How to help your team find the right work using Working Genius

Executive overview

Most teams have the right people but put them in the wrong roles. Burnout follows not from overwork but from doing work that drains rather than energises. Patrick Lencioni's Working Genius model identifies six types of work and maps each person to two they love, two they can tolerate, and two that deplete them.

The type of work a person does matters far more to burnout than the volume of work.

The three stages of work

• Ideation: generating new ideas. Starts with Wonder (asking "is this right?") and moves to Invention (answering that question with new ideas).
• Activation: the missing middle stage. Evaluating ideas, refining them, pitching them, and galvanising the team before execution.
• Implementation: getting things done. Driven by Enablement (supporting others) and Tenacity (finishing).
• Skipping activation — going straight from ideation to implementation — is a common failure pattern.

The three levels of engagement

• Working Genius: two types of work that give energy. Sustainable for hours; the person stays on fire.
• Working Competency: two types that are manageable. Output holds for a while, then fades.
• Working Frustration: two types that deplete fast. Doing these long-term causes burnout, guilt, and misidentification as lazy or uncommitted.
• Naming frustrations publicly reduces shame: "I've got to go do some tenacity work — wish me luck."

The six types

1. Wonder — asks whether a better way exists; questions assumptions
2. Invention — generates new ideas and solutions
3. Discernment — evaluates ideas with instinct and judgment
4. Galvanising — rallies and motivates people around a direction
5. Enablement — provides practical support and responsiveness to others' needs
6. Tenacity — drives projects to completion; holds details

Applying it to a team

• Take the assessment at workinggenius.com ($25 per person).
• Review the team map together — gaps and clusters become immediately visible.
• Low-hanging fruit appears fast: past project failures, persistent friction, and mood patterns get explained within the first session.
• Gaps do not always require a new hire — borrow from another department, bring in a contractor, or restructure responsibilities.
• Use it during hiring: name which types the role requires and probe for them in conversation.

What it changes in practice

• Lencioni reassigned galvanising to a junior team member who loved it; productivity jumped immediately.
• A head of sales nearly fired for weak strategy was saved when the team borrowed invention from a marketing colleague who found it energising.
• A pastor's sense of being a fraud dissolved once he understood his genius lay in counselling, not sermonising.
• Leaders can move people out of roles in a way that preserves dignity rather than signalling failure.

Where it fits alongside other frameworks

• Ideal Team Player (hungry, humble, smart): use first to get the right person on the bus.
• Working Genius: use next to find the right seat.
• Five Dysfunctions of a Team: use after — once people are in the right seats, the bus can actually move.
• Traditional assessments (MBTI, StrengthsFinder, Enneagram) address personality; Working Genius addresses the daily tasks of work.