period, you’ll be glad you have team members with the Enablement and Tenacity Working Geniuses to push the project over the finish line.
And, of course, you’ll lead better meetings when you know how each team member will tend to drive the conversation.
Having the Working Genius assessment for all your coworkers will tell you that too.
But, being more aware of others isn’t the only Working Genius benefit for leaders.
You need to know how to help your team maximize their contribution to your business.
Because every leader knows this: if your teams don’t deliver results, you’re not going to be a leader in your business for long!
Increased productivity of your team
You know teams MUST be productive.
Because resources are limited in every business, and you can’t afford to be inefficient and waste time.
You have to organize people and get work DONE!
That’s where the 6 Types of Working Genius framework helps any team leader.
Leaders have to know the people they’re leading. They need to understand who they are as unique human beings.
And this raises a question many have when they first discover the Working Genius material.
People often ask if the Working Genius Assessment is a personality test?
The answer is “Kind of.”
It is in a sense because of the self-awareness you gain about who you are and what type of work brings you joy, energy, and fulfillment.
But because it is focused on WORK, it’s better described as a productivity tool.
Working Genius brings a framework to help you as a leader understand the different types of work every team does and the 3 basic stages of work that are present in any successful initiative.
It also offers insight into how people can better work together by leveraging one another’s strengths.
Using the Working Genius model also provides benefits for hiring, team communication, planning, and, last but not least, my favorite: meetings!
More productive and effective meetings
If you know much about me, you know I am on a mission to help business leaders stop bad meetings.
I even have a weekly newsletter dedicated to helping you make your meetings productive, effective, and even ENJOYABLE!
It’s called M4 – the Monday Morning Meeting Minute. Click here to check it out if you’re interested.
A major point of emphasis in my Working Genius Facilitator Certification from the TableGroup trainers was the positive impact the model has on meetings.
Of course the awareness of self and the awareness of others I described previously will benefit anyone who leads or attends meetings.
Additionally, when you know the Working Genius pairings of each person in your meeting (including you), you’re going to know how each person is going to show up.
Let me explain what I mean.
Your Working Genius impacts how you show up in meetings
We’re all naturally pulled toward the type of work that energizes us.
So, if you have the Working Genius of Tenacity, you’re going to want to focus on the specific tasks involved with the work being discussed during a meeting.
Your mind will instantly think of all the tasks that need to be done to get the project DONE.
This will be your tendency even when you’re in an ideation meeting with the Purpose of creating new ideas.
But, if you have the Working Geniuses of Invention, you won’t care as much about those details.
You’ll be thrilled to have a blank whiteboard in front of you so you can throw out all your wild ideas without worrying a bit about how they’ll actually be executed.
In fact, the discussion of the details by a person with Tenacity may totally frustrate you.
Imagine the chaos of being in a meeting where one person wants to talk about a new way of doing things (Invention) when the rest of the team is focused on the last 5% of the work to push it across the finish line (Tenacity).
The problem is you’re not all working at the same “altitude!”
Working Genius Altitudes in Meetings
This image from the M4 issue, “4 Meeting Types – How To Make Each Productive” illustrates what I mean by “altitude.”
You probably don’t have to imagine the frustrating scenario I just described because you’ve been in more than one meeting like that!
The Working Genius model gives you and the teams you lead the insight to know what stage of work needs to be done during specific meetings.
And you’ll know who needs to be in a meeting and who should NOT be there.
You’ll avoid creating the conditions that make people around the globe hate unproductive, time-wasting meetings.
Here’s how this works in real life.
An example: Steve with the Working Genius of Invention
Imagine how much better your meetings will be when you can tell Steve, your coworker who is amazing with his Invention Working Genius, these two things:
- He SHOULD attend the off-site ideation meeting where next year’s product ideas are being generated.
- He should NOT attend the meeting where the team will be reviewing the production readiness checklist to ensure this quarter’s new product can be launched next week.
Steve is going to be thrilled when he hears this!
And, he’ll provide significantly more value to your business because he’ll be doing the type of work he’s designed to do.
He’ll be in the meeting where he’s most productive.
Not only that – he’ll have more joy and energy with much less frustration.
Chances are also high that the people in the pre-production meeting will be less frustrated too because they won’t have to keep politely interrupting Steve to tell him to keep his ideas to himself!
If Steve also had the Working Genius of Wonder to go with his Invention, this is what his Working Genius pairing would look like:
Another example: The Wishy-Washy Person
Wishy-washy people can be a challenge to manage in meetings.
By “wishy-washy” I mean a person who rarely responds with a clear, direct answer when you ask them a question in a meeting.
Their replies typically include one of these phrases:
- “It could be [one answer]. But it might also be [another answer].”
- “I’m not completely sure.”
- “Well…, it depends…”
Even though I’ve led hundreds and hundreds of meetings throughout my career, it wasn’t until I discovered the Working Genius framework that I better understand why a “wishy-washy” person might be behaving like this.
I learned they likely have the Working Geniuses of Wonder and Discernment, a WD pairing in the 6 Types of Working Genius terminology.
You can read about how I corrected my mindset about wishy-washy meeting participants in this article.
Working Genius Benefits for you as an individual
Self-awareness as a team member
Self-awareness isn’t just critical for leaders.
It’s super important for every one of us as we’re being led. And we’re all led in some way at every point in our career.
