[Music] welcome to the working genius podcast where we discuss anything and everything related to the six types of working genius and how it impacts your work and your life Cody this is our first episode we are legitimately excited that we're launching this new podcast a whole podcast dedicated to working genius they basically we had to do this otherwise our other podcast would just morph into this podcast cuz every time we started we were like let's talk about working genius more and we were getting so many emails and questions and there's so many nuances to this model and since so many people are taking it we decided let's do one just about this right and we have like these Edge sort of like you said nuances like we we now have tens of thousands of data points that we're we're working with and and so many people and testimonies and stories of this changing people's lives and their work and at home so this is a place where we get to dive into all of that we get to continue to explore sort of the corners of this model and I'm very excited and we're gonna have a lot of guests now the the standard crew we're gonna have Tracy Noble and mat Lin chony who helped develop this so the four of us developed this tool and so they're going to be joining us on a lot of the First episodes but we're going to have guests on it to tell us how that changed their life or or how they they understand it and what what they've discovered so we're going to be having lots of people on the show but today in our first episode we are going to play a recording aren't we that's right so we're going to go back to the original the first time we ever talked about working genius on a podcast was on our at the table podcast and so rather than recreate that here we're just going to play that recording and let people Dive Right In so if you already know the working genius model well because you're already using it or you listen to that podcast that we did before and you remember it well you can skip through this and go to one of our other episodes which we've already posted where we talk about various topics related to working genius but if you don't know the model or you want to get reacquainted with it go ahead and have a listen to this next 30 [Music] minutes welcome to another episode of at the table with Patrick lynon where everything we talk about is related to changing the world of work so that more organizations can be more effective and less dysfunctional and employees can be more fulfilled and less miserable I'm your host patlin chony and I'm joined as always by Cody Thompson my co-host how you doing Cody still here love it we also have Tracy Noble our producer on the mic hello gentlemen and Matthew not on the mic our trusty engineer how you doing Matt he's good that's good Cody what are we talking about today okay the title is what is your Genius but I've got a big smile on my face cuz this is the podcast that we've been wanting to do for almost three and a half months now we've been chomping it the bit this is about the new model that we've been working on and just launched last week and so now we actually get a chance to dive in in podcast format and do this the working genius model so the title is discover you or what's your Genius but tell us let's just dive in what is what have we been doing you know what's really exciting here is the four of us sitting in this room are the four people that have been working on this for the last three and a half months Y which is really cool to be sitting here and we are so excited about this I really don't think I've ever been excited about anything I've worked on more than this in my life and I remember the day we came up with this I was sitting in a room with Tracy and Amy and we'll do that we'll tell that story another time but when we shared it with Cody afterward he said I think this is bigger than the five dysfunctions of a team I know and I'll say this like you just said this might be the most excited I've been to work on something I've said that it sounds like Hyperbole and it's not hyperbole at all like I really think that the impact that this model and this tool and this self assessment can have on people's individual like who they are as a person on their teams on their organizations has the potential to be even bigger than the five dysfunctions that's crazy to say but to to go if we could go back in time to the day that you made the five dysfunctions and know the impact it would have had we would have treated it like with this level of care and concern right so we feel like it's a gift that we just are stewarding and want to get out to people and help them I love your excitement right now I wish our listeners could see you cuz you look you look excited I know it's almost we we normally don't record in the afteron afternoons but it's 4 4:30 and I'm stoked so let's do it you can't wipe the smile off Cody's face I love and which is one of the great things about this tool too we can explain that you know I think about when I started this business and I think about when I when we Tracy and when I was a little kid and my dad God Rest his soul and how frustrated he was at work and this tool gets really right at a lot of those things because there's a lot of reasons that you can be frustrated in your work and one of them is if you don't know who you are and what you were made to do y and this is what this is all about when you read the podcast intro every time it's about making work more fulfilling know and so nothing that we've done I think could have the immediate relief of in that specific you know idea of like making your work more fulfilling this accomplishes that better than anything I thought that as I was doing the intro like this is at the heart of that so let's talk about the six types of working genius here there's it's really two different things first of all these six different things are like activities or skills the six of them make up the process of getting anything done right whether it's a project at work or launching a product or running a company