PDF Summary:The 6 Types of Working Genius, by Patrick Lencioni

Patrick Lencioni’s The 6 Types of Working Genius argues that there are six distinct types of working “genius,” or intelligence, and that all successful teams consist of members each possessing a combination of each type. By properly identifying which traits your team members have, you can maximize both productivity and individual fulfillment.

Lencioni is an entrepreneur, best-selling author, and speaker. In 1997, he founded the Table Group, a consultancy firm designed to coach organizations toward optimal health. Since then, Lencioni has dedicated himself to helping businesses cultivate sounder management practices and workplace happiness.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through these six intelligence types, how they apply to workflow, and how they can help you bolster organizational and personal well-being. Additionally, we’ll address several challenges you might experience in universalizing Lencioni’s system, and we’ll situate Lencioni’s system within the larger conversation surrounding the relationship between talent, intelligences, and workplace efficiency.

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• Share small, incremental triumphs with your team; this helps assure them things are moving forward. Give them concrete and satisfying proof of these victories.

Intelligence #3: Vetting Ideas

Category: Passive

The person with this intelligence is the one who determines if the proposals suggested during the brainstorming stage meet the criteria of reality. In other words, are they achievable? This person might be the one to question the feasibility of producing your new item on a competitive scale or warn about how much time and money will go into its development.

This intelligence is passive because it requires the existence of ideas outside itself to evaluate; yet, this person is vital in helping organizations select ambitious yet realistic projects. These are the people in your organization who you constantly look to for their intuition and honesty. The person with this intelligence might point out that supplies of your new alloy are not always reliable, making long-term use an issue, or that engineers have already tried and failed to use it. She may suggest that the company find its own supply source and specific engineering talent to make that avenue safe.

Building Transparency and Trust

Lencioni insists that one of the factors that makes the Vetting Ideas intelligence so critical is its honesty—a willingness to call things for what they are. But there are a number of concerns that can inhibit employees from exhibiting this same kind of frankness on a regular basis:

• A fear of offending others (especially their boss!)

• Anxiety that they could face blowback for their feedback

• Cynicism that such constructive criticism will actually change anything

To mitigate these concerns, managers should assure team members not only that they are receptive to critical feedback, but also that managers can meet their personal and organizational goals far more easily with this input.

Intelligence #4: Mobilizing People

Category: Active

The teammate with this intelligence encourages teammates to buy in to projects and is indispensable to getting almost any process off the ground. The intelligence is active because it generates energy and enthusiasm and then passes them along to others. This teammate will get everyone oaring in the same direction and to the same tempo, ensuring that effort is concerted and morale is strong. She will relay to your entire staff how revolutionary your new razor design is (how your organization is the first to use that alloy, in particular) and that the price point you’re going to offer will change the entire market.

These attributes make this intelligence of motivating critical to the central phase of work; in essence, it is a cheerleader archetype.

(Shortform note: In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell conjures a similar archetype to the Mobilizer whom he calls the “Salesman.” Gladwell’s Salesman gets people enthusiastically behind these ideas, leaning on a keen mastery of non-verbal communication, social cues, and emotional reflexes. And although Gladwell’s Salesmen function to spread ideas that help create social epidemics (when ideas, messages, or products spread quickly through the public masses) while Lencioni’s mobilizer spurs action on a project, the similarities suggest that they may draw on the same social-emotional strengths.)

Phase 3: Follow-Through

Lencioni's final phase involves seeing work to completion. It requires intelligences that supply teams with the resources, guidance, and attention to detail necessary for seeing things through in alignment with the organization’s plan: meeting deadlines, ensuring quality, and holding people accountable.

Intelligence #5: Supporting

Category: Passive

The person with this intelligence notices when teammates require assistance and jumps in to help them. Lencioni says that this person often recognizes that their teammates need help before they realize it themselves, making them indispensable to the team during fever-pitched moments. For instance, this person might observe that machinists in your manufacturing department are having trouble applying the specs given to them by engineering and then obtain clarification for them. Or, they could help the marketing department express the benefits of your chosen alloy in laymen’s terms so investors and customers understand and become intrigued.

According to Lencioni, this intelligence is passive because it involves responding to others on the team who need assistance.

(Shortform note: The person with the Supporting intelligence is the quintessential team player, and Lencioni underscores their perceptive abilities in recognizing the needs of others. Beyond just their positive attitude and desire to help, however, team players such as these often have an enhanced ability to balance their own needs for success, well-being, and recognition with those of the group. Moreover, they have special abilities to listen actively, seek out opportunities for compromise, and openly celebrate the success of others. This is an intelligence frequently exhibited by successful team athletes and military veterans.)

