Week 31 Day 7: Assignment: Map Your Team's Working Genius Profiles

Have each person on your team identify their two genius areas and two frustration areas. You can use the official Working Genius assessment or simply ask each person: 'What type of work energizes you the most? What type of work drains you the most?' Map the results to see the team's collective profile.

Here is the mapping process. Step one: gather individual profiles. For each team member, record their two genius types and two frustration types. If you are unsure, use these prompts. For Wonder: 'Are you energized by sitting with an open question and exploring what is possible?' For Invention: 'Do you get excited when you create a novel solution to a hard problem?' For Discernment: 'Can you instinctively tell whether an idea will work, even before you can explain why?' For Galvanizing: 'Do you naturally rally people around a vision or an initiative?' For Enablement: 'Are you energized by supporting other people's projects and removing their obstacles?' For Tenacity: 'Do you get satisfaction from pushing work across the finish line and checking things off?' Step two: create a team matrix. Rows are team members. Columns are the six genius types. Mark each cell as Genius (G), Competency (C), or Frustration (F). Step three: sum the columns. Count the total Genius marks in each column. This reveals your team's genius surplus and genius deficit areas. Step four: analyze the gaps. If Tenacity has zero Genius marks, your team has a structural finishing problem. If Discernment has zero Genius marks, your team probably makes decisions slowly because nobody trusts their gut. If Enablement has zero Genius marks, your team probably struggles with cross-functional coordination. Step five: design interventions. For each gap, consider: can I restructure work to cover this gap with competency-area people? Can I bring in a new team member whose genius fills the gap? Can I partner with another team in the organization that has surplus in my gap area? Add the completed matrix and your intervention plan to your Leadership Operating Manual under 'Team Composition.'

The team mapping exercise implements what organizational development practitioners call 'team diagnostic assessment' (Wageman, Hackman, and Lehman, 2005). Their research on 120 teams found that teams that conducted formal composition assessments and made structural adjustments based on the results improved their performance by 25% within six months, compared to no improvement in teams that relied on informal assessment. The prompts for identifying genius types are adapted from Lencioni's (2022) assessment methodology, which uses 'energy-based' indicators (what energizes versus what drains) rather than 'skill-based' indicators (what you are good at versus what you are bad at). The distinction matters because research by Csikszentmihalyi (1990) on 'flow' demonstrates that engagement and energy are better predictors of sustained high performance than skill alone -- a person can be skilled at a task that drains them, producing short-term competent performance that degrades over time as motivation erodes. The gap analysis methodology draws on what portfolio theory (Markowitz, 1952) calls 'diversification assessment' -- the principle that the risk of a portfolio (or team) is determined not by the quality of individual assets (or members) but by the correlation structure among them. A team of brilliant Inventors with no Finishers has high individual quality but high portfolio risk because the genius profiles are correlated (all clustered in the same area). Diversifying the genius profile -- adding Finishers, Discerners, Enablers -- reduces team-level risk while maintaining individual quality.