The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk 388: Patrick Lencioni - The Six Types Of Working Genius
Oct 18, 2020
Patrick Lencioni, a best-selling author renowned for 'The Five Dysfunctions of a Team,' introduces the transformative concept of the six types of working genius. He explains how identifying our unique strengths can significantly enhance workplace collaboration and productivity. Lencioni discusses the balance between innate talents and developed skills and the impact of recognizing diverse talents in leadership roles. Listeners will discover how aligning work with personal strengths can lead to greater fulfillment and improved team dynamics.
53:27
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Intro
00:00 • 2min
Unlocking the Working Genius
02:20 • 24min
Navigating Innate Talents versus Developed Skills
26:07 • 2min
The Leadership Puzzle: Embracing Diverse Talents
27:46 • 12min
Exploring the Working Genius Model and Its Immediate Applications
40:05 • 4min
Harnessing the Power of Working Genius
43:36 • 7min
The Power of Preparation and Personal Growth
50:35 • 3min
The Ideal Team Player
How to Recognize and Cultivate The Three Essential Virtues
Patrick Lencioni
In this book, Patrick Lencioni explains how to identify and cultivate the three essential virtues of an ideal team player. The story follows Jeff Shanley, a leader who must restore his uncle’s company’s cultural commitment to teamwork by identifying and building a culture around the virtues of humility, hunger, and smarts. Lencioni presents a practical framework and actionable tools for leaders, HR professionals, and team members to create a culture of teamwork. Ideal team players are described as humble (sharing credit and emphasizing team over self), hungry (self-motivated and diligent), and smart (emotionally intelligent with common sense about people)[1][3][5].
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
A Leadership Fable
Patrick Lencioni
This book explores the fundamental causes of team failure and organizational politics through a narrative about a fictional company, DecisionTech, Inc. It outlines five dysfunctions: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. The book provides practical advice and real-world examples to help teams overcome these dysfunctions and become high-performing teams.
The Advantage
Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business
Patrick Lencioni
In 'The Advantage', Patrick Lencioni makes a compelling case that the key to a company's success lies in its organizational health rather than its intelligence or technological prowess. He argues that healthy organizations, characterized by a cohesive leadership team, clear strategy, effective communication, and a unified culture, outperform their counterparts. Lencioni identifies three biases (the Sophistication Bias, the Adrenaline Bias, and the Quantification Bias) that prevent leaders from focusing on organizational health. The book provides a practical model for achieving organizational health, including four disciplines: building a cohesive leadership team, creating clarity, overcommunicating clarity, and reinforcing clarity through systems and practices. Lencioni draws on his extensive experience consulting with leading organizations to offer stories, tips, and anecdotes that illustrate the importance of organizational health in today's fast-changing business environment.
The Six Types of Working Genius
A Better Way to Understand Your Gifts, Your Frustrations, and Your Team
Patrick Lencioni
In this book, Patrick Lencioni introduces a framework that categorizes individuals into six types of working geniuses: Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity. These geniuses are aligned with different stages of work—ideation, activation, and implementation—and highlight the importance of recognizing and leveraging individual strengths to enhance productivity and job satisfaction. Lencioni argues that when people work within their natural talents, they experience greater fulfillment and success, and teams become more effective and collaborative. The book also emphasizes the need to design roles around individuals’ working geniuses rather than traditional task-based job descriptions.
The Motive
Patrick Lencioni
In 'The Motive,' Patrick Lencioni delves into the critical reasons behind a leader’s motivation through a narrative involving two rival CEOs. The book highlights the difference between reward-centered leaders, who seek personal gain, and responsibility-centered leaders, who prioritize the needs of their teams and organizations. Lencioni identifies five key responsibilities that leaders often neglect: developing a leadership team, managing direct reports, having tough conversations, running effective meetings, and consistent communication with employees. The book encourages leaders to reflect on their motives and adopt a service-oriented approach to leadership, emphasizing that true leadership is about serving others rather than seeking personal rewards.
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Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com
Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12
The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk
Episode #388: Patrick Lencioni - The 6 Types of Working Genius
Notes:
- What is a "Working Genius?” – There are six different types, and we all have two of them that are natural to us. We are good at doing them, and we get energy and joy and satisfaction from them.
- What about the other four areas? – Two of them are areas that we really struggle with. They exhaust us and drain us of our energy and passion, and in many cases, we’re not very good at them. We call these our areas of Working Frustration. We should doing those things as much as we possibly can, and we certainly shouldn’t do work that calls for us to do them frequently. That is a recipe for frustration, failure, depression. And then there are two other areas that are in between our geniuses and our frustrations, we call these Working Competencies, areas that we can do pretty well, maybe even really well, but that don’t necessarily give us energy or joy. It’s fine to have these things be part of your job, and even the primary part of your job sometimes, but it’s not as good as living and working in your areas of genius.
- What is different about The Six Types of Working Genius and other personal assessments out there? -- This one is quicker to understand, easier to apply, and focused on the work of getting things done.
- What are the six types of working genius?
- Wonder - People with this genius can’t help but question whether things could be better in the world around them. They are troubled whenever they see unmet potential, and they are constantly curious and on the lookout for the need to change something.
- Invention - This type of genius is all about creativity. People who have it love to generate new ideas and solutions to problems and are even comfortable coming up with something out of nothing.
- Discernment - 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. They have good instincts, gut feel and judgment about the subtleties of making decisions that integrate logic, common sense and human needs.
- Galvanizing - This type of genius is about bringing energy and movement to an idea or decision. People who have it like to initiate activity by rallying people to act and inspiring them to get involved.
- Enablement - People with this type of genius are quick to respond to the needs of others by offering their cooperation and assistance with a project, program or effort. They naturally provide the human assistance that is required in any endeavor, and not on their own terms.
- Tenacity - This type is about ensuring that a given project, program or effort is taken to completion and achieves the desired result. People who have this genius push for required standards of excellence and live to see the impact of their work.
- What are Pat's areas of working genius? "I am naturally good at and drawn to what we call Invention and Discernment, I like to come up with new, original ideas, even when it’s not what’s called for. And I love to use my intuition to evaluate and assess ideas and plans to see what would be best. My areas of frustration are Tenacity and Enablement, meaning I struggle to push projects through to completion after the initial excitement wears off, and I have a hard time providing assistance to others on their terms. That doesn’t mean I can’t do those things, because all of us have to do things we don’t like or aren’t good at sometimes. But if I’m in a situation where people are relying on me as their primary source of enablement and tenacity, that’s not good for me or for them in the long run."
- What are my areas of working genius? Discernment and Tenacity. The assessment says: "You are good at and enjoy using your intuition and instincts to evaluate and assess ideas or plans, and pushing projects and tasks through to completion to ensure that the desired results are achieved."
- Your likely areas of Working Competency are: Invention and Galvanizing. "You are capable of and don’t mind creating original and novel ideas and solutions, and rallying people and inspiring them to take action around a project, task or idea."