Over the past 25 years, Patrick Lencioni has penned many bestsellers on leadership, self-management and organizational help. He also started a consulting company with some friends, helping clients put those ideas into action.
It was the perfect working life, except he began to find himself unexplainably exhausted and exasperated. He decided to take a stab a diagnosing the cause. In a four-hour conversation with a colleague, he came up with a model that explains why many people are dissatisfied at work and how that can be addressed, and presents a different way to look at the creation and development of effective teams.
It starts with the premise that each one of us has unique gifts – Mr. Lencioni calls them geniuses – that need to be understood and be the focus of our working day. Using those gifts at work provides us energy. When we can’t work on those gifts, we become upset and ineffective.
Those gifts find expression (or are thwarted) in the six roles that must be carried out to get things done:
- Wonder: This is the ability to ponder, speculate and question the state of things, leading to a new way of seeing the situation and a possible pathway for improvement. People with this skill find it easy to lose themselves in observing the world around them and wondering whether things should be different.
- Invention: This is about coming up with new ideas and solutions. The people with this inclination are drawn toward origination, creativity and ingenuity.
- Discernment: When people wonder about changing things and new ideas are proposed, it’s critical that someone has the intuition and judgment to assess what is being proposed, even without a lot of data, and provide valuable feedback and advice.
- Galvanizing: The new idea or initiative needs someone who has the ability to rally, motivate and provoke people to take action. “People with this genius are naturally inclined to inspire and enlist others to get involved in an endeavour. They don’t mind persuading people to rethink or change their plans in order to embark on something worthwhile,” Mr. Lencioni writes in his book, The 6 Types of Working Genius.
- Enablement: This is about providing colleagues support and assistance. People with this ability are naturally inclined to help others accomplish their goals and can often anticipate what folks will need before they even ask. Individuals with the skill respond to the needs of others without putting conditions or restrictions on that assistance.
- Tenacity: Too often an initiative falters because people lack the tenacity to bring it across the finish line to completion. People with this skill are naturally inclined to finish projects, ensuring they meet specifications. “They get energy pushing through obstacles and seeing the impact of their work, and they find joy in crossing tasks off their list and getting closure,” he notes.
Mr. Lencioni loves invention and discernment. In a dream job he would spend his day generating new proposals and evaluating ideas. He is not particularly fond of galvanizing, but for many years that role fell to him in the firm and it began to crush him. Finding our genius might stroke our ego and lead us to focus on what excites us and what we excel at, but it may be more important to identify – and arrange to keep away from – what saps our energy.
He stresses that we all have areas where we thrive (or working genius), areas where we struggle (working frustration) and areas that fall somewhat in between (working competencies). You probably have a sense of your own range, but it might help if you know that after more than 250,000 people have taken a 42-question assessment from Mr. Lencioni’s company, it seems we tend to have two geniuses, two competencies and two frustrations.
“For every person who initially thought they might have more than two geniuses, there were 99 who settled on two. And in so many cases, when we asked the people who thought they might have three geniuses (one person even claimed to have all six) about where they received energy and joy, they settled on two,” he writes.
He feels frustrated having to admit he is not good at enablement. That makes him sound like he’s not a nice person. But he’s lousy at it because it’s hard to not use his two strengths – invention and discernment – and those strengths get in the way.
All six abilities are needed for a team to be effective. In some cases, you might benefit from having more than one person claiming that genius, but you are in real trouble if one category is completely lacking and people are frustrated trying to cover that gap.
If you’re putting together a team, this model can help. If you’re hiring, keep it in mind. You won’t always be able to find people who fill each role, but that would be ideal to aim for. And if there is a gap, it helps for people to step forward, with awareness, to help out and for others to recognize that they may be frustrated in the role.
Cannonballs
- Stop rewarding toxic rock stars in your organization, warns Deepa Purushothaman, co-founder of nFormation, a company for women of colour by women of colour, and strategist Lisen Stromberg. Find out what happens when an employee is reported to HR as “toxic.”
- Here’s another warning to consider based on the distinction we often make about whether we are a manager or a leader, from consultant Roy H. Williams: Managers mistakenly think they can lead. Leaders mistakenly think they can manage. He says people can rarely do both.
- If a job candidate takes five or six days to respond to an e-mail requesting interview availability, consultant Alison Green advises not to drop them from consideration as inefficient. They may have other things going on in their life and at this point they don’t work for you, so you can’t expect the same responsiveness as if they did. If they are a strong candidate, keep going.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.
Harvey Schachter