Patrick Lencioni: The Genius Way to Crush Team Burnout and Unlock Peak Productivity | Leadership | YAPClassic

Summary

YAPClassic: Patrick Lencioni — The Genius Way to Crush Team Burnout and Unlock Peak Productivity
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha | April 17, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this insightful episode, Hala Taha sits down with bestselling author and organizational health expert Patrick Lencioni to explore his seminal “Six Types of Working Genius” framework. Lencioni unpacks how truly understanding—and deploying—people’s innate talents can transform organizations, supercharge productivity, and prevent burnout. Throughout the conversation, Hala and Patrick examine how this model applies to entrepreneurs, teams (remote and in-person), and the future of work, sharing actionable tips for diagnosing “genius gaps,” improving team dynamics, and finding genuine fulfillment at work.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to the Six Types of Working Genius (03:13, 05:09–09:23)

• Patrick developed the Working Genius model by trying to explain his own mix of joy and frustration at work, and quickly realized its universal value across teams and industries.
• The assessment has been taken by over a million people and is rapidly changing how people understand and organize work.

Quote:
"The things you're best at are the things that actually give you joy and energy... but if you have a job where you're called to do too many things you don't like—and you're not exercising your geniuses—that's misery." —Patrick Lencioni (00:51)

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2. Why Leaning Into Your Talents Matters (05:28–06:46)

• Lencioni distinguishes the Working Genius assessment from other tools by focusing on the actual tasks you enjoy, not just your personality.
• Sustained energy at work comes when your role aligns with your innate “geniuses.”

Quote: "If you have a job where you're called to do too many things you don't like... that's misery, and I don't believe God put us here to be miserable in our work." —Patrick Lencioni (05:28)

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3. Impact of Remote Work and Team Flexibility (07:01–08:53)

• Patrick values flexibility, yet believes people are fundamentally wired for in-person interaction. Full remote deprives teams of creative and relationship-oriented energy.
• However, with intentional effort, remote teams can become highly functional: “There are healthier teams that work remotely than teams together that are dysfunctional.” —Patrick Lencioni (08:17)

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4. The Mechanics: Six Types of Working Genius (12:18–18:40)

Each person possesses:

• 2 Geniuses (joy and energy)
• 2 Competencies (can do, don’t mind)
• 2 Frustrations (drain energy)

The Six Geniuses (spelling “WIDGET”):

1. Wonder — Ponders possibilities and asks big questions (“Why are things like this?”).
2. Invention — Loves novel solutions, ideates freely (“I’ll figure it out!”).
3. Discernment — Instinctively knows what will/won’t work, judges ideas quickly.
4. Galvanizing — Inspires and rallies others to action.
5. Enablement — Provides support and help, loves to assist.
6. Tenacity — Pushes projects over the finish line and loves completion.

Quote:
“Your working genius will hold that energy all day... and then there’s these two that are called your working frustrations, which is like pouring coffee into a cup that has a hole in the bottom.” —Patrick Lencioni (09:23)

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5. How Geniuses Change (Or Don’t) Over Time (11:04–12:18)

• Patrick argues you are born with your geniuses, but can become skilled at things you dislike out of necessity.
• Don’t confuse success or proficiency with genuine energizing strength.

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6. Application to Entrepreneurship (22:46–25:29)

• Hala’s combination: Invention + Galvanizing — ideal for serial entrepreneurs who create and mobilize.
• Entrepreneurship needs all six types, but founding teams often fail if they lack balance: “If they’re all your type, it’s going to fail!” —Patrick Lencioni (23:39)

Quote:
"Entrepreneurship requires every genius... but your thing is about the tip of the spear—it’s like I have an idea and I’m going to get out there and share it." —Patrick Lencioni (24:01)

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7. Managing Competencies and Frustrations (25:29–32:46)

• Don’t try to force competencies into your new geniuses—lean into what fills you up for maximal impact.
• Recognize the value of your team’s diversity: hire and structure around different geniuses to cover blind spots.

Quote: "One man or woman’s trash is another man or woman’s treasure... the very things I love, other people are like, ‘please don’t make me ever do that.’" —Patrick Lencioni (14:01)

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8. How to Use Your Assessment Results (32:46–37:00)

• Share your type with colleagues and managers to reduce misunderstandings and improve fit within teams.
• Teams should “swap tasks” based on their respective geniuses and frustrations for maximum satisfaction and productivity.
• A practical tool for reorganizing roles, increasing engagement, and even rescuing underperforming employees.

Quote: “Too many people get fired from organizations where they’re good cultural fits, they’re just in the wrong chair.” —Patrick Lencioni (36:35)

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9. Handling “Chewing Glass”—Doing What You Hate (38:10–40:26)

• Be aware of which tasks are draining. Don’t feel guilty about dislike—use strategies (Pomodoro technique, gamification) to power through.
• Build a culture where people can openly express challenges with their frustrations.

Quote: “So much of working genius is about alleviating guilt... you can do stuff that you don’t like, but if people are like, ‘what’s wrong with you?’ you’re supposed to love every part of your job.” —Patrick Lencioni (38:10)

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10. Personality Traits vs. Working Genius (40:26–42:12)

• Working Genius describes the “verbs” (what you do and love) versus personality traits (nouns—how you interact).
• Two people with similar personalities can thrive in vastly different work based on their genius types.

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11. Practical Team and Meeting Applications (45:52–47:22, 75:03–86:14)

• Identify what kind of meeting or project phase you’re in (ideation, activation, implementation) and use the new “genius” language, e.g., “We’re ideating, not galvanizing right now.”
• Four core types of meetings:
  • Daily check-ins (quick alignment)
  • Weekly Tactical (operations, hour+)
  • Strategic/Topical (deep-dives, separate from tactical)
  • Quarterly Planning (bigger-picture, reflection)
• Don’t confuse meeting efficiency with effectiveness; deep work and healthy conflict take time ("Effectiveness over efficiency.").

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Most things I do are by accident…just being out in the field.” —Patrick Lencioni (05:09)
• “Entrepreneurs are more prone to burnout... we do need to manage our energy levels, which is what this assessment is all about.” —Hala Taha (31:42)
• “When five people that work together each understand one another’s geniuses and frustrations... productivity and success goes through the roof.” —Patrick Lencioni (31:56)
• “It doesn't feel like people get condemned. It's people feeling understood.” —Patrick Lencioni (62:36)
• “The best salesperson isn’t necessarily the best sales manager.” —Patrick Lencioni (48:48)
• “If you don’t know where you’re going, all roads lead there—or no road is right... People need to be a little clearer about what they want to do and who they want to be.” —Patrick Lencioni (86:53)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:51 | What drains or energizes us at work
• 03:13 | The story behind “Working Genius”
• 05:28 | The importance of working in your zone of genius
• 07:01 | The effects of remote work on genius fulfillment
• 09:23 | Explaining the assessment’s categories: genius, competency, frustration
• 12:28 | The six types defined (Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, Tenacity)
• 22:46 | Hala’s results and entrepreneurial profiles
• 32:46 | How to use and share your assessment results
• 38:10 | Strategies for handling draining/frustrating tasks
• 45:52 | Using “genius language” in meetings and projects
• 75:03 | Managing A-level talent, supporting diverse geniuses
• 80:13 | Best practices for running effective (vs. efficient) meetings
• 86:53 | Patrick’s advice for self-development and clarity

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Takeaways & Action Steps

• Take the Working Genius assessment (see youngandprofiting.co/work) and invite your team to do the same.
• Use results to openly discuss and reassign tasks in alignment with everyone’s energy and genius types.
• Structure hiring, onboarding, and meeting agendas with an awareness of team “genius gaps.”
• Recognize not all roles (e.g., “executive assistant”) require the same genius types—tailor your job descriptions accordingly.
• Integrate “genius” language into team culture to increase candor, reduce judgment, and enhance satisfaction and retention.
• Don’t expect to always love every work task—but be mindful of total time spent outside your genius zone to prevent burnout.
• In meetings, know and declare what phase (ideation, activation, implementation) you’re in and set boundaries accordingly.

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Resources & Further Learning

• TableGroup.com — Patrick’s company and resources
• WorkingGenius.com — Working Genius assessment
• Three Minute Reset Podcast — Patrick’s short daily devotional

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This episode provides a powerful blueprint for leaders and team members to bring more joy, effectiveness, and balance into their work—by finally aligning what they do with what truly energizes them.

