Coaching practices for The 6 Types of Working Genius Patrick Lencioni Under Stress

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Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • There’s a part of my work that quietly wrecks me, but admitting it feels like confessing I’m not good enough, so I just grit my teeth and say nothing
  • I keep dragging the big-picture dreamers into the tedious finishing work and asking my finishers to brainstorm wild ideas, and everyone’s miserable and the handoffs are a mess
  • On paper I’m good at my job, but certain parts of it leave me hollowed out even when I do them well
  • I end every week technically slammed but motivationally empty
  • My team keeps dropping the ball at the same stage every single project

Practices that may help

  1. The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
    Patrick Lencioni’s Working Genius model describes six activities — Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity — that are required to complete any meaningful work. Each person finds two of these energizing (geniuses), two draining (frustrations), and two neutral (competencies). The model is a practitioner framework; it lacks independent peer-reviewed validation, but it provides a practically useful vocabulary for team role awareness.
  2. Name frustrations without shame
    Frustrations are not weaknesses — they’re a mismatch signal that the team can act on.
    The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
  3. Assign project phases to genius-matched people
    Route early ideation to Wonder/Invention geniuses and execution phases to Tenacity geniuses.
    The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
  4. Identify your two working geniuses
    Name the two of the six activities that consistently energize you, not just where you perform well.
    The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
  5. Protect time for work that matches your genius
    Deliberately schedule blocks of genius-type work before filling the rest of the week.
    The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
  6. Map your team’s genius coverage
    Check whether all six activities are covered by someone who finds them energizing.
    The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
  7. Route decisions to your Discernment genius
    Evaluation decisions drain Wonder and Tenacity geniuses — protect your evaluators and route decisions to them.
    The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
  8. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
    Patrick Lencioni’s model describes five compounding failures that undermine teams: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results — each built on the one below. It is a practitioner framework presented as a business fable, not an empirically tested model, but its five dimensions align well with decades of team effectiveness research, making it a useful diagnostic even without controlled-trial support.
  9. Regulate the level of distress in the system
    Keep productive pressure high enough to motivate change but low enough to prevent shutdown.
    Adaptive Leadership, Made Practical
  10. Prioritize and execute
    Under overload, name the single highest priority, solve it, then move to the next.
    Extreme Ownership, Made Practical

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