The 6 Types of Working Genius

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What’s in it for me? Unleash your individual genius in a way that complements the collective genius of your team.

Work. Most people want to escape from it. But what if your job was the one place you went every day for inspiration? Sounds fantastic, right?

Well, it turns out there’s a tried and true way of drawing the best out of everyone not only at work, but in any area of life. This approach will help you thrive – be it at home, as part of your soccer team, or among your friends.

The key lies in this Blink to Patrick M. Lencioni’s The Six Working Geniuses. You’ll learn how your personality relates to work, why your company has lost premium talent in the past, and ways to transform your organization into a desirable workplace. It will also lay out steps to better understand yourself and others so you can flow forward as a cohesive unit – and, in the process, produce your best work yet.

Let’s dive in!

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Work is a chore for most people.

Why do most people dread the very thing they’ll spend a third of their adult life doing? You might know the feeling: the Sunday Blues kicks in, and you start worrying about next week’s assignments. In addition to the tedium of repetitive tasks, you also have to navigate colleagues dealing with their own issues.

Hard to discard, your annoyance tags along and makes its way into your home, relationships, family, and social circle.

What about people who’ve just gotten promoted or received a raise? Are they happier with their jobs? The short answer is no. There’s usually a buzz when someone gets a promotion – but soon enough, tedium writes its name on every paycheck.

A raise doesn’t usually raise morale in the long term. And when morale is low, the company stagnates. You might think that starting your own business and having all that control spares you misery, but many entrepreneurs deal with these issues too. Especially when they’re still trying to figure things out and don’t have enough steady hands to rely on.

Some of the problems around work are a result of bad choices, inadequate counseling, poor management, and people not fitting into the culture of their organizations.

But then there are people who are good at their jobs, have excellent relationships with their colleagues . . . and still have a nagging feeling of dissatisfaction.

So if a job, a raise, a promotion, and great colleagues can’t provide people with an exciting and fulfilling work life, then what is the problem?

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The nature of work consists of three stages.

Meet Mr. Bull Brooks, a fictional character with real work problems.

After graduating with a degree in economics, he works his way through a banking job before going on to find joy in advertising. Bull Brooks excels and gets promoted to vice president at his company.

After a while, he loses his passion and goes on to start his own ad firm with some of his best colleagues and friends. Again, he enjoys it for a while . . . and then the bug returns, threatening to ruin his home and work life.

Not wanting to run away from his company, Bull Brooks and his team decide to investigate the problem.

First, they decide that work is just a series of tasks assigned to an individual. Put together, these tasks contribute to a bigger goal – like building a product or providing a service. Brooks and his friends now make a list of all the tasks that go into every employee's job.

For each employee, the tasks are grouped into activities they like, the ones they don’t mind doing, and the ones they dread.

Next, they discuss the very nature of work – the process of accomplishing tasks. They determine that if a team in an office, home, or charity anywhere in the world were trying to accomplish anything, it would happen in three stages: ideation, activation, and implementation.

Ideation involves asking questions, brainstorming, and coming up with possible solutions. Activation happens when proposed solutions are analyzed and then adopted by the team. Implementation is all about bringing the adopted ideas into fruition.

What did this short fable help us understand? The universal theory of getting things done.

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Understanding the nature of talent

Where do you keep your coffee?

If you keep your coffee in a tightly locked thermos flask, it’ll stay hot for a very long time. Similarly, when you do work that revolves around your natural talent, you excel because it energizes you. You get inspired by it, and it fulfills you. We’re going to call that your working genius.

Now, imagine that coffee in a plastic cup with a lid over it. It won’t retain the heat for long. We’ll call that your working competency. These are things you’re really good at but wouldn’t mind passing on to another person. When you do them for extended periods, they become a chore and start irritating you. For instance, some people are excellent at organizing people – but they’d rather stay at home and build prototypes.

Finally, there are your working frustrations – the things that sap the energy out of you. If your coffee were in a cup that had a hole at the bottom, you’d lose the heat along with the coffee. These are the things you hate doing.

