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The 6 Types of Working Genius

by Mike Oplinger

Key Take Aways

  • Identifying Individual Strengths: Understanding the six types of working genius—Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity—helps individuals recognize their innate talents and areas of frustration.
  • Enhancing Team Collaboration: By aligning team members with roles that match their working geniuses, organizations can improve collaboration and efficiency, ensuring each phase of a project is handled by those best suited for it.
  • Personal Development Insight: Recognizing one’s own working genius can lead to better self-awareness and personal growth, as individuals learn where they excel and where they may need support from others.

I listen to a lot of audiobooks while I work, one book I listened to about a year and a half ago was The 6 Types of Working Genius by Patrick Lencioni.  This book was an eye-opener for me, As I spoke about in my post (Embrace difference to enhance your business) I have ADHD and while I can always come up with new and I think creative ideas, I have difficulty with the follow through.  This book shows how organizations can harness each individual’s skill to push a project through to completion.  So what are The 6 Types of Working Genius?  Let’s take a look below and find out.

In the book Mr. Lencioni describes how each person has all of these traits inside them but frustrations cause them to shy away from or just flat-out fail at different aspects.  I’ll use myself as an example, I have a business Idea of how to revolutionize the LTL freight business based on a previous post (The Customs Standardization Group).  In the little more than a year since I posted that I have thought about how to make it a business and dropped some of the more “out there” ideas, I can see the vision but trying to put together a business plan is proving to be my downfall.  I’ve read over public business plans, I bought a physical copy of Business Plans For Dummies, and when I had difficulty following that I bought the audiobook, and yet it’s still just not sinking in.

So what this says is I’m in the Wonder & Invention camp, I can see the idea but I have difficulty with the follow though.  I need those who are in the camp of Discernment & Galvanizing and the camp of Enablement & Tenacity to work with me to help fill in the gaps where I fall short.  Sadly I’m not part of an organization that is working to what I envision so I have to keep my head down and keep working on the business plan myself.

Using the 6 types of working genius in your organization

So after you’ve read the book (or listened to it) how can you implement these ideas into your organization to move it forward with new ideas?  First, you need to introduce your team to these concepts, some people will not be interested, and that is fine, you want to identify those people early on and move them back to their regular duties.  Those who are interested and can identify themselves with one or more likely two groups are the ones you want to focus on.

Once you have your team split into their three groups Wonder & Invention, Discernment & Galvanizing, and Enablement & Tenacity you need to show them how they can work together.  Here’s an example, you have a system that every time an order is processed the ETA needs to be updated by 4 hours, members of the Wonder & Invention camp come up with an idea to automatically update that time that would need your I.T. department to update some code.

So the Wonder & Invention team brainstorms some idea and writes up a proposal, then they present it to the other two teams who start their part, the Discernment & Galvanizing team digs into the idea and does the technical research and internal planning, then its time for the Enablement & Tenacity team to take all the data and take the lead in the writing of the full proposal that will be given to management and the I.T. department then work with them on the follow though until the idea is completed.

Now this isn’t to say that once each team has completed their part they walk away from the project, far from it. What I have described above is who takes the lead in each step of the process, the key is to have all parties involved and contributing throughout the process, start to finish. What you are doing is leveraging each team’s strengths to move the project forward as a whole. That may be a little confusing so let me use an analogy, think of this team as a football team, you have the quarterback, the receivers, and the linemen, each group does a different task but they all work together to move the ball down the field. These three “genius” teams are like that football team, harnessing their strengths to work as a team to reach a goal.

Conclusion

I could go on and on about this book, but I think you get the basic idea.  I would recommend everyone read it and really try to understand its concepts.  While I did lay out some of the basic idea I only scratched the surface, I would highly recommend that if this got you even a little bit curious you buy this book and read it cover to cover, or if you’re like me listen to it closely.

I will post some links below, including a like the Amazon page where you can buy it.  I am not an Amazon affiliate so this is not in any way a paid endorsement, I just really found this book to be helpful and wanted to share.

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