Transcript

[Hala Taha]

today's episode is sponsored in part by

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[Patrick Lencioni]

you're best at are the things that actually give you joy and energy that fill you up but if you have a job where you're called to do too many things you don't like and you're not exercising your geniuses that's misery

[Hala Taha]

let's go over the six working geniuses

[Patrick Lencioni]

what are they so the first genius it's really important it's called the genius the second one is after that comes this is a really interesting one too many people get fired from organizations where they're good cultural fits they're just in

[Hala Taha]

the wrong chair are there still certain working geniuses that make for better entrepreneurs

[Sponsor Announcer]

than others yes yeah fam i have to say one of the most important things in life is to feel happy at work we spend so much of our lives working and if your job is constantly draining you well that's a real problem as promised we're replaying patrick lencioni's first episode today and it's just as good the second time patrick is one of the most respected voices in organizational health and and is a bestselling author who's helped millions of leaders build stronger teams in this episode we break down the six types of working genius how they show up in your career and why you might be burning out doing work that was never meant for you trust me you're going to learn a lot from this one here's my conversation with patrick lencioni

[Hala Taha]

patrick welcome to young and profiting podcast it's great to

[Patrick Lencioni]

be here this will be fun i

[Hala Taha]

am so excited so you are a legend in the management space you've been writing speaking and consulting on organizational health and team of effectiveness for twenty five years now with the table group and you're a founder you're an entrepreneur and

[Sponsor Announcer]

even though you love your job you

[Hala Taha]

love your industry you've still been frustrated at times at work and i can relate here because i'm the ceo and founder of a company that i love called yap media i'm i'm living my dream as a podcaster selling sponsorships and running people's social media but even me it's like a roller coaster even in the same day i might be finding joy and then at the same time i'm frustrated right even in the same day i know that i love my job but it's still frustrating so let's talk about you take us back to this time where you were frustrating as the ceo and founder of your organization what were you feeling and what were some of the insights that you gleaned from this experience well hala it only

[Patrick Lencioni]

lasted for about twenty years and i didn't understand it because i love like i love the people i worked with i loved what i did and i'd come to work excited i didn't have the sunday blues i was like i liked my work but then i would get there and then i'd be really happy in one moment and then frustrated another and this went on for a long time and i never got it and finally one day one of my colleagues said what's going on with you when that happens and i said i don't know but i want to figure it out and so i sat there for the next four hours god willing i mean it was amazing i don't even quite remember what happened but i was writing at a whiteboard that's what i do i like to come up with things and i realized that there were six different kinds of work that needed to get done in our company and i really loved two of them and every day i came to work excited to do those and then i'd get dragged into doing something else that i didn't really like and people thought well you have to do that because you're the leader and the ceo but as it turned out i didn't but i was constantly getting sucked into that and that's when i came up with this model but i wasn't trying to come up with the model i was just trying to explain my own frustration and then we had one of our consultants saw it and then he met with a ceo the next day and the ceo was complaining about something and was frustrated and he explained the model to him and the guy had tears in his eyes and he was like oh wow this is my thing and we realized there's something universally applicable here and we built an assessment in the next three months and released it and without a lot of fanfare or advertising it took off and there was something universal about that so now we've had like a million people take this assessment it's growing faster than anything i've ever done and we are hearing from people how it's changing their lives and allowing them to do what they're meant to do what god made them to do rather than the things that they thought they were supposed to be doing that weren't good for them so that's the story it was by accident most of the things i do are by accident just being out in the field and

[Hala Taha]

so that's what happened yeah and so patrick's referring to the working genius assessment right so it's called working genius so talk to us about everybody's god given talents and why you believe that people are more fulfilled and successful when they're leaning into their god given talents well

[Patrick Lencioni]

and you know it's interesting because i take all the assessments over the years i've taken myers briggs and disc i like them all you know we use them in our practice and consulting the ceo's and their teams but there was never any that was really about what you did like they were kind of more personality or perspective and this is about like the actual tasks you like to do and what it comes down to is joy and energy what fills you with joy and energy sometimes we can get good at things we don't actually like and i kind of did that in my life because when you need to achieve whether you do that because of wounds or because you really want to you get good at things you don't like but the things you're best at are the things that actually give you joy and energy that fill you up the things that you can spend twelve hours doing in a day and go home and feel like what a great day i feel energized and then the other things that i don't like i can do for three hours in a day and get really tired and really frustrated so that's kind of what this is about it's about how to identify the things that we were put here to enjoy we still have to do things that we don't love sometimes but if you have a job where you're called to do too many things you don't like and you're not exercising your geniuses that's misery and i don't believe god put us here to to be miserable in our work how

[Hala Taha]

do you feel like the pandemic made all of this like more exacerbated like how did it kind of make it worse in terms of us with our working geniuses and talents and having to work together as team well i'm a

[Patrick Lencioni]

believer in so i love flexibility at work i do love flexibility work but i think people are meant to be together and yes there are some jobs that you can do remotely sometimes and i love that people can stay home with their kids sometimes or work from the road and all those things but the fact that we went all in on remote work i think really deprived people of the range of of interactions that they needed to build relationships and to derive the sense of fulfillment that they need from work and there are certain places that are still operating as though that exists and morale and productivity have not recovered in those places i think we are meant to spend a good portion of our working time together now that doesn't mean that there are some jobs that have to be remote that's great i have learned how to have productive zoom calls and do things remotely but there is still no complete substitute for doing what you love and doing it in a room with other people that you care about yeah i

[Hala Taha]

agree i have a fully remote team and i think it's hard for some folks and especially in this day and age like we've got to learn how to work together online and a lot of things that you that i took away from this assessment i feel like i can implement even though i have a remote team so like i'm super

[Patrick Lencioni]

excited about that absolutely and you know there are healthier teams that work remotely than teams that are together that are dysfunctional so really becoming a functional team which is what my career has been about is helping teams get more functional that is more important than whether you're remote or not and we learned how to do some really amazing things on zoom like engage in healthy conflict like really have deep creative conversations it's harder to do remotely but it can be done but all things being equal i think that spending time with each other it is an advantage it is if

[Hala Taha]

you can make it work it is okay so like all good entrepreneurs you had a problem yourself you went about to solve that problem and then you decided you were gonna scale it out and give your learnings to other people so you put out this book called the six types of working genius and you have this working genius assessment i took the assessment so i can't wait to go over my results but first i want to understand these six working geniuses i want to understand more about them can you define what a working genius is exactly right and there's six

[Patrick Lencioni]

of them so there's six possibilities but only two are what we call our own working genius like the ones where we get joy and energy i like to say like if you're pouring coffee in a cup and it wear a yeti mug and you screw the lid on tight your working genius will hold that energy all day you're working there's two others that are in the middle which we would call your working competencies yep and i know yours because i looked at your thing and those are things that we we don't hate doing them we can do them fairly well and they're like pouring coffee into a cup and putting a little plastic lid on it it'll stay warm for a while and so we could do that but then there's these two that are called our working frustrations which is like pouring coffee into a cup that has a hole in the bottom and our our energy and our joy are just drained by those and so everybody there's these six categories which i'll explain in a second and everyone has two that they love two that are okay and two that they really struggle with and if we don't know what those are then the best chance we have at enjoying our work and fulfilling our potential is kind of a crapshoot it's like and the first job i took out of college was the best job in america at the time and it was totally wrong for me and i did not understand why i struggled why i wasn't happy and why those two years went by like ten years and it was because i look back now and i realize i was doing exactly the things i wasn't meant to do it's

[Hala Taha]

so interesting when i was looking at my assessment i felt and we can we'll go into this later i actually felt like some of my competencies and frustrations i used to be better at when i wasn't necessarily an entrepreneur with all of these responsibilities so i actually felt like they changed over time now

[Patrick Lencioni]

here's what we found we think you're born with these okay but i felt the same way you did because i used to be really good at things that i would have preferred not to do but in order to be successful i had to make myself yeah so it wasn't until and when we talk about these things like we had a guy once come on and one of the geniuses is called tenacity which is the finishing of things okay and that's neither your nor my genius we like to start things but the last stage of things and finishing things and grinding toward the end isn't our favorite thing and this guy said hey i'm a doctor i went to med school if i got through med school this must be one of my geniuses because i did really well and we asked him one question did you like it did you enjoy that he goes no i hated it i couldn't wait for it to be over we said yeah there's a difference between succeeding at something even if it drains you of your joy and energy and right away he goes oh yeah it's definitely not my genius so sometimes people have to say yeah i did that i did it because i had a goal in mind i wanted to accomplish something but it didn't really feed me yeah and i think the things that feed us we're born with i remember as a kid my geniuses i didn't get to exercise them and it frustrated me and i didn't even realize it until i became an adult and came up with this yeah

[Hala Taha]

yeah i love it i feel like my assessment described me to a t so before i feel like we're teasing everybody let's go over the six working geniuses what are they okay so the