or running a department within that company or planning a family vacation or organizing curiculum at at school or a or an event at church I mean any activity any kind of work this is working genius and there's six different ones and as it turns out of those six every body has two that we would call working genius and that means they get energy from them they're joyful when they do them and they're naturally good at it as a result so if you could spend most of your working time in your two areas of working genius you are probably going to love what you do yeah I will say this up front too that we don't sit around and think of models right this is you don't start with oh hey let's discover or invent a model that would make work more fulfilling we work back W from the problems that we're facing with our clients or in our lives and this feels like it's so powerful because it's true it feels like we you in particular and we'll talk about why your Genius was particularly helpful in determining this but that it feels like we just lifted the veil off of something that was true that was frustrating for us and for other people yeah so I'll just go into a little bit of that and Tracy you were part of this one day I was in this very room where we do the podcast and something H I was on a zoom call talking to like 70 priests and and their staff members doing like a zoom call for how to lead a church MH and then afterward I did a zoom call with the staff that was organizing that and I was giving them feedback and kind of pushing them around some stuff and after that as soon as it closed down I turned to Amy who was sitting next to me and I said Amy I have an idea about our podcast we should try this new thing and Amy looked at me and said what why are you the way you are why do you act this way and I said I don't know but part of it I love part of it frustrates me and I've been kind kind of frustrated in my work for the last 20 years because of something I don't understand and that started a conversation that led across the street over to our office and me and you and Amy and Kim sat there for about three or four hours with a whiteboard and somehow this kind of popped out of my head and so it was really me trying to solve a problem it's like why do I get frustrated even though I love my work and I realized cuz I wasn't working in my genius yes and I was too often doing things outside of it and it was draining me of my energy and joy yep and so it seems like that was years ago Tracy I know and that was three and a half months ago which is incredible I cannot believe it was three and a half months ago I can't either I have a three-month-old baby that can barely sleep and so the fact that we have a functioning model and an assessment is just wild but Pat like you said it was 20 years in the making yes you have been thinking about this for the last 20 years you just didn't know it exactly and the anticipation is killing me and I'm sure it's killing The Listener so we should probably Jump Right In and what are these six things okay so here they are the six different types of working genius the first one is the gift or the genius of wonder wonder with the w it sounds like and and the gift of Wonder is all about the ability to ponder and to consider things and to be thinking and and contemplative about what's going on in the environment in the company in the world in your family wherever else it is people with the gift of Wonder and they probably don't think they have a gift at all M they can sit and think about things and and they identify like missing potential or greater opportunity or a problem that's not being solved because they can sit in that ambiguity and just wonder about it and Ponder what's going on and it's an actual gift and so often the people with this one get overlooked right I've heard you say it this way that these people are obsessed with unrealized potential and people or projects you know like they literally will sit around and go I just don't know are we doing the right thing or is this the best that we can do I think there's more there you know they say those types of things and it's that angst around are we realizing our full potential right and they don't necessarily know what to do with it right if that's the extent of the genius but it's a such a huge thing this whole model came about cuz Amy turned to me that day and said why are you the way you are people that say why and why not have the genius of Wonder and we just had a consultant named Zach write to us and say I have the geni of Wonder I've never realized it I've often gotten criticized for asking why and why not and people would say why aren't you on board and he said no because see I need to understand I think there's more going on here that's so cool and and he said like my whole career people have just said like get in line you know basically like you know and finally with this assessment and him recognizing as a genius he gets to embrace that right and he he knows why He's a consultant now too yes so the genius of Wonder is is if if this is linear and it kind of is the genius of Wonder comes first but then comes the genius of invention The Genius of invention is that person who says that's a worthwhile problem that you wonder or came up with please let me try to solve it let me come up with something new let me come up with a creative novel Solution that's going to solve that problem okay and the genius of invention just love and this is one of mine I just love to come up with new ideas and i' prefer a blank slate I love the idea of inventing or innovating from scratch right and actually when I'm telling this or doing this model with people in the last three months to try to like get the word out there I always use you as the example like some like saying someone says why do meeting suck and you're like oh let me try to figure that out and you invent a whole new model around meetings and it's great it it directly solves the problem that we were trying to identify like these these meetings are not good there the