The 6 Types of Working Genius®

Help Your Team See Where the Work Stalls

The 6 Types of Working Genius® is an assessment-based team session that shows you which work gives each person energy, which work drains them, and where your team loses momentum between the first idea and the finished thing.

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The Problem

Most Stalled Work Starts With a Stage No One Owns

When a project loses momentum, teams look for someone to hold responsible. The more useful question is where in the work it stopped moving. Every effort passes through the same stages, and a team that runs thin at one of them will lose the same projects in the same way.

01

Ideation

Nobody Questions the Premise

The team moves straight to solving. Months later it becomes clear you solved the wrong problem carefully and well.

02

Activation

Ideas Arrive and Nothing Gets Chosen

Options keep accumulating. The meeting ends with everyone informed, energized, and holding the same open question they walked in with.

03

Implementation

Decisions Do Not Cross the Line

The call gets made and the work does not finish. The same item returns to the agenda for the fourth time, slightly reworded.

A team that cannot name the stage will name a person instead.

How the same behavior gets misread

  • Someone asks whether there is a better way, and the room hears second-guessing.
  • Someone keeps generating options, and the room hears a refusal to commit.
  • Someone pushes hard to decide, and the room hears impatience.
  • Someone chases the last ten percent, and the room hears rigidity.
  • Someone clears obstacles for everyone else, and the room hears nothing at all.

Each of those is a person working from the stage that gives them energy. Without language for that, a difference in wiring reads as a difference in commitment, and the correction lands on the wrong thing.

Judgment moves into the space where a shared language should be.

What It Is

What Is The 6 Types of Working Genius®?

The Working Genius is Patrick Lencioni’s teamwork model, which helps people understand how they can contribute to work most effectively.

It names the six activities present in any piece of work, from the first question asked to the last detail finished. Each person carries two types that give them energy, two that drain them, and two they can perform competently without much joy.

The assessment itself takes about ten minutes. What makes it worth your time is the session that follows, where every person appears on one map and the team reads its own shape together.

That is the part a report cannot do for you. A profile tells one person something about themselves. A facilitated session tells a team why its work behaves the way it does.

80%

productivity tool, twenty percent personality assessment

Working Genius is applied to the work itself rather than to how people relate. That makes it a different instrument from a behavioral assessment, and a useful layer on top of one.

The 6 Types of Working Genius model: Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity shown as connected gears moving from ideation through activation to implementation.
Work moves left to right, from the first question through to the finished thing. Each person is built to give two of these freely.

The 6 Types of Working Genius® model and diagram are the intellectual property of Patrick Lencioni and The Table Group, Inc. Nayli Russo is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator.

The Model

Six Types, Across Three Stages of Work

Every effort moves through the same sequence. It begins as a question, becomes an idea, gets judged and championed, and then has to be started and finished. Each stage asks for something different, and each person is built to give two of those things freely.

01

Ideation

Where the work is still a question, and the ground is being tested for what could be better.

W

Wonder

Sitting with the question of whether there is more potential here than anyone is currently using.

Craves Consideration
Crushed by Being dismissed
I

Invention

Generating something from a blank page rather than improving a draft somebody else started.

Craves Freedom
Crushed by Constraint
02

Activation

Where an idea gets weighed for whether it is any good, and then gets people behind it.

D

Discernment

Reading an idea by instinct and pattern, and knowing what will hold before the data arrives.

Craves Trust
Crushed by “Prove it.”
G

Galvanizing

Rallying people around something and creating the movement that turns a decision into action.

Craves Reaction
Crushed by Apathy
03

Implementation

Where the work leaves the room and has to get done, to standard, on time.

E

Enablement

Responding to what the effort needs and giving support in the form it is actually asked for.

Craves Appreciation
Crushed by Being overlooked
T

Tenacity

Pushing work across the line and holding it to standard after the energy has left the room.

Craves Clarity
Crushed by Ambiguity

Your two geniuses are the work you would do without being asked. Your two frustrations cost you something every time, no matter how capable you are at them. The two in between are the work you can do well and should not live in.

Which is why the craves and crushed-by column matters more than it looks. A person is not difficult in meetings. A person is being handed the thing that crushes them, over and over, by a team that has no idea it is happening.

The 6 Types of Working Genius®, including the six types and their craves and crushed-by pairings, is the intellectual property of Patrick Lencioni and The Table Group, Inc.

Start Here

Give Your Team a Map of How Its Work Moves

If the same projects keep losing momentum at the same stage, and the conversation keeps landing on people rather than on the work, a Working Genius session will give your team the language to see it differently.

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Nayli Russo is a Certified Facilitator for The 6 Types of Working Genius®, delivered as a facilitated team engagement. Sessions are built for intact teams, leadership groups, and retreats.