Intelligence #6: Seeing Things Through

Category: Active

The person with this intelligence is the taskmaster. She always keeps the end goal in mind, making sure efficiency, timing, and quality are on point. People with this intelligence love to check boxes—they are relentless, nuts-and-bolts thinkers. This is the person who makes sure your new razor blade is ready for that vital sales quarter, that everyone knows the quality and uniqueness of what they’re selling, and that the product itself delivers value, precision, quality, and durability. She’s often focused on late-stage problem-solving, making her territory the least conceptual and most pragmatic stage of work.

This intelligence is active because its personality provides the drive and focus required to see things through. The principal distinction Lencioni describes between this person and someone with Mobilizing intelligence—the person who energizes and motivates the team during the set-up phase of work—is that mobilizing is about inspiring teammates, whereas seeing things through is about doggedly pursuing the goal.

(Shortform note: The person with Seeing Things Through intelligence not only gets your team’s project across the finish line but also helps the team gain larger psychological benefits. Psychological investigation recognizes that human beings thrive when experiencing closure—it allows people to feel safe and secure within environments and relationships. On the other hand, failed projects can lead to disappointment, cognitive stress, and reduced faith in the legitimacy of those processes and others’ promises. Therefore, this intelligence conceivably closes a vital circuit in human expectations.)

Genius, Competency, and Frustration

According to Lencioni, the average individual excels in two of the six forms of intelligence. For the other four, she is competent or proficient at two, and she is frustrated or drained by two.

Proficiency means a short-term ability to perform that task. People may be able to use their proficient intelligences when the team experiences shortfalls with related tasks, but when they do so for an extended time, they become exhausted and irritated. Work quality and morale eventually suffer.

The intelligences that drain a person are those that require tasks they struggle with. If your teammates hold authority over tasks that drain them, Lencioni says it will harm their professional happiness and the work’s successful outcome. Additionally, the rest of the team may misinterpret the person’s failure as being the result of low motivation, team spirit, ability, or the like, when in reality it’s due to their being less naturally inclined to that form of labor.

Gone With Red Tape

In distinguishing between the categories of Genius, Competence, and Frustration, Lencioni highly values a supervisor’s ability to perceive different intelligences operating within her team. This expectation is part of a broader trend in business literature that seeks to portray modern leaders as more orchestrators of talent than dictators of process.

One reason for this might be that bureaucracy, which tends to favor top-down organization and direction, tends to stifle creativity and hamper process, as Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini explain in Humanocracy. On the contrary, if leaders enable individuals to pursue their own goals and determine a larger portion of their own processes, the organization will benefit. For example, to avoid bureaucratic smothering, a company might consistently encourage individuals to explore new work territories and increase the level of accountability they accept, for both successes and failures. They may also push team members to have more regular encounters with customers, which allows them to see the impact they’re having on other people’s lives through their work.

Balanced teams recognize a person’s skill levels across all three categories, allotting tasks and leadership accordingly. To this end, team managers must strive to create transparency regarding what teammates’ competencies and frustrations are. Put differently, employees should feel safe offering feedback regarding the types of work that most drain and discourage them. Indeed, Lencioni insists these deficits are natural to any individual’s range of abilities—just as their intelligences are.

(Shortform note: Some organizations may experience difficulty applying Lencioni’s model if it absolves team members of the need to observe hierarchy as a necessary feature of leadership. In The Culture Map, Erin Meyer argues that values such as leadership through consensus tend to resonate more effectively in societies and organizations where egalitarianism and individualism are also valued, as is common in the West. However, this approach is often deemed less desirable, even destabilizing, in communities where top-down structure and obedience are more highly prized, such as in parts of Asia, where every team member will likely not feel comfortable voicing all opinions or personal preferences.)

Mapping Genius

After determining each of your team member’s intelligence types, Lencioni encourages mapping them out. This allows you to evaluate your team’s current skillset and where improvements and/or additions are advisable.

To do this, Lencioni suggests listing each intelligence type in the order it appears in the phases of work: Perceiving Opportunity, Innovating Solutions, Vetting Ideas, Mobilizing People, Supporting, and Seeing Things Through. Alongside each, place a field with two columns. In the left-hand column, put the team members who excel in that intelligence; on the right, list those who struggle with it.

Lencioni doesn’t map team members’ intelligences here. Instead, Lencioni emphasizes that you should use the map primarily to visualize major strengths and weaknesses.