potential is not there and then the inventor comes along and says I'd love to solve that they have empathy for the question and they're like I want to try my that's worthy of my energy and effort to tryy to solve and that you know you have a genius when you want to use it even if it's not called for right because while I'm an inventor I love the genius of invention sometimes invention is what not what's needed yep and yet people will come to me and I'll start inventing and and now that we know this we'll go we don't want your eye yep we don't want you to be inventing right now we're beyond that stage but they know that that's just my natural genius and I I I gravitate toward that that's right it's so fun for me to have this language now because I've witnessed your Genius of invention over the last 23 years and I never had the language for it I never understood I just thought what is Pat doing how does he keep coming up with all of this and this is your Genius this is where you shine and we call it a gift these are god-given talents it's not like I take I like I was like this since I grew up and to be able to use it is a blessing but it's not like I'm like I'm so special this is just the thing I have because there's two on this list that I'm terrible at right well it is worth mentioning You' say this often where this is the one the genius of invention is the one that's most commonly recognized as a like a genius I'm using air quotes here because people are like oh he's a genius or she's a genius she came up with this and one of the things that we're doing with this whole model is that you have to recognize that all six of these are required and some people can't do some of them and so it kind of levels the playing field and and elevates people who have different Geniuses that are like Man Without You with these other Geniuses we wouldn't all these inventions would just stay inventions or they may not be good well and without the gift of Wonder you might not have solved a problem anyway but the genius of invention doesn't mean that you have the the next genius which is necessary because not all inventions are good and the next genius I love to talk about is the genius of discernment The Genius of discernment and that is people with this genius have great gut instincts and great intuition they know how to how to evaluate and assess something whether it's going to be a good idea or not and it's not through data and linear thinking they see patterns and they they just have this amazing intuition so the the the inventor throws something out there and the person with the genius of discernment can say wait whoa whoa whoa that's an like you said Cody you got this better than any of us or they can say whoa whoa whoa I don't think this is going to work or here's three areas that I don't that don't make sense to me and we just people with the genius of discernment we just trust their opinions and their judgment they're really good curators of what's going on around them and they know how to take all that information and come to really good Solutions and advice and counsel yeah and I love when you say that like this is sort of like an integrated intuitive thinking process because I think some people hear this and think industry expertise like oh I have an expertise in this area let's go talk to this person who knows a lot about XYZ that's not it in fact discerners are people that can do this across a broad range of topics they they seem to have this like natural ability to evaluate things even that they don't know right you know so so it is that is the the relationship between the inventor and discerner so talk a little bit about that yeah it it's an iterative process the invent the person with a genius of invention throws an idea out there and the discerner comes along and says o what about this that's a great idea how about this and they go back and forth and finally the discerner says I think it's there I think we've got something and that's huge so we've had Wonder invention discernment and then the next one that comes along though is this if this is worth doing then the galvanizer The Genius of galvanizing has to come along and say let's get people excited let's recruit people let's inspire people let's gather people together and get this moving get this organized to take action see the G and you have the genius of galvanizing Cody and see you and I are both enfps in the Myers Briggs yeah and for years you felt bad because we were different this gave me some immediate relief when you put the when you put these things together because you mentioned this up front but each of us have two working Genius of the six and I used we're both nfps and I would go home literally when Tracy said hey I've seen you do this invention thing for a long time we didn't have the language you would get a whiteboard marker and go up and solve the problem or invent the solution and I would try to do a miniature version of like a junior Pat impression when you're gone and it never seemed to work and it like so I would go home and i' be like man we're both the nfps what's wrong with me do I Listen to Too Many podcasts do I watch too much TV why is Pat able to do this and I'm not and then when I realized that you have invention and discernment that's your two Geniuses mine is discernment and galvanizing I got to go oh I'm not an inventor and that was actually so freeing for me to be able to go I get to live in my genius and guess what the very thing that frustrated you was that you had to invent something and Galvanize it well that's the thing I was constantly galvanizing which is not my area of genius and it was was exhausting me and I didn't know why that's what started this whole thing is that every time we'd come up with a new idea people would go okay Pat get us get us moving around this and when we finally came up with this model I said hey who else in the company is has got the genius of galvanizing Cody does he's got to be the person to get us rallied and it's it's freed me up to live in my genius it Taps into