Book of the Month: The 6 Types of Working Genius

The 6 Types of Working Genius has been one of the most enlightening books I've read regarding how people work. In fact, our whole team read the book and took the assessment. It has given us a greater understanding of how we each work and has changed the way we approach projects. It has also relieved some guilt over areas that are not our "genius". 

The 6 types of working genius are as follows:

The Genius of Wonder: the natural gift of pondering the possibility of greater potential and opportunity in a given situation.

The Genius of Invention: the natural gift of creating original and novel ideas and solutions.

The Genius of Discernment: the natural gift of intuitively and instinctively evaluating ideas and situations.

The Genius of Galvanizing: the natural gift of rallying, inspiring and organizing others to take action.

The Genius of Enablement: the natural gift of providing encouragement and assistance for an idea or project.

The Genius of Tenacity: the natural gift of pushing projects or tasks to completion to achieve results.

The 6 types of genius are divided into three stages of work. The first two geniuses, Wonder and Invention, comprise the stage of Ideation. This is where needs are identified and solutions are proposed. This stage begins when someone asks a big question or identifies a need 

The next two geniuses, Discernment and Galvanizing, make up the Activation stage.This stage is about evaluating the merits of the ideas or solutions proposed during Ideation, and then rallying people around the ideas or solutions that are worthy of action.

The final two geniuses, Enablement and Tenacity, comprise the stage of Implementation. This stage is all about getting things done. Whether it is answering the call to action or pushing that action through to the final stages of completion, these genius types are the ones who ensure that the great ideas, the ones that have been discerned and galvanized, actually come to fruition.

It is important that each phase - and therefore each genius - is worked through in order to ensure that your projects and solutions have great success.

The assessment will identify your Working Genius (you have two), Working Competency (you have two of these, too), and Working Frustration (yep, two of these as well). 

When we reviewed the results of our team's assessments, we were able to identify areas we were weak as a team, and areas where we were really strong. We could see each employee's ideal type of work and were able to make some adjustments in order to accommodate those more. We were also able to understand why specific types of work sometimes make us grumpy. 

We have recommended this book to a lot of people and have been hearing reports of how helpful it has been. We will be doing a book study on it in the upcoming months, so stay tuned. In the meantime, we encourage you to pick up a copy of The 6 Types of Working Genius and take the assessment. 

In addition, there is a Working Genius podcast that we have found very helpful. You can check it out here.