6 Types of Working Genius -
Team Workshop 1/2 Day
Most team friction isn't personal. It's structural.
High-performing teams aren't built from people who all work the same way. They're built from people who understand how they each work, and have stopped mistaking difference for dysfunction.
The 6 Types of Working Genius is a half-day workshop that gives teams exactly that understanding. And what happens when they have it tends to surprise people.
What Working Genius is
Developed by Patrick Lencioni, the Working Genius model identifies six distinct types of work that every project and team requires. Each person has two types that energize them, their geniuses, two that drain them, and two that they can do but don't sustain them.
The six types are Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity.
When a team doesn't know their mix, they either overload the wrong people, leave critical work uncovered, or spend energy on conflict that isn't actually conflict, it's just misalignment.
When they do know it, everything changes.
What this workshop unlocks
Three things consistently shift when teams go through this work together:
Friction becomes legible. What at first felt personal - the colleague who always slows things down, the one who moves too fast, the one who never seems energized - suddenly makes sense. It wasn't about the attitude or the effort. It was about the fit. That realization alone changes how a team relates.
Drain becomes explainable. When people understand which types of work cost them disproportionate energy, they stop pushing through and start solving the actual problem. Teams that have this conversation stop burning out their best people on the wrong work.
Meetings and workflows get smarter. When a team knows who needs to wonder before they can commit, who needs to galvanize before the group can move, and who will carry execution when others have moved on, they stop running the same ineffective processes and start building ones that actually work.
How the half day works
Participants complete the Working Genius assessment before the workshop, so the day itself is entirely focused on application — not administration.
The session moves through:
Individual results: each person understands their own genius, frustration, and competency profile in depth
Team mapping: the group sees their collective mix for the first time, including what's well covered and what's consistently missing
The friction conversation: guided discussion that reframes past and present tension through the lens of genius types
Practical application: how to use Working Genius in meetings, project assignments, and day-to-day collaboration going forward
Who this is for
Working Genius works for any team, but it lands hardest for teams that are ready to have an honest conversation about how they work together.
Teams ready to stop misreading each other and start working with each other's natural strengths
Leadership teams who want to move from polite alignment to genuine, productive collaboration
Teams navigating change, pressure, or a period of underperformance who want to understand what's actually driving it
Any team that senses there's more collective capacity available than they're currently accessing
What teams leave with
A shared language for how each person contributes and where they genuinely struggle
The ability to have conversations about work distribution and energy that used to feel too awkward to raise
Smarter meetings, clearer ownership, and less of the low-grade friction that slows everything down
A team that understands itself and knows how to use that understanding to move faster and work better together
A final word
The most common thing people say at the end of this workshop is some version of: "I wish we'd done this years ago."
Not because the model is complicated, it isn't. But because what it surfaces is something most teams have been living with for a long time without the language to name it. Once they have that language, the conversation changes. And when the conversation changes, so does the team.