yours absolutely I mean that's why I have this level of energy talking about this I literally have had backto backto back Zoom calls talking about this model and by the fifth one I'm more excited than I am by the first one because I'm going out there and telling the world you know like this is what I love to do around stuff that I find good I'm a discerner like this is the solution a galvanizer goes I got to tell the whole world yeah now the next one after you Galvanize is the genius of enablement and that's a good word people think enablement you don't want to enable people who have an drinking problem or drug addiction no enablement is a good thing it means people that make things possible that enable things to happen and when the galvanizer galvanizes and inspires people and recruits people the person with the genius of enablement the e as we say they know how to say I know what you need I can help you with that I will come alongside and make this work on your terms and two of the people in this room Tracy and Matt this is one of their Geniuses yes and it's extraordinary because you know exactly how to help and when to help and you can Flex to what's needed to happen a lot of people with this genius think oh I'm just nice exactly or I'm a pushover I'll do anything people ask no this is an actual genius and it's something that we need to recognize and when you finally get those people to realize what a gift it is you do that usually by helping them realize how many people don't have that gift right I know and I'm tempted right now to jump into these examples because it helps explain but I think we should go all the way through and then it's what what you do is you look at a team and you say hey if if we don't have people with this level of Genius here's what we can expect in terms of like where projects fall off and enablers they get the ball rolling I mean they they love being responding to the galvanizer and saying I'm here to help was it hard for you to admit that you had this one Tracy you recognize this now right yeah I think so I think I struggled with this one for a while just because I didn't see it as a genius right I thought I was just a pushover and just and and I I didn't understand it as a genius but I think you've given me the language now I'm like okay I get it now and the people in our company that are have the genius of enablement they make things happen they get thing off the ground the people we we've worked with organizations have no one with the genius of enablement and they we have the hardest time getting people going cuz nobody wants to help they all want to invent or they all want to discern or they all want to Galvanize well who's going to actually respond totally and what I love and this is part application in the you know we'll get into that but part of what makes this so amazing is I look at you Tracy with someone who has enablement and and the enablement falls in my bottom two which are like so painfully hard for me to do and I am like can celebrate that in you Abol I'm like to me that that is seems impossible and so distasteful and you are just like to be able to look at someone and celebrate it because I don't have it is amazing it is and I feel it's a similar experience around galvanizing because that is in my bottom too that's I think my my bottom and I look at when you g I I I think it's magic it's like magic the about that's the wonderful thing in here it helps us celebrate one another's gifts and move them into roles where they can be the very best that they can be absolutely the last of the six genius is called the Genius of tenacity the the the person who has a genius of tenacity loves to finish things they like to drive things across the Finish Line make sure that the the results and the impact has been achieved and they're not responding to the emotional appeal of the galvanizer they're responding to the need to see it finished and completed that's right and this is very very low on mine and I really appreciate it when people have that because it means that even after some of the the luster is worn off or the the the exciting new part of something that they're going to keep us moving they're going to stay on top of us and make sure we finish y yeah they're not they're not satisfied with the getting the ball to the 2 yard line I mean they they want to punch it through to the end zone and they get actual real satisfaction joy and energy from finishing things yeah which is amazing I mean I know people like this in my life or on teams that we I mean Tracy has this too and or up in her top couple but it's amazing my wife has this and she will Marvel at like she gets real satisfaction from finishing a project or checking a box on something or saying like we finally saw the impact of this whole process in the world yeah and neither my wife nor I have this in fact it's in our very very bottom which is why our garage is usually a mess and our power got cut off once because we both forgot to pay the bills right so but but now we know that we used to go why aren't you doing that it's like we both stink at tea and we and we and it's we call it working frustration because well you know what that's actually what we should do next is you should do the two two and two yeah so so two of these six things Wonder invention discernment galvanizing enablement and tenacity two of those six are what we call working genius and that means you can it's like take a cup of and and pour coffee into it and then put a lid on the top and if it's one of these you know these tumblers Tumblers or wherever these kids are caring around with them all the time Matt has one with him at all times and you put the lid on it it can hold that that coffee the heat for for a long long time so th this is where you pour energy into something and if it's your working genius you can maintain your joy and your energy for a long long long time and you're naturally good at that there's another one which is like pour coffee into a cup but don't put a lid on it and it's going to hold the heat for