[Patrick Lencioni]

first one we're going to start with our head up in the clouds we're going to go from the highest altitude down to the most practical on the ground so we're going to go down and it's kind of how work the flow of work happens so the first genius you and i don't have this genius but it's really important it's called the genius of wonder and it happens at like sixty thousand feet head in the clouds and this is a genius that most people don't even think of as a genius in fact they were probably told not to do it most of their life and it's called the genius of wonderful and people with the genius of wonder ponder things they can sit and think about things and ask questions without an answer they're like is there a better solution out there are our customers happy why are things like this what's the point of all this and it's where every new idea ultimately starts is somebody asks the question why is it like this just like this model came about because one of my colleagues who had wonder said why are you like that pat i'm curious as to why you get frustrated and then why you're happy and somebody asks the question my wife is a wanderer and she is constantly asking the big questions and when you're young and you do this your teachers tell you to stop and they're like why aren't you on board and why are you still asking questions this is a critical genius and most people that have it have never really been understood or rewarded for it this is probably the most mysterious of them all that's the first one the second one is the person who comes along and this is you and i share this genius and that's the genius of invention and when somebody asks the question like why are things like this we go i don't know but i'm going to figure it out and we get a whiteboard and a pen and no restriction and we love to come up with new ideas and solutions out of nothing and what i thought is everybody liked that and there are people that hate that when i ask them to do that at work in my office they're like i hate that i have none that's their frustration and that's one of the things we realize is that one man or woman's trash is another man or woman's treasure the very things i love other people are like please don't make me ever do that you know so wonder starts it the question invention comes up with that new idea and those two are what's called ideation the first two after that comes what we call discernment this is a really interesting one discernment is people that have the genius of instinct and intuition and gut feel and they look at something even something they don't know about and they have this way of thinking that they can kind of identify the right thing it's like those people that you ask for advice about everything we have one in my office her name is tracy she has great discernment and every it's people are constantly saying well ask tracy should you refinance your house ask tracy should we go to europe on vacation this year we'll ask tracy what she thinks my wife will say i'll say does this look good for this thing i'm doing she goes ask tracy and tracy said when she was a little girl all of her friends did that too she just has this amazing gut feel about things that everybody trusts and it's pattern recognition it's not linear thinking it's kind of being able to look at something and go yeah that's the right answer she's the editor of my books she never studied that when i write a chapter in a book and i send it to her if she says this is a great i know it's true and if she goes this doesn't make any sense to me i'm like i'm going to rewrite it even if i disagree so discernment is the third one the next one after that is your other genius it's called galvanizing galvanizing is people that get joy and energy out of getting up in front of people and inspiring them and encouraging them and exhorting them and rallying the troops and some people love to do that as it turns out i don't i can come on a podcast and talk about it once but i'm not good at kind of keep pushing and keep people going and that's what led to this model because every day i'd come to work and my staff would go galvanize us they didn't use those words they were like galvanize us and i was like oh gosh i'm so tired of this and yet there's people like you and there was a guy in my office who go oh i'll do that every day and so i made him my chief galvanizing officer i said you're gonna do that and he's like well do i really have the the authority to do that is no no no it's a gift it's a gift that you're good at his job satisfaction went way up so did mine and the productivity of our office changed overnight wow so so that galvanizing is really important the next two are what we call implementation and the next one is called enablement i don't have this one and neither do you according to your report it's it's a it's a working frustration for us and that that means this it's really important to understand this enablement there are people who wake up in the morning and say i just want people to ask me for help now you and i love to give people advice and get them excited but we don't necessarily want to help people on the terms that they need if my wife says i need your help the first thing i do is like whoa wait wait what kind of help and if it's the kind of help that i love to do then i'm like yes but she says i just want you to do what i ask you to do i actually kind of wilt and i feel really guilty like i'm supposed to be a good person but there are people in the world and they are glue on teams and you'll know people in your organization that are like this who just love they get joy and energy of just being asked to help and they say yes they're the first to volunteer whatever you need i'll do it yep i'm on board let's get started and we love them we need them but we don't all have that and so enablement is the fifth genius and the last one is tenacity and that is it's one thing to want to help it's another thing to want to finish people with tenacity love to make their numbers and drive closure and and hit the goal and in fact they're not actually happy unless they're completing things and i'm actually only happy if i'm starting things and then i move on to the next thing before it's finished so so that's the sixth one so it spells widget which was a kind of an accident and it goes from wonder to invention to discernment to galvanizing to enablement to tenacity and those are the six types of working genius so

[Hala Taha]

cool and i really do feel like it really describes people accurately like every time you're saying that i'm like oh that fits kate that fits jason right and like you start to think oh she's got these two

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[Patrick Lencioni]

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[Hala Taha]

profiting so let's go on to my results yeah selfishly so i was invention and galvanizing which totally makes sense because my whole life i've been inventing things starting businesses since i was four i'm president of everything like my whole life started so many charity organizations and like different companies blog sites you name it like i'm just always have a team of fifty around me no matter what i'm doing even if i'm not paying people it's crazy i'm just really good at motivating people and thinking of new ideas my whole life it's your genius it's it's me and i feel like it's very entrepreneurial yes so i did want to ask you are there certain working geniuses that are more entrepreneurial or make for better entrepreneurs than others there

[Patrick Lencioni]

are well because the interesting about entrepreneurship requires every genius but the people that start things the ones that that that get it going right away that serial entrepreneur that really sparks the idea your type is perfect for that because now without people with tenacity around you you might and that's what a genius of yours is surrounding yourself by people with people that do things well that you don't right so entrepreneurship you need people who finish things you need people that come alongside and help you need people that ask the questions you need people that but your thing is like at the heart of entrepreneurship it's like i have an idea and i'm going to get out there and i'm going to share it with people and i'm going to ask people for their help so i would say your type is about the tip of the spear on entrepreneurship in many ways but you need to surround yourself by people that do the things that aren't your favorite so like so when you think about a startup company for instance let's say five people get together to start a company if they're all your type it's going to fail yeah right because they're all going to want to do the same kind of things and then and i've seen this in the silicon valley before because i've done a lot of work there in my i live in the bay area and there's these companies that get together and everybody wants to be an entrepreneur and nobody wants to be the one to like no i want to just crank i want to take inspiration from you and then deliver on that and if you don't have that diversity on your team it's not gonna work totally it's like a band if everybody wants to be the songwriter and the lead singer it doesn't work and the drummer has a different thing and the keyboards do a different thing and usually that corresponds to some working genius so it's a really interesting thing how we all need them but the tip of the spear in entrepreneurship and ig is

[Hala Taha]

perfect yeah well i love that i love hearing that i'm a good fit to be an entrepreneur because it's what i'm doing so i have working competencies right so these are different than frustrations different than my working genius and these are things that i actually feel like i'm really good at to be honest so my working competencies were tenacity and discernment which especially tenacity like i get my stuff done and i love getting stuff done so i was curious to understand like why is it only two working geniuses and what are we supposed to do with our competencies are we supposed to try to make them strengths are we supposed to just leave them alone like how should we handle it

[Patrick Lencioni]

yeah and i love this question definitely don't try to don't try to make them stronger than they are because people do that too often when michael jordan got out of college and he spent his first two years in the pros he was really good at defense and dunking the ball and going to the hoop and people said well should we then make him become a great shooter and people said no no no make him continue to work on his strengths he will become a great shooter because he won't feel like that defines him and he'll do that without pressing so you're going to be good at those things and the fact that those are your competencies is really important because you are not allergic to finishing things and you're not allergic to evaluating things in discernment but the thing is if i made you do finish things and you had no input into the innovation around it and getting people excited and your job was just to crank you'd realize that that would exhaust you after that

[Hala Taha]

got it that makes a lot of

[Patrick Lencioni]

sense so it's something that you don't mind doing especially if it's in service of the idea you came up with and helping people rally around it but to to do that in a vacuum would be painful for you that makes

[Hala Taha]

a lot a lot of sense okay so my working frustrations were enablement and wonder the enablement part was so eye opening for me because as of now i have a sixty person team okay and i'm still like hands on managing my sales and marketing team but i'm also this ceo and founder of the company so i'm like the ceo cmo sales leader of my company i love it now i find that as of now today in twenty twenty four i'm a different type of leader where like i just can't handhold anyone anymore and anybody who's not a rock star who's not moving as fast as me i'm just like all right you're slowing me down let's i'm pulling you in now because you're getting it and this person's off to the side and it's like i'm but i wasn't always like that i started with a team of interns and volunteers my whole company started with twenty volunteers that worked for free from me and i used to handhold everyone and teach everybody everything and be very very patient and now it's just a different i just have different responsibility i just can't be that person anymore so it made me realize that i need to get some sort of middle manager between some of these employees and and like made me realize how valuable like my business partner kate is who is super patient and i know if she took this assessment she would have enablement

[Patrick Lencioni]

exactly yeah yeah and i know the people in my and that's the thing about this this this assessment is that ten minutes after getting the results back you go i got it it makes sense and you know what to do we've seen companies like reorganize and i don't just mean like the titles but like reorganize how work gets done they look at this and they go oh my gosh we're not even tapping into that genius of yours and the people are like i know if you let me do that more i'd be so much happier and you're looking at your people going they have enablement that is allowing me to do what i do best and i know that i have somebody else who's going to be helpful and listening and patient with everybody and all that but if everybody had that you wouldn't get things done either yeah and so it really is the word diversity in this is so critical now the other genius that you that's a frustration for you is wonder which is like if people just sit around and ask questions and ponder things and don't have a bias for getting something done that's probably frustrating to you yeah i

