6 Types of the Working Genius — Guilt
“The Table Group” have made various publications about the 6 Types of the Working Genius in their podcast, workshops, certifications, self assessments, coaching work and a book.
It is a model that claims that there are 6 natural gifts that are required for meaningful accomplishments:
Wonder — pondering the possibility of greater potential and opportunities
Invention — creating original and novel ideas and solutions
Discernment — intuitively and instinctively evaluating ideas and situations
Galvanizing — rallying, inspiring and organizing others to take action
Enablement — encouraging and assisting an idea or project
Tenacity — pushing projects or tasks to completion to achieve results
Out of these 6 gifts, each person:
- Excels at 2, highly enjoys this type of work
- OK-ish in 2, can perform without much joy
- Sucks at the remaining 2, they are energy draining.
These are named working frustrations.
There is a paid self assessment on their website.
The publications explain in length the benefits of each gift, and how all of them need to be present in a team in order to be effective. No single one is better than the other.
For example, a company’s executive team that has Wonder and Invention, as well as Enablement and Tenacity, will come up with many ideas to unlock an opportunity, and rush to execute it before electing the best ideas, creating waste and lost opportunities.
“Have the right people on the bus” and “have the right seat” go hand in hand, when we manage to make use of this model in the hiring process, ongoing 1:1s and performance conversations, which lead to higher engagement, productivity, happiness and outcome. The idea is to identify the best role and work each can do, or realize this is not possible within the organization.
On top of the benefits for teams, the model helps individuals to find their type of work and tasks they would enjoy and do best, and be more productive and happy as a result.
A counter-example is a person who sucks at Invention and works as a copywriter.
“All models are wrong, some are useful” — there is a lot of usefulness in this model, also in non-work settings, such as marriage or friends. I highly recommend to check out their work.
Guilt
The podcast episode about the guilt involved with the working frustrations (what the suck at) really struck me. It details the guilt that individuals who have a certain “working frustration” feel, i.e., how they negatively beat themselves up:
No Wonder — shallow, missing depth, not interesting
No Invention — not creative, no ideas, not imaginative, cannot build things from scratch, unoriginal
No Discernment — not intelligent, slow to grasp, no intuition
No Galvanizing — not a leader, not inspiring, weak
No Enablement — selfish, unkind, not caring, self centered
No Tenacity— lazy, low work ethics, flaky, cannot finish, unreliable
Accept that you have other strengths and make the most of them. Trying to deliberately do more of the type of work in the realm of the working frustration is a futile effort that increases the discouragement.
Change the type of work you’re doing or find others to complete what you are missing.
Acknowledge that we depend on others with completing gifts for results.