a while but it's eventually going to dissipate you know and if you leave it outside it's probably going to evaporate over time but you know you can do it we call these working competencies and two of them fall into that cat two working competencies and and you can do them you wouldn't want to do them all the time but if you had to do them for quite a while you could probably make it work so these are in the M middle areas the last two are working frustrations we call them and this is the cup of coffee you pour the coffee in and there's a hole in the bottom of the cup and it just drains right through it doesn't hold any liquid and so all the joy all the the energy is gone and if you have a job where you have to work in your areas of frustration you are miserable and you know what is crazy is right after we threw this up on the board for the first few times I'm still a little jealous I wasn't at the first 4-Hour meeting I was I was right but the job I had before this one at a startup in San Francisco this is a job that I I would literally go home and I'm like everyone in the world wants this job I was the fourth employ at the startup that was growing super quickly and I was miserable and I was like why is this the case and now that we have this language I look back and I'm like it required me to do the exact two things that are in my bottom category it could be the it could be the sexiest looking job in the world but if you're required to work outside of your working genius and and especially in your working frustrations it's not right for you it's going to be miserable my first job as a Management Consultant was supposed to be the greatest job for college grads but all they wanted me to do is enablement which is whatever the B says do what we say and come alongside us when we need you and tenacity which is and just finish everything and I didn't realize at the time I like I thought management consulting means I was going to be giving advice to managers as it does I was going to be doing spreadsheets and printing things really late at night before a deadline and so it makes sense that I wasn't but I was like why am I failing and it's like because God Gave You strengths and you're not using any of them here MH that's right and what a relief when people figure this out I would love for everyone on this podcast I mean they've they've been around they've T they've been here when we talk about the arguments that we've had and the people on that people that listen to this like it feels like we know them and they know us and for for them to be able to speak some of the same language around like man I'm a I'm a Wonder Tena tenacious person or I'm an enabler gal galvanizer you know so you know a lot of people said why didn't you charge more for this cuz like if we made this an Enterprise player we wanted to maximize our Revenue we might have charged more but we said we want every if there's a parent out there as a kid graduating from high school or college or you know somebody who's frustrated in their work this is a chance to give them insight and they will Pro we've had so many people have their minds blown by looking at their report and saying oh my gosh I never had language for this before now I realize what was wrong totally I was just talking to a team this week where the the team leader is not a galvanizer and there's no one else really on the team that has any level of galvanizing they keep thinking man if we if we invent the right thing and we execute on it people will come yeah and no one's coming and and so the amount of relief it gave to them to go like oh okay you guys are missing this key piece of the puzzle when when you think about that and this is why I say it has the the potential impact to exceed the five dysfunctions is this is true in your marriage it's true personally it can like even just knowing this about yourself the the thing that makes this different from any other personality assessment is it's great to I'm an ENFP and I get to read about we love the Myers disc all those different things but at the end of the day it doesn't tell me exactly where I slide into getting something done right and and that's what people say is well should I hire a d or an s or an I or should I hire an entj or whatever else and we're always like well it's hard to know but this says these six things make sure a person wants to do those tasks and if they do they're going to be so happy and if they don't no matter how talented you think they are you're going to drive them into the ground and I will say this like cuz I I keep having these conversations and even one one person I was talking to was like no I think I believe in this as much as you do and I was like I don't think so let me let me keep going and what what I see actually is like that I think that there's a real probability or possibility in the world where like when people apply for jobs there should be like a two-letter code on the Jobing for an ET yeah we're looking for or a wonder galvanizer you know that helps them because it's not about experience you know it's like oh I worked at Visa before this that doesn't really help you understand this but this model itself is a testament to the fact that we did all that we did in 3 and2 months to get it out in the world we couldn't have done if we didn't play into each other's Geniuses true you know I think we hired Matthew and Liam earlier in the summer right and we came up with this model like weeks before they started so we said hey you guys take this so we figure out how to staff you so we looked at Matthew who is a discerner and and enablement genius and we said he should work on this project here because it's going to re a lot of discernment anding about this what are the right questions how do we test it and he's going have to help Tracy and us do this and he's been wildly successful Liam on the other hand is a galvanizer tenacity genius and he we put on a different project that needed somebody to kick butt and get things done he's been wildly successful had we swapped them their