[Hala Taha]

think it's actually like an i don't want to say i was thinking through this and i was like man i hope i'm just not this like egotistical founder because i'm like i think i have all these with wonder i'm just like i know what to do i don't need to wonder about it i know how to push my business forward i don't need to wonder about everything

[Patrick Lencioni]

yeah or five minutes of wonder that's enough here we go exactly exactly well i will tell you something to go a little level deeper which is a new book i'm working on something right now and that is sometimes because of the way we're raised we have this desire to achieve i had this growing up and i was actually really good at the things i hated the first job i got out of college was a job organized around the very things i liked least but because i had this achievement mentality it was like then i am going to do it and i've come to realize now that i have wounds that i didn't even know were wounds i thought they were my superpowers and you know and you're young and you're like i can power through anything and that doesn't mean we're meant to and so as you understand your geniuses more it'll be nice for you to be able to go i don't have to be good at that yeah but for the longest time when i was young i was doing all the things i didn't necessarily like and i said see i'm pretty good at this

[Hala Taha]

yeah and sometimes we have to to

[Patrick Lencioni]

get the experiences absolutely absolutely and when and then you're gonna be a parent and you gotta you gotta do everything you know i can't go well my kids diapers need to be changed i'm not a t i don't finish things so i guess i'm not gonna do that it's like no no there's certain things in life where we and in fact even in any job every ceo every leader has to do all of them a little bit but if they over index on the ones that drain them of energy and they don't give themselves the experience of spending a lot of time in their genius it's really bad yeah it's really bad and burnout and really i think a lot of addiction comes from that a lot of really difficult things because we are meant to exercise the gifts we've been given

[Hala Taha]

yeah and entrepreneurs are more prone to burnout it's like twenty five percent of entrepreneurs or more have burnout more prone to depression addiction to your point anxiety stress so we do need to manage our energy levels which is what this

[Patrick Lencioni]

assessment is all about yes and we need to not feel guilty about not loving every part of what we're supposed to do one of the things on our assessment a team of five people like if you're having a little entrepreneurial organization all five of them can take it and they can look at it and they're gonna go oh my gosh you mean you like that oh you do like that would you do that instead of me and i could take this off your plate and literally this is more of a productivity tool we didn't design it that way we thought it was just a personal a personal understanding insight but we've seen that when five people that work together each understand one another's geniuses and frustrations and competencies they adjust and everybody gets to do more of what they love and the productivity and success goes through the roof and that happens like in an hour they look at this and go holy toledo i know what we need to

[Hala Taha]

do yeah so let's talk about how people can take this assessment so young and profits i highly encourage you guys to check this out it takes ten to fifteen minutes you can go to young and profiting co work to take it it's a forty two question survey i literally did it in ten minutes you get your results right away and like i said it's eye opening like as soon as i read the report i was like this sounds exactly like me and i know exactly what i need to do thank you can you talk to us about what people can use with their results like how do people utilize their results typically yeah well

[Patrick Lencioni]

first of all because there's if anybody took math i didn't remember how to do permutations and combinations because there's six geniuses it means there's fifteen pairings okay and every pairing like your pairing is what's called the evangelistic innovator yep like you like to come up with new ideas and evangelize them you have energy for those and everyone has a two word descriptor and these are the things people look at and go oh my gosh that's exactly who i am and what should you do with that the first thing you should do is you should share it with the people you work with and the people you live with because it's going to help them avoid what we call the fundamental attribution error and the fundamental attribution error is when you do something that i find annoying hala i will attribute to your character i will do that but if i do something that causes people to think i'm annoying i'll attribute it to my environment and this is where relationships break down i need to go oh you're wired that way you're constantly excited and exuberant about all these ideas not because there's something wrong with you because that's who you are whereas some people can go gosh that's so annoying well we all do things that are wonderful and annoying and it's because of how we're wired and when we understand that about each other we actually start to under the prayer of saint francis is to seek to understand more than to be understood so we seek to understand one another the other thing you should do is talk to your manager about it or talk to your colleagues about it we had a guy who called us and said he was going in for his performance review and he knew it was gonna be bad he had had a bad year and the night before he took his working genius and he looked at the results and he was like oh wow he walked into the room he handed it to his boss and his boss's boss i think they were both there and said would you guys look at this before we go over this and they looked at it and they were like oh my gosh you're totally in the wrong job and he goes yeah i think so too and they're like you know we have another job that you'd be great at and he said i spent twenty five dollars on this darn assessment showed it to my boss and i got promoted instead of fired oh my god too many people get fired from organizations where they're good cultural fits they're just in the wrong chair and it's so hard for managers to know like what's wrong with this person we had a ceo hala who was going to fire his head of sales this wonderful woman who was a good cultural fit and she had made her numbers and her staff loved her and the customers loved her she was fantastic but then the market changed as they always do and entrepreneurs know this better than anyone and when the market changed he said to her hey you know we need a whole new sales strategy and she was dumbfounded she was stumped and he kept going back to her so did you come up with that and she goes no i got nothing he goes i was about to let her go and we did the working genius and i realized she had no invention at all she was all about implementation she had enablement her staff loved her her customers loved her because she was always responsible she was at tenacity so she made her numbers delivered on what they said but she didn't have invention and so they borrowed a guy from marketing to come work with her and in three hours they came up with a new sales strategy he said i almost fired one of my best people and leaders do this all the time because i couldn't understand that she's not great at everything and that we can borrow skills from other people or work across divisions or change people's roles to fit their geniuses so i think this could be such a good way to avoid losing good people over hiring when we have people in our organizations that aren't being fully tapped and so we're finding that this is growing faster than anything hala that i've ever done and it's having a greater impact on organizations and people in their lives than anything we've ever worked on so it's it's crazy it's

[Hala Taha]

really really cool i love taking it i'm going to have my whole team take the assessment so again guys if you guys want to take the assessment go to young and profiting co slash work i'll put the link in our show notes so you guys can get access to it and so i want to talk about what we should do when we have to chew glass as entrepreneurs so there's this famous quote from seth godin elon musk nobody knows who really came up with this he said running a startup is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss and basically what elon and seth meant is that as an entrepreneur you want to work on all these new shiny things a lot of us are inventors but you end up having to work on the problems of your business you have to chew glass do the things you don't want to do like you said entrepreneurs have to do this and especially people young in their careers which i think there's a lot of young people listening where they're they're having to chew glass they can't pick and choose what they can work on yet because they haven't built that foundation so how can we like manage our energy levels and suck up and do our frustrations at work our working frustrations and we didn't go

[Patrick Lencioni]

over these questions so if anybody thinks we did but this is a fantastic question and i have an answer a very specific one so much of working genius is about alleviating guilt and judgment so in other words so when you have to chew glass what's worse than having to chew glass is feeling like there's something wrong with you for not liking it so when you have to do something and you go oh crap i have to go do a performance review or do enablement or do tenacity for us enablement would be a good one it's like instead of saying like what's wrong with me i guess i'm a fraud or i should like this it's good to go hey this isn't the thing i love but i know i have to do it i'm gonna go in there and do it and i'm not gonna feel bad about myself for not loving it like in our office here my son works with me he doesn't like tenacity and so he'll go into an office and go hey i'm going into the tea cave you guys i got three hours of tenacity work to do i'm gonna roll up my sleeves and do it i'm probably gonna be kind of grumpy and when i come out i'll probably be exhausted and it's his way of saying it's important i'm gonna do it well but i don't like it and when you know that you're allowed to say that it's like yeah i can do stuff that i don't like but if people are like what's wrong with you you're supposed to like doing the accounting you know if you're an entrepreneur doing the books is supposed to be you're supposed to love every part of your job but when you can go no i actually hate this but it's necessary i'm going to go push through it and at the end of it and if you don't do it perfectly you should go yeah i'm probably never going to do it perfectly some people actually love this stuff so i really think it's taking that guilt so when we're chewing the glass we can go man i can't wait till this is done so i can go back and do the

[Hala Taha]

stuff i love yeah i could also imagine that it will help us just become aware that like hey this is probably something i'm gonna procrastinate because i hate doing it and let me put some boundaries on myself let me do like a pomodero technique and time myself to do it let me gamify this let me do something to get it

[Patrick Lencioni]

done exactly and we don't need to do those things with the stuff we love exactly and in fact when we do those things with the stuff we love it's kind of a bummer because we're like oh no don't limit this let me just enjoy my work so it's a great i love the way you said it's like find ways to get through it without making yourself feel like there's something wrong with you for

[Hala Taha]

not loving it so how do personality traits interact with working geniuses like how is it different than personality traits this

