1135: Patrick Lencioni on How to Identify Your Gifts for More Energizing Work Days

Pete Mockaitis
Pat, welcome back!

Patrick Lencioni
It’s great to be back with you. It’s been a while.

Pete Mockaitis
It has, yes, and we both moved to Tennessee since we chatted last.

Patrick Lencioni
Isn’t that crazy? Yeah, one less family in Illinois and one less family in California. And here we are.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. Well, it is, it’s icy out, but, hopefully, you have some hot insights – no pressure – to drop here. We’re talking about Working Genius, but first I wanted to zoom way out and hear what’s one of the most surprising and fascinating discoveries you’ve made about us humans and how we work together well from all of your work with consulting and researching and writing?

Patrick Lencioni
Wow! I think that one of the things I’ve realized is that the root of all sin is pride, and the antidote to pride is humility. And humility is the key ingredient to relationships, and teams, and individual growth, and relationships. I think you know of an author named Matthew Kelly, probably. He used to say, “Humility is the most attractive quality in the world.” And I believe that.

When you meet somebody, like, “Man, they ooze humility,” and you can’t fake that, because then it wouldn’t be real. Because to be around somebody that’s humble, and in the workplace, people that are humble, people are like, “I want to listen to them. I want to follow them.”

And so, I think that everything we do At The Table group seems to be rooted, ultimately, in humility.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s juicy. Let’s dig in a little bit more. So what specifically do you mean by humility? How do you define it? How do you know it when you see it?

Patrick Lencioni
I’m glad you asked because it’s not being self-deprecating around the things that you’re good at. Humility is about truth. So there are some people who go, “That person is really humble. They never think they’re right. They’re always putting themselves down.” That’s not humility.

Humility is, “I know what I’m good at. I know what I’m not good at. I’m just as capable of talking about both of those. I know who I am. I know what other people are great at, and I celebrate them.” And so, it’s like this recognition of what is true and good. And C.S. Lewis said, “Humility isn’t thinking less of yourself. It’s just thinking about yourself less.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah, that’s good. And I’m thinking about, in leadership contexts when some folks, it seems like they’re uncomfortable acknowledging that someone else is right and they are wrong. You mentioned humble people are very attractive to follow. I’m thinking about some of my favorite experiences in following people are when we’re just having a meeting, we’re just going through some things, some ideas, they propose an option, I propose an option.

And one of my favorite phrases to hear from a leader is, “Hmm, I like your way better.”

Patrick Lencioni
Oh, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Because, well, one, it just feels good, like, “Ooh, oh, I feel affirmed, validated, smart, I scored some points.” And, two, it’s humble at the same time. They acknowledge, “Hey, I had an idea, you had an idea. And this time I like yours better, and I’m comfortable and humble and strong enough to own that. As opposed to feeling the need to somehow make your idea mine, to somehow subtly point out all the risks,” or, “Okay, maybe let’s give your thing a shot.” Like, that feels much less edifying and enjoyable.

Patrick Lencioni
And, you know, I think the contrapositive of that, or the corollary to that, is people who also will say, “Oh, no, that was my bad.” When they make a mistake and they go, “Oh, no, I fully own that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Totally, yes.

Patrick Lencioni
One of the other definitions of humility I heard, I don’t know who said this, I have to look it up, but it said, “Humility is like standing next to a cathedral and being just as proud of it as though you had built it yourself.” Like, I didn’t have to do that and I can still say, “Oh, look how beautiful that is. Somebody else did this. I didn’t, I couldn’t, and I’m so happy that somebody else could do that,” rather than, like, “Well, what does it say about me that I didn’t or couldn’t?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, oh, totally. Well, we’ll go just a little further there before we talk Working Genius. When it comes to humility, I’m thinking of, now we had Amy Edmondson on the show, and we were talking about psychological safety. And so, there’s some research which shows that that’s a real big deal.

Patrick Lencioni
Which is not what people think it is. I love that about her.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I want to get your take on that in terms of teams working together effectively, psychological safety is huge. And the more I reflect on that, the more I think about humility and virtue, in general, seems to be absolutely critical to have that, both as the giver of saying of things that can feel unsafe to the hearer, and the hearer, you know, feeling unsafe by what they’ve just heard, offense or defensively, however everyone think about that.

It seems like you really got to have a lot of virtue and psychological mental health for psychological safety to be a reality because any number of things can feel unsafe.

Patrick Lencioni
Yes, and if being disagreed with or not affirmed in something makes you psychologically unsafe, that’s not something that the team has to do or the leader. Like, a person who needs to be agreed with or protected from responsibility for their own actions or positions on things, that’s not psychological safety.

And I love that about her, because people kind of hijack psychological safety, and says, “Nobody can ever be offended for being disagreed with.” Like, you said, that guy that said to you, “Hey, no, I like your idea better.” Or if he said, “Oh, no, I think your idea, that’s not a good idea.” Both of those should be psychologically safe.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And so, could you speak to what are the vibes, the elements, the things going on within a team such that folks can hear that, “No, your idea is not going to work,” and that’s totally cool?

Patrick Lencioni
Right. I think it gets back to humility, and it also gets back to what you know about yourself. Do you know what you’re good at and what you’re not good at? And one of the things that makes a person really struggle in work is when they don’t know their defects, and they’re not even defects, they’re shortcomings and everybody’s got them.

When they can’t go, “Oh, here’s my idea, but I’m not really good at thinking this way, so if I’m wrong, it’s probably understandable.” When a person actually tries to be good at something they’re not good at and you have to protect them from realizing that they’re not good at that, that’s a terrible thing for a team. And it’s a very low ceiling for a person in their career.