success level and enjoyment of their jobs would have been completely completely different not to mention we wouldn't have been able to do what we did you know because you take someone you know if if we talk about culture being getting the right people on the bus this is the most practical way to make sure that the people on the bus are in the right seat in the right seat as Jim Collin says yeah you got to get them in the right seats the other thing is Liam who's 22 years old has the gift of galvanizing he was on a team with people 20 years older than him and we said you need to Galvanize them and the other people said yeah and he goes but I I don't even know your business that well it doesn't matter you like to Rally people when we have a goal we need you to get people going to to crack the whip and the other people said yeah please do that cuz we're not Galvan and he's loving that MH and he said I it'll taken me 10 years at another company before I could do this but we said it's a it's a gift it's a skill you don't earn it by being in your chair for 10 years right y you know I want to talk about one other thing that has to do with right after the tool came out literally the night we came up with I wrote it on the whiteboard in the other office I went home cuz we had just come back from the co shutdown and we were working in the office again and I had a a zoom it and I and I wrote it on the Whiteboard for this consultant a friend of ours I mean people know Chris he's on our podcast and I said hey Chris look at this new model we came up with and he was like wow that's interesting but we I mean literally it had been around for 6 hours yeah the next morning he had a call with the CEO of a company and he was Consulting to them and the CEO is like I'm so frustrated with the process of how we get things done and it's driving me crazy and Chris was like wait a second cuz he knows how to spot these things and he draws the new model on the board and the CEO is staring at it tears in his eyes he says this is my problem this is the problem this works and they've reorganized as a result of that right well I love this I was going to read this email I mean there's so many stories like that that the aha moment is so it's so simple and so practical and so immediate that somebody took the assessment and we got this email today it says guys wow very intuitive so helpful I'm I'm wonder and discernment my business partner is invention and tenacity it's helped explain a frustration that i/we have felt for years and it flipped the we used to flip too quickly from idea to implement my business partner feels like I slow things down a bit at times helps explain that too so almost immediately the insights come within 10 minutes right my wife and I in our marriage were like here's why we argue here's why we do so well together we better Outsource this thing because neither of us want to do it yep you had said this Pat when we talk about it's important for two reasons we could for two hours on on this and we're I think we're going to break it up we're going to do multiple around the six Geniuses but let's end with this like the this is important for two reasons tell us what that means well first of all it reduces unnecessary guilt too many people walk around in life think I feel bad that I'm not good at that I remember Chris said gosh I've never been a tea and I've always felt like am I lazy or am I and I feel the same way and it's like no that's not your gift and it doesn't mean sometimes we don't have to do stuff like that but why make yourself feel guilty for for not being good at something that's not your natural god-given Talent the other thing is we judge each other we'll see somebody at work and we go hey they're not finishing that they must not care they're lazy or they don't know how to come up with a new idea they're just dumb and it's like and and we don't do that overtly but inside we start to judge people when once we understand there are geniuses we're like I can celebrate who Tracy is she can celebrate who I am and we can help each other filling the gaps that that we have it really does go a long way to reducing unnecessary tension at work yeah what we're going to do in our next podcast most likely you know all of this is subject to change is talk about teams yeah teamwork how teamwork changes as a result of people understanding one another's Geniuses and and stories about about how that's worked here and at other companies but we would love to hear from you if you when you take this we really want you to take it at working genius.com we would love to hear about your insights and Pat I'll let you wrap up before you go I want to say one thing and that is we almost never sell anything on this podcast we don't feel good about it we're just like except those cookies that woman that was awesome but I feel so strongly about like I just want everybody on this podcast like this is the one thing that I'm like you know in the 70 podcasts we've done where I'm like this will help you so and if it doesn't you email us and we'll send you a notebook and and and the thing is is is there are so many things out there like if you're listening to this and you're like me you hear something on a podcast you're like that's great I might check that out later let this be the one that you write down go home get on your computer and actually do and have your spouse do it have you have a one of your older children do it it can really make a difference and we're so excited about that yes I love it Tracy thanks for being on thank you for having me we have our introverted friends on and and it's hard for them to get a word in sometimes we feel bad after we're aware of that by the way you send us an email and you're like hey you should let the other people talk we're like I know we screwed that up again but thank you Tracy for all you did around this Matt you ser and Cody it's been fun it always is we love talking to you we love doing these podcasts we wish we could be be with all of you until the next time God [Music] bless