[Patrick Lencioni]

is a great question and we're really working on this right now like i said we like myers briggs and working and strengths finder and all those other things you know strengthsfinder is interesting there's so many of them it's hard to remember but your personality is the noun is what you bring so like and like we use myers briggs a lot my myers briggs type doesn't say what i like to do it says what my preferences are about how i think and how i how i just approach the world working genius is what you do it's the verb that goes with the noun and what's interesting is like i know people that have my same myers briggs type my same personality like we were extroverted and we're idealists and we like to keep our options open but they have a completely different working genius they take that personality and then they actually get crap done and they like details around that whereas i am an enfp but i like to invent and discern things and so what we've realized is so often we look at a person's personality type and we think that tells us what kind of job they should have and it doesn't not at all it tells you kind of what generally motivates them in life but not like what that translates to in terms of the role and what you do every day because when we used to use myers briggs we were like so should i be in marketing if i'm an enfp and we're like well first of all what do you mean by being in marketing and secondly what do you love to do yeah and so it's very different and the combination of the two is great but the thing that's really lacking out there is people don't know the tasks that they

[Hala Taha]

love yeah so like we said i'm an evangelistic innovator what are you and what are some of the common pairings out there that people should be aware

[Patrick Lencioni]

of yeah i'm an i'm an id which means i like innovating and discerning which means i'm what's called a discriminating ideator which means discriminating means this like when i write i'm an author i've written a lot of books my first draft is usually pretty good because while i'm innovating while i'm writing i'm actually editing myself too because i'm kind of like that doesn't make sense that doesn't make sense so so i don't i don't like i have so many good friends that are your type right and i love working with them they have a hundred ideas they're constantly come up with them and they'll check in with me and go hey can you discern this for me and then and the discernment part what you have in your in your competency is what says hey those are the three that you should pursue those other seven are okay or these two wouldn't work and it's like so to check in with a discerner and go check me on this does this sound right and they'll go those are the three that you should pursue with abandon so i am pretty good at figuring things out quickly but what i don't do is i don't do what you do which is stick with evangelizing it i need people around me that love to do that and when they'll look at my idea and they'll go that's a great idea i'm gonna go out and tell the world about it i'm like thank you and i'm gonna tell them again and again and again because they really so so i'm what's called the the discriminating ideator which is more about the judgment than the

[Hala Taha]

action if that makes sense interesting and what are some of the other pairings that that you have in this assessment

[Patrick Lencioni]

well like the if you're a wi which my wife is and some close friends of mine are which are the first two which is all ideator they're called the creative dreamer and they're just like you know what would be cool i have this idea and you're like yeah but we gotta go tell the world about this they're like oh i don't know and they change their mind a lot and then they just love to stay up there at sixty thousand feet where you're galvanizing as closer to landing the plane right and then on the other end of the scale there's the e and the t that are the implementers and that's the loyal finisher the et is the loyal finisher they love other people to set the direction other people to get things organized and then they're like i will do what you asked me to do and i won't stop until it's done and let me tell you i love wis and i loved et's but in the same meeting it can be really frustrating because if i'm having a brainstorming meeting the wi is so happy they're like yeah and the et is like i got work to do can we just get through this or you're brainstorming and they're like well that'll never work because the budget doesn't and you're like no no no you don't have to implement it yet or if you go to an implementation meeting and the wi is there and you're like the day before the launch and the people like okay this is what we need to get done and the wi says hey i have an idea maybe we should and you're like no no no this is not the time for new ideas we have to actually do this so one of the things we say is when you're in a meeting identify what kind of conversation you're having this isn't a gt meeting which is we're going to get stuff done or this is a wd meeting where we're going to actually just kind of throw things against the wall and evaluate them so that people can go oh okay i'm not very good at this so i'll sit back and be patient otherwise people come to meetings and the et wants to drive things to closure the wi wants to brainstorm and everybody's kind of pissed off because we didn't really know what kind of discussion we were having and they were just bringing their best selves to the

[Hala Taha]

table yeah that makes sense totally makes sense and i love that i love the fact that this assessment allows you to know more about your coworkers so that you can kind of be proactive and be like okay i've got two people that are going to be opposites in this meeting and i don't want to just spiral out of control so let me just set some boundaries before we even get started and then and

[Patrick Lencioni]

you can also you know what i love about this hola is that you can also have conversations that seemed like dangerous or even offensive before and somebody will go like you're in a meeting and somebody will go you know i wonder if we should rethink this and somebody go that's your w huh and they'll go without that's not a criticism it's like oh this is your w coming out and they're like yeah and they go you know i don't think that we're in a w place right now i think we should do that another time and it's not offensive they're like oh oh okay we're actually meeting them where they're at and saying and there's another meeting where you'll turn to somebody and go hey we need your w are we in the wrong are we doing the right thing so it's so great to be able to have those conversations or sometimes somebody's being too e and they're too much trying to please people and you're like hey you're managing this person they're not meeting their numbers we've had a problem you're really patient but maybe you're being too accommodating and that's probably your enablement yep and so rather than saying there's something wrong with you it's like you're naturally inclined to this we usually love that but maybe it's not appropriate here and people receive that really well they're like hey you're just recognizing me for who i

[Hala Taha]

am yeah i could imagine that that would lead to a lot more employee satisfaction and retention people just being happier

[Patrick Lencioni]

at work absolutely and usually in an organization there's a place for everybody if you know what they are and if you have a small organization and there's only a few people there you're an entrepreneur and somebody's geniuses don't line up with what you need instead of rejecting them and making them feel like a bad person what you say is hey you know you really should use these skills and we don't have a role for you here to do that but you're meant to use them so we're not saying you're not a good person we're just going to help you find a place where you can be who you are as opposed to trying to justify it by saying well you didn't deliver mm like there's something wrong with you i mean i will tell you hala that first job i had for two years which was right out of college and it was the number one job in america somebody wrote a book that year the best places to work in america for college grads and this was listed as number one and i got the job i don't know how and it was all wrong for me well i didn't know that i just thought i failed and thirty five years later i'm figuring all this stuff out and i'm like oh my i didn't fail i just took the wrong job and probably had they known what my working it's funny i don't know if you know who meg whitman is but

[Hala Taha]

she's of course i worked at hewlett packard for five years oh okay well

[Patrick Lencioni]

i worked with meg in my first job at bain and company right and i really appreciated her because she pulled me aside after two years at bain and she said pat you would be a good partner here because that's kind of what i ended up doing she goes but this analyst job that we hired you for this isn't for you and i was like no it's not i hate it but she said you'll be a good partner one day but this kind of work right here and the problem sometimes in companies is we make somebody prove themselves in one kind of work in order to get promoted into another kind of work when they were meant to just do that one like the best salesperson isn't necessarily the best sales manager yeah but meg even back then said to me you're gonna do really well someday but this kind of job right here is not good

[Hala Taha]

for you and honestly as i'm thinking about my employees i can already tell like who's in the right job and who's not yes i already know i'm already like oh i need this so and so and so to take the assessment because i know in my gut that they're not in the right job because they're great people very smart but not doing rock star work and when

[Patrick Lencioni]

they get seen that way and you can say to them hey you're not there's nothing wrong with you we just have you in the wrong role and you're meant to work in the right role that's so liberating

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[Hala Taha]

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[Hala Taha]

something that helped me put this all together was really thinking about the working geniuses as the recipe to actually complete a project right and you have these three stages of work so i'd love for you to explain how all of these sort of work together to actually complete a single project cause we need all of them to do so yes

[Patrick Lencioni]

so early stages in an organization the w and the i are really at play and the d too and the g a little bit but that's the ideation phase and you know we talked to these guys at nike a few years ago and they talked about how they had people that do product ideas you know ideation and so they come up with some idea we can put gel in a shoe or you know whatever they come up with their ideas and that's called ideation and that's early on but then somebody needs to take that idea the middle two are called activation and the discernment and the galvanizing is evaluating whether the idea is good and working with the innovator to tweak it and then when it's ready to go galvanizing people and getting them on board and at nike they were talking about how they went from ideation they skipped the middle stage for a while and then there were people in implementation the e and the t that's the later stage of work where you're actually just getting it done the product's been set the plans are there now we just have to execute and if you go straight from ideation to implementation which is what they were doing the people in ideation are like why don't those people implement our ideas better and the people in implementation are why don't they send us better ideas because nobody has tweaked them and rallied people around what needed to be done so the three stages go from ideation to activation to implementation and that's kind of how now of course you're doing a little bit of each at every step it's never completely linear but when you move out of the ideation phase it's really important that people realize that and they focus their efforts and there's some people that have a harder time with that and so when you can talk to them about that and go hey listen we have three weeks until this launches we really have to stop going back and questioning everything or hey we're at the early phase here and i know you want to implement things and you want a timeline but we're not there yet so come to the meeting but sit on your hands if you have to while we're brainstorming this because we're not ready to start putting the detailed plans

[Hala Taha]

in place is this something that we should actually like think through before our project like who's going to be responsible for each of these three phases how are we going to put this in a project plan like is it something that or is it just like a natural thing that happens i think it's

