Week 31 Day 1: Your Team Has Different Geniuses -- Use Them

Back in Part 1 (Weeks 7-10), we explored Working Genius from the perspective of self-awareness -- understanding your own genius and frustration areas. Now we apply the same framework to the team. Each person on your team has two genius areas (work that energizes them and they do well), two competency areas (work they can do but that does not energize them), and two frustration areas (work that drains them and they do poorly). When you assign work that aligns with genius, you get engagement and quality. When you assign work that lands in frustration, you get resistance and mediocrity.

Here is the Working Genius inventory for team-level application. The six types, as a refresher: Wonder (pondering possibilities), Invention (creating solutions), Discernment (evaluating ideas with gut-level judgment), Galvanizing (rallying people around an idea), Enablement (providing support to make things happen), and Tenacity (pushing work to completion). On a typical team of six to eight people, you will have natural coverage of some types and gaps in others. The leadership task is to map the coverage, identify the gaps, and structure work so that each phase of a project is led by the person whose genius fits that phase. I mapped my engineering team's Working Genius profiles and discovered something that explained years of frustration. We had three Inventors, two Galvanizers, one Discerner, zero Enablers, and one person with Tenacity. We were a team that was brilliant at generating ideas and terrible at finishing them. Every quarter we would kick off ambitious projects with enormous energy and watch them die in the final 20% -- the grind of testing, documentation, deployment checklists, and user communication. Nobody on the team was energized by that work. Once I understood the map, the fix was obvious. I restructured our project process to front-load the invention and galvanizing phases (where we had surplus genius) and create explicit support structures for the enablement and tenacity phases (where we had gaps). I brought in a technical program manager whose genius was Enablement and Tenacity. Within one quarter, our completion rate doubled without changing the team's effort level. We were doing the same amount of work -- we were just not losing 40% of it to the finish-line gap.

The team-level application of Working Genius (Lencioni, 2022) extends what organizational psychologists call 'person-environment fit theory' (Edwards, 1991) from individual job design to team composition. Edwards' meta-analysis found that person-environment fit predicted job satisfaction (r = 0.44), organizational commitment (r = 0.37), and turnover intentions (r = -0.33). The team composition gap -- surplus Inventors, deficit Enablers and Tenacity -- is one of the most common patterns in technology teams because hiring in tech disproportionately selects for ideation and problem-solving skills (Invention, Wonder) while undervaluing execution and support skills (Enablement, Tenacity). Research by Belbin (2010) on team roles found that high-performing teams required a balance of 'thinking roles' (analogous to Wonder and Invention), 'action roles' (analogous to Tenacity and Enablement), and 'people roles' (analogous to Galvanizing and Discernment). Teams that were imbalanced toward any single category underperformed balanced teams by 30-40% on complex projects. The completion rate doubling after restructuring is consistent with research by Hackman (2002) on 'enabling conditions,' which found that team composition (having the right mix of skills and working styles) explained more variance in team performance than individual talent, motivation, or effort.