For example, if you’re like me, you’ve spent most of your career working with other people on some type of team.
You may be an official project team or a member of an informal “team” of people who work together to get something done.
Our lives at work and outside of our careers are spent getting things done with other people.
Someone is the leader (formally or informally) others are following.
You’re probably on more teams than you think and the more self-aware you are as a team member, the more you can contribute to what you and your teammates are trying to accomplish.
The Six Types of Working Genius assessment is the fastest and simplest way to discover your natural gifts and be the best team member you can be.
You can stop feeling guilty all the time
That Working Genius benefit may surprise you.
It did me at first so let me explain what I mean.
Many people attribute their failures and struggles to having a bad attitude, not being smart enough, making bad decisions, or just not trying hard enough.
They struggle with negative self-talk using harsh words like this to describe themselves:
- Lazy
- Dumb
- Incompetent
They feel guilty about not being good enough to do the work they need to do.
The Working Genius assessment and framework helps them have a more accurate and healthier mindset.
When people realize they have certain areas of Genius and other areas of Frustration, they can attribute their struggles to the lack of alignment with their Geniuses and roles.
This reduces their sense of guilt and shame.
And their new perspective gained through the Working Genius assessment allows them to move into work that provides a better chance of fulfillment and success.
When they have to do work that frustrates them, they now know why.
So they can still do that work when they’re required to but without beating themselves up about not enjoying it.
This renewed outlook is incredibly liberating!
You can be less judgmental of your coworkers
Along with reduced guilt, the 6 Types of Working Genius model also decreases judgment between individuals in an organization.
Guilt and judgment go together:
- Guilt is focused on ourselves.
- Judgment is about how we view others.
People who don’t understand the Working Geniuses of others and their Frustrations will inevitably find themselves judging their coworkers’ performance and behavior.
And by “people” I mean me.
And also you.
Because we’re both human and subject to Fundamental Attribution Error.
We all tend to attribute bad behaviors we observe in others to their character.
But when we mess up, we have explanations for what we’ve done.
For example, if you’ve ever criticized a “lazy” employee or colleague for being late to a meeting and then made an excuse for being late yourself that same day, you’ve made the Fundamental Attribution Error.
This is where the Working Genius framework helps us avoid this mistake.
Instead of coming to the incorrect conclusion that our teammate isn’t trying hard enough or isn’t smart enough, we can better understand why they aren’t able to do certain types of work with the same attitude or performance level as others.
We can understand how they’re wired so we can support them better instead of judging them and causing them to feel misunderstood and even rejected.
The 6 Types of Working Genius model has definitely helped me improve in this area.
I’m confident it will benefit you in this way too because I’ve seen it work not just in my own life but with my clients and coworkers too.
I explain more about this and share tips I’ve learned in this M4 issue: How To Be Less Judgmental In Meetings – 3 Tips.
You’ll know what job fits you best
Taking the 6 Types of Working Genius assessment will give you insight that can prevent you from taking a job you’ll end up hating!
How do I know this?
A colleague of mine recently told me he was considering moving to a new role in his company.
He initially thought it would be a good fit. It looked interesting and he had the skills to do the job.
But, he turned it down.
Because he knew his Working Geniuses and understood what types of work brought him joy, energy, and fulfillment, he recognized that he would eventually NOT enjoy what the new role required.
His Working Geniuses are Wonder and Enablement and he especially loves pondering the possibility of greater potential and opportunity in a given situation.
This Working Genius pairing describes my colleague:
Tenacity is a Working Competency for him so he doesn’t mind pushing projects and tasks through to completion. But when he has to do this type of work for too long, he feels drained.
The job he was asked to consider involved a lot of Tenacity-type tasks and not much Wondering.
He told me the coaching I had done with him allowed him to avoid moving to a position that would have been enjoyable for him at first but would have quickly become drudgery!
This true story shows the benefit of taking the Working Genius assessment and working with a Working Genius Certified Facilitator like me to understand the type of work you love and were created to do.
In this case, it saved my colleague from experiencing energy-drain in his job and potentially damaging his career by being in a role that wasn’t a good fit for him.
How I know about these Working Genius benefits
You may be wondering how I know about these benefits of the 6 Types of Working Genius framework.
The answer’s simple.
I’ve experienced them myself as I’ve used the Working Genius assessment and team maps for myself and my teams. In fact, you can learn how I use assessment reports and see my personal reports in this article.
And, I am continually collecting stories from the dozens of clients I’ve worked with as a Working Genius Certified Facilitator to help them use the Working Genius productivity tool in their own businesses.
It seems that every person I work with tells me another story of the benefits of this model from Patrick Lencioni and the Table Group team.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to tell others what I’ve experienced and observed.
If you’re interested, I’d love to share more details with you.
And, if you have your own story about the benefits you’ve experienced with the Working Genius model, I’d love to hear them.
Just shoot me a quick note (click here).
Greg Harrod
Greg Harrod is a Executive Business Consultant and Coach. Follow GregHarrod.com to learn how you can build your business and your career as a kind, confident leader. You CAN care deeply about your teammates and still deliver exceptional results. Greg will help you learn how based on his 30+ years of experience leading teams and businesses.
Check out Greg’s weekly newsletter, M4 – the Monday Morning Meeting Minute to make the meetings in your business better every week.
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