Making the Most of Maps

Lencioni asserts that using his team map is one of the most potent possible tools to engage employees with his intelligence model. As a result, it is a vital vehicle for enabling mutual understanding. Team mapping in itself is a popular implement for managers seeking to better understand their people. Forms of assessments and resulting maps are quite diverse in approach, topic, and complexity, and often entail financial investment to perform. Here are some best practices in administering them:

• Research beforehand to discover your options and find the right fit.

• Inform employees beforehand for suggestions and to allay any concerns they may have about taking the evaluation.

• Whenever possible, make participation voluntary.

• Let the team know how and when the results will be delivered.

• Make sure to allow yourself ample time to digest the results and apply them to tangible management strategies.

• Engage each team member on their own concerning the results, optimally providing the most non-threatening environment possible.

Harvesting the Map’s Information

Lencioni insists that the benefits of mapping go well beyond knowing who’s who. You can visually conceptualize where your organization is adequately staffed—in other words, how deep is your proverbial bench? In studying the map, you can then ask key questions:

• Is anyone over-extended because they’re the only one on your team possessing one of the intelligences?
• Likewise, is anyone burning out because their competencies too often have to compensate for deficits of intelligence?
• Who might be “under-utilized” because their true skill set remains unacknowledged? And how can this add balance and bandwidth to the team?

Takeaways from these and similar questions can inform big choices or, at least, important follow-up questions:

• Can you fill gaps solely by moving around existing personnel?
• Can you transfer/borrow people from other departments or teams?
• Is hiring an option? If so, for which intelligences and competencies?

To Hire or Not to Hire

Lencioni makes clear that identifying intelligence types can lead to opportunities for reorganization and hiring of employees, both of which have intrinsic benefits. Nonetheless, some of the most significant benefits of reorganization over hiring pertain to cost. For instance, it can frequently take between eight to ten weeks just to hire a new employee, forcing the manager to seriously consider the urgency of the work they’re hiring for. Leaders must weigh the investment involved in advertising, screening, interviewing, and potentially relocating possible candidates. And many of the other costs of hiring are not so obvious, including the resources you must divert—particularly the time of some of your most productive employees—to onboard new people.

We’ve now made it through the many layers of genius, work phases, and their interlocking requirements. Next, it’s time to put everything together with an eye toward big-picture organizational health.

Genius and Overall Organizational Health

Lencioni argues that the implementation of his model, including the mapping techniques mentioned above, will lead to dramatic improvements in your team’s performance, particularly in areas of leadership, productivity, employee retention/morale, and meeting integrity.

The Benefits of Recognizing Genius

First, leadership that follows an intelligence-based approach leads far more organically; it’s better poised to tap into the resources right at its fingertips. It doesn’t shoehorn people into boilerplate job descriptions; rather, it encourages people to follow their talents instead of conventions. Lencioni identifies the following chief benefits for any organization:

• People don’t feel forced to be good at all things, all the time; this means they can focus primarily on the things at which they’re best.
• Team members have greater insights into everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. And instead of blaming one another for those gaps, they embrace them as a natural function of any team.
• Productivity and efficiency increase accordingly.

Parts of the Whole

Lencioni concludes that leaders who embrace his intelligence model not only produce teams that are more cohesive, but that also contain members who are more willing to go above and beyond for the success of mutual endeavors. In Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin agree on the importance of individual team members understanding their role within the broader scheme of things, as well as the specific tasks they answer for. According to Willink and Babin, this recognition of the purpose and justification behind team members’ specific roles builds trust in leadership, lessens ego, and pushes individuals towards enhanced ownership of the results they produce.

Moreover, this sense of ownership over a specific portion of the work process frees individuals to make more intuitive and on-the-spot decisions in their particular arena, also allowing those higher in the leadership structure greater room to focus on big-picture concerns. Assuredly, Willink and Babin’s model depends much more on an assumption of hierarchy than is obvious in Lencioni’s collaboration between intelligences.

The benefits are just as striking, Lencioni continues, for employees themselves, as well as for how ensuing morale reflects upon the company. Employees who regularly engage their intelligences and avoid tasks for which they’re less equipped are simply happier. They exude more enthusiasm, stay on the job longer, and the company acquires a reputation as a great place to work.

Keeping Your Key People

Lencioni argues that allowing employees to tap into their natural strengths and apply them meaningfully to group outcomes is a critical component of employee retention. However, research suggests that the primary driver of such retention may be more obvious – for example, one result shows that, as of 2022, 65% of individuals leaving a current job are simply seeking enhanced salary opportunities.

Other areas you can focus on to boost employee retention include:

• Emphasis on the quality of hiring and onboarding processes

• Wellness options and other perks

• Continuous feedback, professional development, and mentorship options

• Flexibility (i.e. blends of on-site and remote work) and prioritization of work-life balance