[Patrick Lencioni]

the answer is somewhere in between and probably closer to yes we should do what you said originally but it's never going to be perfect that way but i do think we should go like hey we're at the early stages of this we have to have a wid meeting where we're going to get together wonder invent and discern that's all we're going to do okay so you're probably best at leading that meeting for the next week why don't you realize that that's what you're gonna help us do and if there's other people that struggle with that let's be aware of that and then we get later and it's interesting cause you have i which is an ideation but you have g which is an activation which leads to implementation yep so like for you this is an interesting thing hala i say this a lot i think that there are times when you're innovating you're ideating and you have to let people know that you're not galvanizing because you could probably go to people and go oh this would be a cool idea and the implementers are like okay you want us to start right now and you gotta go no no no no no i'm

[Hala Taha]

just ideating yeah this is so true

[Patrick Lencioni]

so i often say to people i'm not g right now i'm iing because otherwise they'll run out they'll want to go out and implement something and you're like oh no i'm just throwing it against the wall for your discernment rather than galvanizing you for your enablement does

[Hala Taha]

that make sense totally makes sense and

[Patrick Lencioni]

there's other times when you're like okay we should do this and people are like well i'm not really sure oh no i'm not ideating right now i'm galvanizing you i need you to act we've already discerned this so it's just the language and knowing what stage of the conversation you're in or the project you're in or the work that you're in and a lot of entrepreneurial companies are really comfortable with the ideation and then they get frustrated when it comes to implementation that's why even the most innovative young company in the world needs enablement and tenacity so i want to

[Hala Taha]

move on to more of like team effectiveness productivity talking about how we can roll this out to our whole organization so let's start there if we wanted to roll this out to our organization what are the stages of actually doing that like what should we think through

[Patrick Lencioni]

and we're doing that more and more now and the first thing is and the good news about this is it's so the results are so they resonate with people so quickly that there's not a lot of organizing you have to do in other words once a team i think it's good to do it in teams right okay but we have organizations where everybody in the company does their working genius and suddenly people are and they know what they are people remember what they are and so people are going around the office going hey could you come to this meeting well i'm not in your i know but if you come to them we really need some galvanizing we don't have anybody on our team that does that so it's like first of all just get as many people in your organization to know what they are the language the vocabulary and the way people work together is gonna change okay but then do the team map the team map is a piece of paper that shows you in all six geniuses where you have people with geniuses or frustrations and so you can see the gaps okay and right away literally you look at it i had a team i worked with and it was a technology company but a big one and and they had nobody on the executive team with invention nobody and it was a technology company and you know they were terrible no and they were frustrated for ten years they hadn't had a new idea they were usually they were really extra using their old products and they were like why can't we come up with a new product well we looked at their type and it's because they were all about implementation they're all like well we got to make our numbers we got to have our tight schedule and nobody there liked to sit back and ask questions and come up with new ideas except for one guy on the team and he was their lawyer and they were like why don't you take over new technology acquisition he's like well i'm the chief legal counsel and they're like yeah but you like it don't you and you're good at this he's like i love it i would love to do that two years later he was no longer even in the legal department he was running that part of their business and so the answer to your question about how do you roll this out get people to do this and talk about it on their teams and they are going to solve problems just looking at it and going well hell i could do that i love that and somebody else is gonna go you love that why i hate it and they're like well because i'm this and they're gonna go well let's change the way we're getting this done yeah so there's not a lot to do there but there is this we have a program around which we call certification which is you can take one person in an organization and make them kind of an expert in this in two days we have this training thing where you can do it online it's virtual and in two days you can become an expert and then you can be the consultant to your organization to help them figure out how to do this i love that so we've had like three thousand people get certified already and and like companies will say we're sending three of our people through certification and they're going to teach everybody in the organization how to use this yeah i have

[Hala Taha]

to say whenever i roll i'm definitely rolling this out to my organization because first of all it's it's so cost effective it's twenty five dol dollars per it's like not expensive and the amount of money that you'll save from productivity and not having to hire and it's just a game changer and even just the activity itself i feel is going to make my employees happy and feel like we care about them and right i'm just going to roll it out as like an activity that we do across the company and then everybody has new language which creates a deeper bond because everyone's talking about are you you know are you an innovator are you do you have tenacity it's like it's something else to bond everybody together as

[Patrick Lencioni]

well and it's not a judgment thing because like there are some things that people go i don't want to be put into a box i don't want to be limited they don't respond to this like that very much at all because it's about joy and energy and everybody wants to know everybody wants to be able to share to people hey i really love doing this so if you could let me do this more i'd be really happy they don't feel like they're being judged it's really about revealing to other people what their favorite things are and so it doesn't feel like any people get condemned it feels like it's like it's people feeling understood

[Hala Taha]

the other thing that an idea and this is not something i necessarily read i literally just got this idea is that i want to implement it as part of the hiring process oh this

[Patrick Lencioni]

is we think that i got to tell you a story so you know you're not really allowed to use in hiring there's certain legal limitations about using assessments oh really yeah but it's not as bad as people think but we actually had a lawyer come to our office i worked with him and his team i didn't know this he was the guy that argued the case before the texas supreme court to not let them use assessments in hiring because they thought it could be biased and all those other things so he hated assessments i did not know this we did working genius with him and his team at the end of two days he i found out that he was that guy and he goes i think this one works because he was actually giving people feedback and he goes i can't believe how everybody is resonating with this and i make it makes sense to me and i'm actually now talking to them using the working genius because it's related to work itself it actually allows us to avoid hiring people who are going to be miserable or hiring somebody and putting them in the wrong job so we've actually we're developing it's almost done an ai tool where you could type in a one paragraph job description we want this person to do this and this and this and this and it'll spit back to you the most likely working geniuses that will help find the person that would do that and you know who loves it is employees who are getting hired and they're like i don't want a job i'm going

[Hala Taha]

to hate exactly so it's a great

[Patrick Lencioni]

matchmaking tool and we use it when we talk to people you can't necessarily force people to but a lot of staffing companies they're going to get their candidates all to do it they're staffing companies that do this now okay and then when their clients call and say hey we need somebody to do this job they look at their working genius and they go hey i think this job would be great for you or i think i have a person who would love this and it's taking staffing and hiring from a crapshoot where fifty percent of the time a person's like i don't know why i took this job to one where we're getting a lot better at knowing who's going to succeed and who's not

[Hala Taha]

i'm sort of disappointed because i was so excited that i was like okay i'm just going to make this mandatory because like for example i'm looking for an ea and i need to make sure they can create well and i need to make sure they have tenacity i need those two things okay so here's the thing

[Patrick Lencioni]

and tenacity i love it so an ea is a perfect job because one ea is not the same as another hey one ceo is not the same as another depends on what kind of company is but so you're looking for an ea what you can say to them is hey i would love for you to take this if you want to it'll help you it's a gift here's a gift for you to do this then i'm just gonna describe what i want and if you think that it's a good match for you then that's fantastic we'll talk about that but oftentimes it's the candidate who will look at it and go oh no please don't hire me for this job this is going to be miserable for me because for you you're saying you want somebody with tenacity and you said somebody

[Hala Taha]

who can create yeah invention and they've got to get stuff done okay so

[Patrick Lencioni]

that's called the methodical architect okay and that's very like if i had an administrative assistant and we're hiring one for me right now and because i'm moving to a new place and i need a new one and and i need a dt which is discernment and tenacity you know why because i will not give them detailed job descriptions they're going to figure out how to help me now if i were a different personality as a ceo i would tell somebody what to do and i might want them to be an et which is to do whatever i tell you but i'm going to say to them could you figure out what you think i need because i don't know and that's really different and in your case because of the work you do you want somebody who's actually creative now there's a lot of people that don't want an ea that has has that yeah so it's not so much about every job with that title needs the same thing frankly one person's executive assistant is different than another's one person's head of marketing is different people talk about this like what would be a good head of marketing and i'm like i don't know do you want somebody who's lead generation and closes deals or do you want somebody that's come up with a new brand strategy and understands the market from a strategic standpoint those are two different roles do you know how often and you know the ceo's hire a head of marketing and they don't even know what their working geniuses are and they say well they were good at marketing before yeah but they did a totally different job so i think working genius i don't know how to make it mandatory for a candidate but usually you can say to the candidate if you want to figure out what you are i'll tell you what we want and then you can convince me that you think you could do that i love

[Hala Taha]

it that's what i'll do that's the approach that i'll take so another thing with teams is that you say that there's sometimes genius gaps can you talk to us about some of the common genius gaps and how we can actually figure out if we have any gaps in our organization yeah like if there's

