Every type of work requires six fundamental activities: Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity. The Working Genius model, created by Patrick Lencioni, identifies which of these activities energize a person and which ones drain them — and gives teams a shared language for who should be doing what.
The Six Types of Working Genius
- Wonder — the natural gift of pondering the possibility of greater potential and opportunity in a given situation.
- Invention — the natural gift of creating original ideas and novel solutions.
- Discernment — the natural gift of intuitively evaluating ideas and situations and offering sound judgment.
- Galvanizing — the natural gift of rallying and organizing others around an idea or initiative.
- Enablement — the natural gift of providing support and assistance to help others succeed.
- Tenacity — the natural gift of pushing work across the finish line, even against resistance.
Most people have genius in two of these six areas, competency in two more, and frustration in the remaining two. Working Genius isn't a personality test — it's a productivity tool that shows a team exactly where its energy and its gaps actually are.
Why It Matters for Teams
Left unaddressed, mismatched work assignments are one of the most common — and most invisible — sources of team dysfunction. People get stuck doing the type of work that drains them, meetings drag because the wrong people are weighing in at the wrong stage, and good ideas die because no one owns pushing them to completion.
Working Genius gives a leadership team a shared language for solving that. Teams that use it typically see improvement in:
- Meeting effectiveness
- Staffing and hiring decisions
- Team productivity
- Morale
- Communication and shared language
How I Use It
I'm a certified Working Genius facilitator. For teams, that typically means walking through the assessment together, then facilitating a working session that maps the team's collective geniuses, competencies, and frustrations against how the team actually operates — where work is getting stuck, who's carrying work that drains them, and where the real gaps are.
Working Genius is a tool I bring in on its own or alongside a broader engagement, including as part of an EOS® implementation, wherever a team's dynamics are getting in the way of its execution.