Week 7 Day 7: Assignment: Name Your Two Working Frustrations Out Loud to Your Team

This is the scariest assignment so far, and it is also the most important. Telling your team where you are weak is not natural. But the exercise from Day 6 showed that strategic vulnerability creates permission and partnership. Your frustration areas are already affecting your team. This assignment makes that effect visible and actionable.

Here is the script. In your next team meeting or one-on-one cycle, say: 'I have been doing some work on understanding where I add the most value and where I struggle. My two frustration areas in the Working Genius model are [X] and [Y]. What that means practically is [specific impact]. I want to restructure how we work so that those areas are covered by someone who is energized by them instead of someone who is drained by them. What would you change about how we work together if you knew those gaps were being specifically addressed?' Then stop talking and listen. What you will hear will probably surprise you. Your team has been observing your gaps for a long time, and they likely have concrete, actionable ideas for how to work around them -- ideas they have been holding back because they did not want to imply you were bad at something. The permission to speak openly about a leader's limitations is rare, and the ideas that emerge from it are usually excellent. This is Week 7 -- the first week of Part II, where we apply the inner work to team dynamics. Next week, we begin building what I call your 'Operating Manual' -- a document that codifies how you work best, including these frustrations, so your team never has to guess.

The practice of leader self-disclosure as a team development intervention has been studied by Spreitzer and colleagues at the University of Michigan's Center for Positive Organizations. Their longitudinal research shows that teams whose leaders practice 'reflected best self' exercises -- sharing both strengths and limitations openly -- demonstrate higher collective efficacy and faster norm formation. The mechanism is reciprocal disclosure: when leaders share first, team members disclose at higher rates, which accelerates the formation of team mental models -- shared understanding of who does what best. Research by Mathieu et al. (2000) on team mental models shows that teams with more accurate shared mental models coordinate more effectively with less explicit communication, reducing overhead and error rates. The 'Operating Manual' concept previewed for Week 8 is an operational instantiation of this research -- a structured artifact that makes implicit team mental models explicit. DeRue and Ashford (2010) at the University of Michigan have also shown that leadership identity is co-constructed through 'claiming and granting' behaviors. When a leader claims a limitation ('I am not good at this'), they create space for team members to grant themselves the corresponding capability ('I can cover that'). This reciprocal identity work is the foundation of distributed leadership -- the model where leadership functions are shared across team members based on capability rather than concentrated in a single role.