From here, it's easy to pick out the things that inspire you and give you energy, the ones that everybody says you’re good at but wear you out over time, and the tasks that make you outright grumpy.

Catching the drift?

You might have heard that doing what you love will take you far, but that’s an oversimplification when it comes to working teams. These geniuses have to work together – and many times, a team might not have enough of the geniuses to function properly.

Even when a team is well rounded, they still have to fit into the nature of work we discussed earlier: the ideation, activation, and implementation order of getting things done.

The next step consists of identifying your real talent – your genius – and determining where it fits in the team.

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The 6 types of working genius

To attempt to list all the amazing things people can do would be like trying to count the stars on a cloudless night. However, we can classify the skills that people have in terms of getting things done into six categories: the genius of wonder, invention, discernment, galvanizing, enablement, and tenacity.

Yup, it’s that simple.

People with the genius of wonder look at the world and think about how they could make it better.

Inventors find solutions, while those with the gift of discernment have the intuition and judgment to see whether these solutions would work – sometimes without having to look at complicated data.

People with the spirit of galvanizing excel in rallying the troops, supported by enablers who take joy in being the glue that brings everything together.

When they all get to the final stretch, those with the gift of tenacity are waiting and eager to carry them over the line.

Many times, when the team is finishing the race, those with the genius of wonder and invention are already busy looking at ideas for the next project and couldn’t care less about the fanfare. Identifying each person’s talent, then, is the first step. When people do work they can lose themselves in, they capture and retain energy.

Knowing how these geniuses complement each other is the vital next step to pairing talent and building teams that accomplish projects.

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Pair up your geniuses, and place them along the three stages of work.

When an organization initiates a project, the workflow should move progressively from the genius of wonder and invention all the way through to the genius of tenacity.

Geniuses work best in pairs. An inventor will find joy with the genius of wonder, who identifies a problem or sees an opportunity. During the adoption process, discerners test solutions using their sound judgment – and relay certified ideas to galvanizers, who sell them to enablers and implementers.

People with the gift of tenacity work perfectly together with enablers, who give them everything they need to cross the finish line. Enablers, those generous souls who are always there to lend a hand, are the glue that holds every successful organization together.

These pairings are also important when deciding who should attend meetings.

Having the tenacity expert in the room at the early stages of a process might put pressure on the inventor. Although teams are working on the same project and helping each other, understanding where – and when – they fit in will make them work better.

So what happens when one of these geniuses is absent? In that case, the organization could choose to find and hire the missing link. They could also borrow a genius from another department to fill the gap. Or they could find another temporary solution: someone with a competency in that area.

The six geniuses can also be classified into two broader categories. Responsive geniuses include the wonderers, discerners, and enablers – they respond to the world around them. Their disruptive counterparts, inventors, galvanizers, and finishers are more proactive and willinitiate action.

Most people tend to possess two geniuses, so try to identify where you stand!

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Building a happy and productive team

Now that you have a better understanding of genius, competency, and frustrations, how do you go about creating the perfect band?

Four songwriters all trying to impose their ideas clearly won’t work. Instead, hire a songwriter, a guitarist, a bass player, and a drummer who are all dedicated to their craft. These are the seeds of a promising act. They will complement each other and take responsibility for their individual contributions.

Work should be a form of expression that displays your natural skills. When that happens, you’ll feel fulfilled – and happy to be working with people who help you excel. But it’s not just about personal satisfaction. Organizations that excel at implementing the ideas they’ve thoroughly vetted are also more likely to grow.

As they grow and thrive, each individual will be able to see themselves in the team’s collective success.

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Final summary

It’s possible to build organizations where people wear a smile to work. This starts with identifying every employee’s unique talent – and then placing your employees wherever they’ll derive the most joy applying their talent.

It also involves giving employees the chance to collaborate closely with people who complement their skills throughout the process of ideation, activation, and implementation.

When complementary geniuses work together toward a common goal, they achieve better results and find their jobs more fulfilling.