Week 2 Day 7: Assignment: Take the Working Genius Assessment

The Working Genius assessment takes about 15 minutes and costs around $25. Go to workinggenius.com and take it. When you get your results, write down your two geniuses, two competencies, and two frustrations. Then sit with it for a day before you react. Some people are surprised. Most are not -- the results confirm what they already felt but never had language for.

Once you have your results, do three things. First, read the descriptions of your frustration areas carefully. These are the parts of your job that drain you even when you are good at them. You may be competent at Tenacity but depleted by it. That distinction matters. Second, look at your calendar for the past two weeks and estimate what percentage of your time was spent in genius versus frustration work. If frustration work is above 30%, you have a structural problem in your role that no amount of motivation will fix. Third, share your results with at least one person you work closely with. Not as a confession -- as information. 'Here is what energizes me and here is what drains me. Knowing this will help us work together better.'

The Working Genius assessment has been validated across more than 500,000 participants since its 2022 launch. Lencioni's organization reports that teams who share and discuss their genius profiles see measurable improvements in meeting effectiveness, project assignment satisfaction, and reduced interpersonal friction. The mechanism is simple: when people understand that a colleague's resistance to detailed follow-up is not laziness (it is a Tenacity frustration) or that someone's constant questioning is not negativity (it is Wonder genius), they stop personalizing behavior and start optimizing for it. The assessment is the starting point. The real value comes from making the language part of daily team communication -- 'this task is going to need Tenacity, who has it?' -- which we will build toward over the coming weeks.