

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The 6 Types of Working Genius" by Patrick Lencioni. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What is the book The 6 Types of Working Genius about? What’s the best way to get a team to work together?
In The 6 Types of Working Genius, Patrick Lencioni walks you through six intelligence types and how they can bolster organizational well-being. Additionally, he addresses how these intelligence types apply to workflow.
Read below for a brief overview of The 6 Types of Working Genius.
The 6 Types of Working Genius by Patrick Lencioni
Patrick Lencioni’s The 6 Types of Working Genius argues that everyone possesses certain “geniuses,” or intelligence types, and that all successful teams consist of members possessing a combination of each type. By identifying which traits your team members have, you can maximize both productivity and individual fulfillment.
Lencioni is an entrepreneur, best-selling author, and speaker. In 1997, he founded the Table Group, a consultancy firm designed to coach organizations toward optimal health. Since then, Lencioni has dedicated himself to helping businesses cultivate sounder management practices and workplace happiness.
Lencioni begins the book with a fable, a common feature in his works (including The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, Death by Meeting, and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team). It tells of a businessman who, despite many professional shifts and successes, still finds himself consistently drained and irritable towards the people around him. After one of his employees delivers some particularly critical feedback regarding these shifting moods, the businessman and members of his team ultimately divulge what tasks they most love and despise at work, thus revealing their particular natural strengths—the framework for the 6 Geniuses is born.
Six Geniuses and the Phases of a Project
Lencioni explains that an intelligence type is intrinsic to the individual, meaning the types reflect what that person is naturally good at. Each intelligence helps people excel at one of six essential activities required during any project, from developing your next product to planning a family vacation to establishing a summer fundraiser for your local charity group. These are Lencioni’s names for the six intelligences as well as the descriptions we’ll use to reference them:
- Wonder: Perceiving Opportunity
- Invention: Innovating Solutions
- Discernment: Vetting Ideas
- Galvanizing: Mobilizing People
- Enablement: Supporting
- Tenacity: Seeing Things Through
We’ll describe each intelligence type in more detail below. For now, it’s important to understand that Lencioni argues that each individual excels in only two intelligence types, that the intelligences are mutually complementing, and that all intelligence types must be represented for a team to succeed.
Lencioni argues that each of these six intelligences has either a responsive (passive) or disruptive (active) quality and that this stems from the source of the intelligence’s inspiration. Passive intelligences draw inspiration from the surrounding world and formulate approaches to changing or reorganizing it—in other words, they respond or react to situations. Active intelligences rely instead on their own internal powers to instigate change or impact behaviors—they create, innovate, and pull ideas from thin air.
Moreover, each intelligence is defined by its role during one of three stages of work that Lencioni defines: ideation, activation, and implementation. From here on out, we’ll refer to these as the brainstorming, set-up, and follow-through phases, respectively, and we’ll describe them in more detail below. Each of these three phases comprises two intelligences—one passive and one active.
Lencioni illustrates the three phases on a downwardly sloping gradient he calls elevation. The earliest phase of work (brainstorming) is at the top, descending through the remaining phases toward the project’s completion. This gradient has a metaphorical quality, where the earliest phases of work occur when our heads are in the clouds and activities are most conceptual. The process then eventually gains practical definition as it descends.
Lencioni emphasizes that one phase of work or intelligence is not better than another—only that they are most effective in a specific sequence in the life cycle of a project. For instance, early-stage discussions typically can’t tolerate too much task-mastering, because they’re meant to be more open and imaginative. Similarly, abstract creativity in later-stage discussions can distract the focus from the project’s execution and last-minute problem-solving. This means that putting team members in positions that don’t capitalize on their unique intelligence can derail the project.
In this section, we’ll study the six intelligences and their essential traits within their respective phases of work.
Phase 1: Brainstorming
Lencioni says the brainstorming stage begins any working process. It involves seeing a need or opportunity and devising ways of addressing or capitalizing on it.
Intelligence #1: Perceiving Opportunity
Category: Passive
The person with this intelligence gets the ball rolling. She recognizes an opportunity in the status quo and contemplates what’s possible. This intelligence is passive because it reacts to external challenges calling out for solutions and is required to catalyze projects.
For example, imagine your company wants to develop a new razor blade for personal care, but that particular market is saturated. This person sees where your competitors are going wrong and why their products don’t fully satisfy consumer demands: because their prices are staggeringly high. Instead of seeing difficulty, the person with this intelligence sees an opportunity—if you could lower production costs while maintaining quality, your company could make its mark.
Intelligence #2: Innovating Solutions
Category: Active
The teammate with this intelligence thinks outside the box. After the person with Perceiving Opportunity intelligence identifies the problem or opportunity, the person who innovates solutions provides an approach to fixing or seizing it through her industrious imagination. This intelligence type is active because it relies on its own inherent creativity and vision and is adept at leading brainstorming sessions with onslaughts of new ideas. The person with this type of intelligence is likely the one who will come up with an ingenious design solution for your new product, and because this intelligence is active. she’ll do so without the need for prompting or direction. Perhaps this person sees how to use a lower-cost but high-quality alloy for your company’s razor blade and that machining this alloy with precision will also take less time than the competitor’s expensive, conventional blade.
Phase 2: Set-Up
This is the critical middle phase of work. This is the time to troubleshoot ideas raised in the previous phase and evaluate their integrity and applicability. This is also the point where the organization must fully commit to the project.
Organizations that dedicate ample time and resources to this phase tend to experience both expedited and positive outcomes. However, according to Lencioni, set-up is typically the most neglected of the three stages of work. When teams rush this phase, they tend to:
- Deliver under-performing outcomes
- Forfeit critical steps that can aid in realizing projects
- Create cycles of mutual blame and resentment among the teammates who lead the previous brainstorming phase and subsequent follow-through phase
Intelligence #3: Vetting Ideas
Category: Passive
The person with this intelligence is the one who determines if the proposals suggested during the brainstorming stage meet the criteria of reality. In other words, are they achievable? This person might be the one to question the feasibility of producing your new item on a competitive scale or warn about how much time and money will go into its development.
This intelligence is passive because it requires the existence of ideas outside itself to evaluate; yet, this person is vital in helping organizations select ambitious yet realistic projects. These are the people in your organization who you constantly look to for their intuition and honesty. The person with this intelligence might point out that supplies of your new alloy are not always reliable, making long-term use an issue, or that engineers have already tried and failed to use it. She may suggest that the company find its own supply source and specific engineering talent to make that avenue safe.

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- The six types of working intelligence that successful teams need
- How to identify which traits your team members have
- How to apply the six types of genius to bolster workflow and well-being