[Patrick Lencioni]

an organization that has no t right like you look like there's five people working on it and nobody has tenacity they're like how come we have these great ideas we get motivated and then nobody they never seem to get implemented or you only have one t on your team and you're killing her or you're killing him because every time you get to the last stage we're going to that person going okay can you finish this and the finishing stage often takes a long time and we're crushing that person i did an organization once where i looked and they had like ten people start up and one person on the team had tenacity and i think her name was laura and i said hey laura i just met them for the first time do you ever think you're gonna get crushed and does everybody else think she might quit because we make her do too much and they were like oh my gosh how did you know and it's like cause she's the only one that finishes and they're like oh no oh we gotta hire more finishers or actually rethink about how we do these things or if you're a company that has no w and i you know you might be the most organized efficient company in the world but nobody's actually saying maybe we need a new product or maybe our customers aren't happy so you know you're not identifying the opportunities so any gap in the six things if there's an egregious gap causes problems if there's no enablement i had an organization that i worked with that was that served churches so they're very kind but nobody had enablement and so they were like how come nobody helps shouldn't we be helpers we work with churches it's like oh nobody has the genius of enablement nobody comes along and says yeah i'll volunteer to do that for you and so any gap is going to show up and usually teams look at the gap on the thing and in five minutes they're like oh yeah this is why that project failed or this is why we were good at this thing but why we're not good at this thing so it's pretty predictable it's pretty self

[Hala Taha]

explanatory and you say that the best way to sort of identify these is by visualizing everything with a team map so like what's that process like so

[Patrick Lencioni]

everybody takes their assessment on an account and then they just say print the team map and it's just a piece of paper comes out and it says wonder and it shows the list of people that have it as a genius and the list of the people that have it as a frustration and if there's none then they all have it as a thing in the middle it's very easy to see and there's green and red so you look at this thing and you go oh my gosh we have no green in discernment or we have a whole bunch of reds in my organization we had a whole bunch of reds in invention and i was the only green and so not only was i the only inventor but the other people my organization really hated having to come up with new ideas and what that told us is two things is one we can't be pulling me out of invention too much because there's nobody else that's going to fill that gap and when we hired the next person it would sure be nice if they had invention as a genius or at least certainly as a as a competency so there was a little bit more of that in the atmosphere

[Hala Taha]

yeah it reminds me of my organization so much like i started with a social agency super innovative always going viral and then i launched my network kate's running my agency she's more of enablement tenacity and i'm always just like we're using the same strategies that i did like and then i'm like trying to figure out the new strategies and i'm getting mad at her because i'm like you're not inventing but now i realize like that's not what she's good at i need to get somebody else that's gonna invent so how great is that

[Patrick Lencioni]

to realize that because what happens is then people will say things like so i don't have enablement and tenacity and it's very easy for people to think that i or for me to think about myself that i'm lazy now i work my ass off but i'll go like i guess i'm kind of lazy because i don't have enablement and tenacity it's like well i'm just not an implementer but i'll work really hard in the things that i do or a person that doesn't have invention we can go they're not very smart and they're like what do you mean like well gosh i come up with these ideas can't they come up with an idea it's like no it's just a different genius they're smart but in the thing that they do so it avoids judgmentalism now let me tell you if a person is really lazy you know i have a book called the ideal team player and it's about humble hungry smart the three values of a good team player there are people that aren't hungry they don't work hard so there are people that are slackers and they deserve to be recognized as such but that's not about their skill set it's about maybe they're just not motivated maybe they never learned how to work hard maybe they don't really care that much so i'm not trying to say that there aren't things that you should let somebody go from your organization for there are yeah but if it's just that they're wired differently man that's a tragedy when we lose good people because they're just wired differently and we attribute it to

[Hala Taha]

something else totally i totally agree and it's really hard to hire people and it wastes a lot of time so if you could just sort of plug people and switch roles and lateral moves like that's gonna save a lot of

[Patrick Lencioni]

money and time yeah i really think in terms of productivity if you have four people and you have them in roles and you didn't know why and you figure out their working genius and you make adjustments you're gonna save two hires and there was a saying years ago i remember when i first got outta school and they said if you have five engineers working on a project and it's not getting done get rid of two of them and what they meant is sometimes it's just that you know there's too many and then but i actually think when you tap into if you have five engineers working on a team and you actually help them understand their geniuses they're going to get the work of nine done would you please let me know how that goes i can't wait to hear what you guys learn it is so fun to get stories back from people who have rebirthed an employee by helping them figure out their thing or or avoided hiring the wrong person or letting go of the wrong i love to hear those stories so would you if you would share that with me i would i

[Hala Taha]

would love that of course i'd love to tell you about it i'm very excited in terms of how you roll it out to an organization is it a different process or are we still going and taking the assessment individually or are we like signing up our organization so we can see all the results

[Patrick Lencioni]

how does it work if you go on there it'd be it's very clear i know that because people do it all the time and i can also tell you i don't know as the inventor of this i'm amazed at like i'll be at some place and i'll say hey you should take the assessment and then i'll go i have to find somebody that can get you on to do that because i don't even know how to do it but but it's very simple when you go on and everybody fills it out it's just one person signs them all up and they put it in the same account

[Hala Taha]

got it okay so youngandprofiting co work you guys can take the assessment individually or you can sign up your organization we'll make sure of it okay and

[Patrick Lencioni]

call us if you want we're at tablegroup dot com or and you can find us on the internet and you can call us we'll walk you through

[Hala Taha]

it okay perfect okay so let's get into some more tactical stuff because i know you're really good about like having good meetings we talked about zoom like just some productivity team management type of stuff so you've written in the past that it's a mistake to think that a level talent doesn't need to be managed yes so what do we need to know about how much to manage someone and especially maybe in the context of working geniuses yeah well i think

[Patrick Lencioni]

and that's and i love that you asked in terms of working genius because i've been saying this for years but working genius helps us understand how they might need to be managed because not everybody's the same but one of the things i find in organizations is a lot of ceo's one of the things they don't do is they don't manage their direct reports and what they do is they say well i'm a ceo now and this person's on my leadership team so i shouldn't have to manage them they're an adult or they think that managing is micromanaging and so they say well i don't want to micromanage them i trust them but the truth of the matter is every person in the world benefits from management and that's why being a ceo is so dang hard because it is unmanaged and a board does not manage a ceo oftentimes boards need to be kind of humored and one of the hardest things about being the ceo of an organization it's lonely and there really is no guidance now you have to seek out advice but there's nobody that says i own this and i will give you direction and the buck stops with you when you're the ceo so there's something naked about that role and it's and that's why it's a very lonely and hard job but when when leaders say and and i i i fall into this category too i don't like to manage people by objectives and details and all these things because i'm an id i hire people and i go hey i hired a guy recently who's in who has et's all implementation but i said to him hey why don't you just figure out what your job scope should be and you tell me what success looks like and you tell me what your job should look like and i just i want you to figure it out on your own and he was like mortified because that's my ideal job by the way and he's like i want measurables i want structure i want expectations set for me and i realized i can't manage him the way i would want to be managed i have to manage him to make him the best that he can be and too often ceo's abdicate responsibility they don't delegate and they don't i say at least be a good macro manager know what they're working on know if they're doing well check in with them provide what they need based on their working genius and take responsibility for being their manager and i don't care if you're running a ten billion dollars company and you're managing the cmo or if you're an entrepreneur and you have four employees everybody needs to be managed it doesn't mean that there's a specific system for it it doesn't mean you're checking in every day on their deliverables it's less about efficiency and it's more about effectiveness and so even if you don't necessarily like doing it do it and do it for them based on what they need

[Hala Taha]

yeah even just like i said taking this assessment made me realize even though i have employees that haven't taken it i know what they are now and how i need to manage them somehow know it's just so clear it's really clear and you know what you're going

[Patrick Lencioni]

to do with them you're naturally going to go by their office and brainstorm and inspire them you'll do that i don't have to tell you to do that but what you might not do is go okay do you have enough information about whether you're succeeding or not

[Hala Taha]

exactly the management the enablement stuff like how can i be a better enablement right it's chewing glass for me i don't like it but i have to

[Patrick Lencioni]

do it you know what's great hala when you go to them and you go hey you know me i'm an ig by the way i want you to see this and they're gonna go of course you are that makes sense but there's things you need that i don't do naturally so just know though i'm not saying that i don't want to do them just know that it's not easy for me and if you come to me and say hey i need more clarity from you on something i'm not gonna take that as a complaint i'm gonna take that as a compliment that you know i'm not good at it and you need to provoke me to do it and that'll give them permission to do it without going holla are you gonna get more specific with us and you're gonna go not naturally i won't but if you ask me to i will so they can coach you your employees will be your best management coaches when you give them the language and the permission to do

[Hala Taha]

that so something that we agree upon is meetings don't necessarily to have a successful meeting it doesn't have to be short okay i i've i've heard that and this is something that me and my business partner jason disagree upon all the just wants to have short short meetings and i'm like we had a short meeting but like what was accomplished like we don't know what to do we need to talk about it like it's not about just having short meetings we need to know what to do and have clarity right so i'd love for you to just break down some of your best tips in terms of having good meetings and also the fact that a lot of people tuning in right now are having zoom meetings let's be honest yeah yeah yeah most of the meetings are zoom so let's let's

