The most sought-after productivity and teamwork tool is here! You’ve probably tried different assessments and team approaches to help your top team be more cohesive and productive together – only to find the new insights are hard to remember, and old behaviors reappear. Working Genius is the answer to your productivity and teamwork challenges!
I’m Margie Oleson. For the last 20 years, I’ve helped clients be more productive. I have never been more excited to share a tool with my clients. Working Genius is the first team approach that creates benefits instantly for winning results.
Patrick Lencioni introduced Working Genius as a productivity tool, and the data is overwhelming – leader after leader and team after team express phenomenal success with what they learn about their themselves and how to approach productivity with their teams.
There are six Working Geniuses that follow the life cycle of a service or product – from an idea or problem all the way to implementation.
Wonder. The first Working Genius is Wonder – the people who are always asking questions, pondering why things are the way they are, asking how they can be better. Ambiguity is familiar to them, and they enjoy imagining possibilities.
Invention is the profile for team members who derive joy from looking at challenges and inventing solutions. They love working with a blank page or whiteboard and are comfortable brainstorming.
Discernment. The natural ability to evaluate ideas and potential solutions. They know how to connect dots and give great feedback to others – because they are skilled at recognizing trends and quickly sizing up ideas or situations. While Wonder is asking questions and Invention is recommending ideas, the Discernment genius provides opinions about those recommendations, because they swiftly assess when something will probably work or have potential challenges.
Galvanizing. Once ideas are generated and evaluated, teams move to implementation – organizing people and managing activities for completion. Galvanizing involves pushing people out of their comfort zones, inspiring them to get started. There are many leader roles that require those strengths, but not all leaders feel energy for galvanizing others. When some ideas don’t produce results, it may be that people were not organized or inspired to take action – because the right person wasn’t helping them activate.
Enablement is the Working Genius for helping people move forward together on an idea or solution. They know how and when to help their colleagues realize a vision. Teams may not vocalize the value of this genius, but when projects fail, it might be because no one is savvy enough to know how things get done or have the skills or energy to make them happen.
Tenacity is the final critical step In the life cycle of new ideas or solving problems. These team members are task-oriented and motivated by crossing the finish line. They need wonderers and inventors for ideas and discernment… to ensure the ideas are workable. And they need galvanizers and enablers to execute. The Tenacity Working Genius is primarily interested in completion, gaining joy and energy from checking boxes on the to-do list. Without them, many projects or programs fail to completely land – causing ideas or decisions to be revisited, never fully executing the goals.
Every product or service idea needs all six genius types to execute successfully!
We Need All Six. You can see how the six Working Geniuses show up in every initiative – forming a new department, offering a new service or product, solving a stubborn problem, planning a relocation, and so on. Where there are delays, challenge after challenge, people issues, etc., they can usually be tied back to certain steps in the life cycle that are missing or overemphasized. We need all genius types to be successful, and leaders can strategize to ensure the six different types of Working Genius are represented and sequenced correctly throughout the process.
Your Team Profile. Greatest success happens when new ideas or changes are managed by the people who have the most energy and skills in wondering, inventing, discerning, galvanizing, enabling, and providing tenacity. Individuals complete an assessment, and for each profile, they discover two Working Geniuses, two Working Competencies, and two Working Frustrations. When individuals spend too much time in their working frustrations, or even their working competencies, they burn out, take too long for project phases, skip over critical steps, have people issues, experience high turnover of talented team members, and more.
Assessing your Team. Understanding your team profile helps the work be planned intentionally and methodically. Teams are more cohesive and achieve results together faster and more enjoyably. Once armed with this knowledge, leaders and teams improve how they ideate, plan, and execute.
What would it mean for you and your team to maximize Working Geniuses in every phase of your organizational cycles? Follow me on LinkedIn for more information.
by Margie Oleson, Ed.D.
Organizational Leadership and Performance. Business Consultant | Executive Coach | Top Team Accelerator |
Top Team Coach | High Performance Coach | Organizational Behavior Expert and Coach
