Coaching practices for Working Genius Project Management

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Working Genius Project Management, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

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

• 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
• I end every week technically slammed but motivationally empty
• I’ve got a new hire starting and the lazy move is to just hand them whatever’s piled up in the backlog
• We decide things by group vote and the loud idea-lovers always carry the room, while the one person whose gut is usually right about what won’t work gets drowned out
• My team keeps dropping the ball at the same stage every single project

Practices that may help

1. 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)
2. 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)
3. Use genius mapping in onboarding
   Surface a new hire’s geniuses early so you design their role around energy, not just skills.
   The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
4. 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)
5. 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)
6. 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.
7. 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)
8. Take the outside view (base rates)
   Estimate using the track record of similar cases, not the vivid details of your own.
   Thinking, Fast and Slow, Made Usable
9. Maker vs Manager Schedule
   Paul Graham’s framework distinguishes two fundamentally incompatible time structures: makers need long, uninterrupted blocks to produce creative or technical work, while managers run on hourly slots. Mixing meeting culture into a maker’s day destroys the sustained concentration that deep output requires.
10. Schedule buffers as first-class commitments
    Add explicit slack time to your schedule and treat it as non-negotiable white space, not a reserve to fill.
    The Planning Fallacy — Why Your Estimates Are Always Wrong

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