610R: How to Help Team Members Find the Right Work, with Patrick Lencioni

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Jul 7, 2025

Patrick Lencioni, founder of The Table Group and bestselling author, explores how to align team members with their strengths using his Working Genius model. He emphasizes that understanding individual work types is more crucial than simply counting tasks to combat burnout. The discussion highlights practical strategies for enhancing team dynamics, including the importance of role alignment to improve satisfaction and productivity. Lencioni also suggests filling gaps in team capabilities through strategic resource utilization while prioritizing internal strengths.

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ANECDOTE

Lencioni's Galvanizing Experience

Patrick Lencioni shared how doing too much galvanizing work exhausted him despite being good at it.
He handed that role to a younger colleague better suited for it, leading to increased productivity and joy.

INSIGHT

Three Key Work Stages

Work breaks down into three stages: ideation, activation, and implementation.
Activation, often overlooked, is critical to refine ideas before execution for better success.

INSIGHT

The Secret to Ending Burnout: The Right Work, Not Less Work

Patrick Lencioni reveals that the type of work you do is far more crucial to preventing burnout than just the amount of work. Through his "Working Genius" model, he explains that everyone has two types of work they naturally excel at and love — their "working geniuses." Doing work that aligns with these geniuses fuels your energy, like coffee kept warm in a thermos all day.

Conversely, engaging frequently in tasks outside your geniuses, your "working frustrations," drains your energy quickly, like coffee leaking from a cup with a hole. Many people feel burnout and guilt simply because they are placed in the wrong roles, not because they lack willpower or commitment.

By identifying each team member's working genius, leaders can reassign roles or adjust tasks to fit their natural strengths, dramatically increasing joy, productivity, and engagement. This approach transforms how teams work together and tackles burnout at its root rather than its symptoms.

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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 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 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.

Good to Great

Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

Jim Collins

In 'Good to Great,' Jim Collins and his research team investigate why some companies achieve long-term greatness while others do not. The book identifies key concepts such as Level 5 Leadership, the Hedgehog Concept, a Culture of Discipline, and the Flywheel Effect. These principles are derived from a comprehensive study comparing companies that made the leap to greatness with those that did not. The research highlights that greatness is not primarily a function of circumstance but rather a result of conscious choice and discipline. The book provides practical insights and case studies to help businesses and leaders understand and apply these principles to achieve sustained greatness.

Patrick Lencioni: The 6 Types of Working Genius

Patrick Lencioni is founder and president of The Table Group, a firm dedicated to protecting human dignity in the world of work, personal development, and faith. Pat is the author of twelve best-selling books with over seven million copies sold. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team remains a national best-seller and he’s also the author of The 6 Types of Working Genius: A Better Way to Understand Your Gifts, Your Frustrations, and Your Team.

Many of us have heard the invitation from Jim Collin’s book _Good to Great_ to get the right people on the bus. But once the right people are on the bus, how to do you find the right seat for each person? On this episode, Pat and I discuss how to utilize the Working Genius model to find the right work for the right team members.

Key Points

When addressing burnout, the type of work someone does is more significant than the volume of work.
Three stages of work are present for almost every team: ideation, activation, and implementation.
A cup of coffee in an excellent thermos can stay hot an entire day — that’s true of us when we’re aligned with our working geniuses.
Finding the right work for a team member is far easier than finding the right person culturally. Before you look elsewhere, be sure they are in the right seat.
To fill gaps in your team’s geniuses, you can hire, borrow, or find people where competence will suffice for now. Resist the temptation to immediately jump to hiring.

Resources Mentioned

Interview Notes

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Related Episodes

How to Get the Ideal Team Player, with Patrick Lencioni (episode 301)
How to Lead an Offsite, with Tom Henschel (episode 377)
The Mindset Leaders Need to Address Burnout, with Christina Maslach(episode 609)

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