Each month I attend a cigar networking event. One of the things that I love about it (aside from the fact that we are doing business while we are smoking) is that there is a mastermind session which invites business owners to share a particular challenge to the collective wisdom of the room. Recently, one business owner asked the group about how to hire the right people. A rich conversation followed helping this business owner to get clarity on what success would look like for his team, how AI could help, how he was getting in the way, and many other good pieces of advice.
A real aha moment happened for him, though, when I introduced him and the others in the room to Pat Lencioni’s Working Genius. I have to confess that I’m Pat Lencioni’s fan boy. Philosophically, I am so aligned with his core beliefs and the work that he is passionate about. The advice he gives is practical and his insights cut through the nonsense to the quick. The Working Genius is Pat’s latest creation and lays out the six stages of work in the acronym WIDGET.
W is for wonder. These are the dreamers among us. They consider what’s possible and how we can expand.
I is for inventors, the ones who help understand what the wonderer’s thoughts may look like as an idea or solution.
D is for discernment. These geniuses help us to evaluate ideas and situations.
G means galvanizers, the ones who bring people together, inspiring them and rallying them to take action.
E stands for enablement. These folks want nothing to do with the spotlight and everything to do with supporting and encouraging a project.
And the T’s are the finishers. Standing for tenacity, they are the ones pushing projects to completion and goals to achievement.
As you read through that you are probably imagining which geniuses you had. We all have two. They are the ones that we could do in our sleep. Commonly referred to as “flow,” it’s the type of work that we lose track of time doing. We also have two competencies which means that we can do them for a bit, but eventually we will run out of energy and enthusiasm for them. And what about the two remaining? They are our working frustrations. These are the ones that feel like the energy vampires. They suck the life out of us, take us longer to complete, and, frankly, don’t make us as productive a member of the team as our competencies and certainly our geniuses do.
Generally, I’m not a huge fan of assessments. I’m not opposed to predictive indices, science, or tools that can help us improve. I am opposed to assessments that just tell us who we are and don’t help us turn that information into actionable intel. I’m also opposed to assessments that identify weak areas and just want you to keep working on them. Now don’t misunderstand me, there are areas where we need to improve. I wonder, however, how much time we spend asking people to improve in areas that they are barely competent or frustrated by. And that’s why I love the Working Genius. It says we are all brilliant in certain areas and helps us to align our work and our teammate’s work in the direction where they are a genius. Making a good thing better is a much better way to scale than making a bad thing mediocre.
While I don’t know the makeup of the business owner’s team, I’d be willing to bet that he has gaps in galvanizing and tenacity. He’s having trouble getting his team bought into what he thinks is important and then actually completing the tasks. He is creating processes that people may not even believe in and then asking them to do them. If they aren’t bought in and don’t have someone monitoring the progress and spearheading achievement and completion, the best processes in the world won’t help. As I was explaining this to him with the rest of the room watching, his eyes began to grow. It was sinking in that (1) there is a solution to this frustration he has been experiencing for months, and (2) it isn’t to try harder (as if that ever works anyway); it’s scientific.
There is such relief in those two realizations. I love the Working Genius because it dignifies each of these six types of work. It doesn’t rank them in any order of importance. It basically puts them on a flow chart from ideation to completion and achievement. It also says that your geniuses are valid and asks individuals to play to their strengths. We’ve all heard that “rising tides lift all ships,” and this actually puts that into action. It offers disgruntled employees the opportunity to contribute with work that is satisfying and delighting to them. It takes individuals who, perhaps, were performing at a C level and gives them the opportunity to perform at an A-level because it’s work that is engaging and they are skilled in.
Aside from cultural misalignment, my experience tells me that not allowing employees the opportunity to use their geniuses in their work is one of the main reasons that struggling employees leave organizations and thrive somewhere else. Interviewing managers overestimate their ability to change people. The fact is that we can’t change anyone who doesn’t want to. It’s a fact. Frankly, it’s also a choice that belongs to them. We can invite, but trying to change people is manipulation, and that’s a violation of their boundaries. The organizations who find ways to get the right people in the right seat on the bus—to use Jim Collins’ phrase—are the ones who are going to continue to win in this ever-changing environment.