[Patrick Lencioni]

talk about that and the hardest thing about zoom meetings hala is that first of all we learned this at the beginning of COVID when i just saw this movie called hot fuzz and it was based and there's this where they go this shit just got real it's like a cop movie and that was from bad boys or something like that but i remember when covid started when we were doing our third zoom meeting and i finally provoked real conflict i really and we said i think this shit just got real because too often on zoom it's harder to go there cause you're not in the same room and after the meeting's over you're not gonna be able to rec kind of walk over to the kitchen and talk to them about it so sometimes we don't go deep and get messy during zoom meetings the way we need to so that's the thing i would say first of all is when we're doing stuff on zoom we've got to get to that place where we're being fully human and it's harder when it's two dimensional and there's not follow up and we don't have incidental time so we need to do that but the other thing is i would love to know what your partner's working genius is because the thing about a short meeting it's efficient but it's not necessarily effective and i'm a believer in effectiveness over efficiency yeah okay and so sometimes a meeting wanders but it needed to and sometimes it takes forty five minutes in a meeting before you finally realize oh my gosh we were talking about the wrong thing yeah and when a person's sitting in that meeting going checking their watch and going well i have another meeting to go to and i have real work to do and here's how to help a person understand that there's four different kinds of meetings that a leadership team has to have and you and your partner have to have there's four and you can't do them simultaneously when we do them simultaneously it doesn't work i call that meeting stew where we toss out every ingredient in the cupboard into one pot and stir it up and it just tastes bad and the four different kinds of meetings that need to be separated are one is what i call check in a daily check in and that's like a five to ten minute like what are you doing today what are you doing today okay great that's great okay oh i didn't know you were going to be doing that tell fred i said ohio can you ask him about this thing okay i can take that off my list totally like administrative check in don't sit down just every day this is the me saying to my wife hey who's picking the kids up from school what time are you coming home here's how i got this meeting today okay great the second meeting is called your weekly tactical if you do it weekly and this is the running the business meeting where you sit down you go okay these are our goals here's how we're doing do we need to solve any near term problems this this one's green this one's yellow this one's red alan mullally who ran ford did it that way too green yellow and red we do that our company too like how are we doing these are our five big things we're working on how are they going what do we need to do it's probably an hour maybe ninety minutes it's pretty tactical and it's focused on moving the ball forward yep okay the problem is there's a third meeting and we usually combine it with the second meeting and we call this the strategic topical meeting this is like there's some big new initiative or idea or problem and it's really interesting and it's really urgent and so we try to talk about it in the same breath where we're going through our goals and we never give it enough time this is the meeting where we need to go into a room clear out two hours and say we have a competitive threat or we have this new product idea or this new partnership like you talked to me before about there's new partnerships you're developing don't have that during your regular weekly meeting have a separate meeting all we're gonna talk about is that partnership and go in there roll up your sleeves grab some food get a whiteboard and argue and debate and dream and do this that's what people in business school call the case study it's the most fun you can ever have and yet we kill that fun by having it in ten minute increments in between going through our checklists and it robs our meetings it makes the tactical meetings confusing it makes the strategic meetings far too limited and when the leaders of an organization do that they really lose their way and so so when somebody says let's have a short meeting i say yeah make your daily check in short hey maybe make your weekly tactical fairly short but never cut off a conversation that needs to be explored and worked through and it's messy and that's the biggest problem i see in organizations they combine their strategic conversations and their tactical ones in the same meeting and it's never good for anybody the fourth kind of meeting is what i call i think it's once a quarter you should probably do it and maybe it takes two hours maybe it takes a half a day and that's just the quarterly check in where you just get out of the office you take a breath and you say is this working are we that's probably a wi meeting where you just step back and go is there anything we're not seeing what's going on in the market how are we doing as a team behaviorally you just need to do that every once in a while those four kinds of meetings most organizations try to have all four in one meeting and they call it their weekly meeting and that's why people hate meetings i'm actually

[Hala Taha]

really proud of my company because we do all four you do we do all four so we call each other scrappy hustlers that's our like name i love it and every morning we do a hustler huddle i do it with my executive team i do it with my sales and marketing team fifteen minutes what are we grateful for what are we working on are there any blockers how do you feel now like that kind of a thing every single morning we do something called g nineties where we talk for ninety minutes every week me and my executive team about all of our problems called g ninety then we do a monthly strategic meeting to talk about any strategies and then we do a quarterly planning which is the ideation stuff wow so i feel like we're really on track here you got

[Patrick Lencioni]

it that is crazy and and and because you know that people have different contexts when they go into those meetings and you can't do them all together

[Hala Taha]

good for you yeah so no wonder we're doing so great all right patrick seriously seriously meetings are key yeah so i know that we're a bit about out of time and honestly i had such a great conversation with you i loved learning about the working genius i loved understanding how this is going to impact our team i end my show with two questions that i ask all of my guests and so you can kind of just think of this as not having to do with the topic necessarily just whatever comes from your heart the first one is what is one actionable thing our young and profits can do today to become more profiting tomorrow

[Patrick Lencioni]

wow so i mean i want to give a thoughtful answer to that you know i think that one of the things that people don't do when they're young is get very clear about who they are and what their personal values are and we kind of we're too opportunistic and kind of reacting to whatever's going on and actually sit down and write down like this is the person i want to be and this is what i want to do and it's so crazy it's so simple but you know they say if you don't know where you're going all roads lead there or no road is right and so i just think people need to be a little clear about yeah this is what i'd kind of like to do and who i'd like to be and then that contextualizes everything else so that's a very general thing but it's so simple and most people are like yeah

[Hala Taha]

i haven't really done that yeah so actually step back and think about who you want to be in the future your future you like what do you want to grow into yeah absolutely and what would you say is your secret to profiting in life and this can

[Patrick Lencioni]

go beyond business well for me it's it's two things it's healing it's identifying the things that happened to me when i was young that i thought were my superpowers but they were actually wounds because i was working out of those and then every day i pray i wake up and i pray and i literally i'm catholic christian i listen to some bible readings and i pray and that is all the difference between waking up and feeling like scattered and lost and feeling like oh yeah yeah everything's good

[Hala Taha]

just to dig deep on that just a bit is like is that like sort of a gratitude practice that you have like what do you feel like that does to set the foundation for your day and how can people mimic that well i think it's everything

[Patrick Lencioni]

it's interesting that you ask that cause so i have this app it's called amen and it goes through the readings of the day which is like seven minutes eight minutes of the readings old testament maybe psalms and the gospel and then it asks you a series of questions and i think in those questions it kind of gets at the four areas of prayer which is like like gratitude like what you're grateful for petition like what you want what you need praise which is like god you're good i mean this is great and then sorrow and like hey i want to be better and i'm sorry i did these things i think it kind of touches on all four of those kinds of prayer but i'd like to be more gratitude is the thing i need to work on the most i grew up every time i accomplished something i would go like okay what's next and i never felt safe just going oh that was wonderful thank you that's great so gratitude is a deficiency area for me and i learned that from john gordon i don't know if you know

[Hala Taha]

who john gordon is yes i had

[Patrick Lencioni]

him on the show yep oh he's like one of my favorite human beings good dear friend and the gratitude thing

[Hala Taha]

is so critical michael jervis came on the show and he taught me this morning ritual where he says before he even gets out of the covers the first thing he does is what are some there's three things i'm grateful for wow before you get out of the comfort so now every morning before i even wake up when i'm laying in my bed before i get out of bed i just say what am i grateful for and then i get up and it just helps a little bit you know especially if i remember to do it it's always a better day

[Patrick Lencioni]

that's great i'll remember that that's fantastic

[Hala Taha]

patrick where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do well

[Patrick Lencioni]

my company is called the table group so if you go to tablegroup dot com you can find us there the working genius stuff is at workinggenius dot com and they can get to that through your site and that's it you know there's one thing i have that i've started recently i do a morning three minute devotional for professionals who are followers of jesus but if you're not if you're curious about jesus you can do it too cause i love everyone but it's a three minutes it's called the three minute reset me and a guy named chris stefanik do it and i've found that a lot of people really like it and i just started doing this january first of this year and it's every weekday and so because a lot of people are like i don't know what i want to do around my faith and it's like well here's three minutes maybe you can just start with three minutes and it's combining stuff that i do in the work world with faith and so a lot of people really like that it's grown so that's a three minute reset how do you join it you just go wherever podcasts are and type in the three minute reset in my email oh

[Hala Taha]

it's a podcast that you can listen

[Patrick Lencioni]

to every morning yeah it's essentially a podcast with a daily three minute resource

[Hala Taha]

thing oh cool we'll put the link in the show notes again guys if you want to take the working genius assessment go to youngandprofiting co work we'll put that link in the show notes i can't wait to hear what you guys think about that assessment if it helped you let us know write us a review patrick thank you so much for joining us on young and profiting

[Patrick Lencioni]

podcast it's been a blast thank you holla