The best people in jobs are the ones that know their strengths and use them, and they know their weaknesses and they’re not afraid to highlight those. And so psychological safety has to be a person that’s willing to acknowledge their weaknesses as well as their strengths.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then I’m also thinking just about like a woundedness, you know, like some things are just a real sore spot for folks, and it may not be sensible, rational, true. And yet, that’s there, it’s like, “Ooh, you just hit something.”

Patrick Lencioni
Yeah, and, essentially, I’m doing some work around this right now. When people have wounds and they’re not aware of them, it throws everything off.

Because you can look at a person’s Myers-Briggs or their Working Genius or their typology, whatever it is, but that doesn’t explain everything. There’s also virtues that they choose to exercise, and wounds that they have that they either have worked on or they’re not aware of.

You can’t understand a person completely just by understanding their types. You have to also understand these other things that factor into it. And wounds are the big one that I’m realizing that really make it hard to understand somebody, because if they don’t understand their wounds, they don’t understand why they’re not being true to their self.

And I know that sounds very complex, but I’ve discovered my wounds in the last five years of my life in a deep way. And, man, has it been a godsend to go, “Oh, I never realized that happened to me. I just need to go now come to terms with this and work on it so I can actually be the person I’m meant to be.”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And not to put you on the spot, but when we say the word wounds, could you give a couple examples of things that tend to pop up, kind of often, and really do have an impact on individual, professional, and team effectiveness at work?

Patrick Lencioni
Yeah, so a lot of high achievers, one of the reasons why they work hard or strive to be successful is because they’re operating out of their wounds, and they’ve turned their wounds into superpowers, if you will. In other words, “Oh, I have to be perfect,” or, “I have to please others,” or, “I have to achieve. I have to prove that I’m good at this.”

And while that is something you get rewarded for in life, ultimately, you’re not getting the peace you want because we should be working out of joy and love and desire to do good, not fear and worry and running from the possibility of failure.

And I think there’s more people that are successful because they’re afraid to fail than the other. And people are looking at them, going, “Well, you don’t have too big of a problem because you’re doing well in your career.” And they’re like, “Yeah, but you don’t understand. Every day I wake up and go, ‘Is today the day I’m going to fail or…?’”

And so, a lot of people have different kinds of wounds that make them try so hard, and so they don’t recognize them as wounds because they think, “That’s why I’m successful.”

Pete Mockaitis
And when you gave us some examples, these were sort of like false beliefs, “I have to, I have to, I have to, I have to.” It’s sort of like, in this context, a wound is a belief that is false and problematic and causes unease. Is that the entirety of what a wound is? Or is that just a subset?

Patrick Lencioni
I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s the entirety. My guess is that there’s probably some others. But what it does is, it’s the unease. Because that unease could get you to do things that society says are good, or it could get you to do things that society says are bad. And that’s almost independent of the wound itself.

So we look at people who like, “I’m an athlete, and I’m in my 40s, and I can’t give up my sport, and I have to go for another Super Bowl.” And I’m not trying to pick on Tom Brady or anybody in particular. And it might be because this is their whole identity, right?

Or somebody else who’s like, “Hey, I love that I get to do this. I can still do it. Why not give it a shot? It’ll be fun. And if it doesn’t work out, I’m fine.” It can look exactly the same from the outside, but the reason they’re doing it informs whether it’s healthy or from a standpoint of woundedness.

And so many people work from a place of like, “I have to prove that I can still be that person. I have to prove that this is who I am. I’m a successful athlete,” or author or leader. And it’s like, “No, we’re not meant to do it out of fear. We’re meant to do it out of joy.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, before we shift into talking Working Genius, specifically, just so we don’t leave anybody hanging, if they’re like, “Oh, my gosh, yes, that’s inside me,” what are some next steps or resources you’d point folks to who are seeing some of this woundedness stuff in themselves?

Patrick Lencioni
Well, there’s an author, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Bob Schuchts.

Pete Mockaitis
I think so, yeah.

Patrick Lencioni
So, he’s this Catholic author that’s a psychologist, and he wrote a book called Be Healed. And it’s a very faith-filled book, and he goes through the different kind of wounds, but there’s all kinds of other people out there. And there’s a lot of work these days on what’s called complex PTSD, CPTSD, which sounds very…and it talks about childhood trauma.

And most people listen to that and go, “Listen, nothing horrible happened to me when I was a kid,” and that’s what makes it complex. Sometimes little things happen throughout our childhood and we don’t realize the impact that had on us. So I really recommend people look into those things.

It sounds so deep and dour and psychological, but a lot of people have grown up with complex PTSD, which means you didn’t really get affirmed as a child. You didn’t really get paid attention to. And over time you adapted to that and even became successful, but you can’t experience the peace you’re supposed to. So the resources around those things are really good.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot, and these notions of, it’s not like an epic trauma in terms of abuse or whatnot. But I can still recall like, geez, sixth grade, I was the school store manager for our student council. And someone asked me in a student council meeting, “Oh, yeah, how much money did the school store make?”

And I thought that the treasurer’s job is count money. And so, I looked over the treasurer, he’s like, “Yeah, how much did we make?” And then the student council president said to me, like in front of everybody, “Actually, that’s your job.” And she pointed at me and I was like, “Gasp,” and it felt profoundly shameful and embarrassing in that moment.

And, in a way, like, there are echoes of that in terms of, if I screw up, like on something that’s kind of important, and maybe kind of public, it’s like, “Oh,” you know, there’s some reverberation there.

Patrick Lencioni
Yes, and like what somebody would say is, “Was that the first and only time that happened or did that actually provoke memories of things that happened when you were younger or other things?” And that’s the thing. Sometimes somebody has just one incident, and you go, “That’s called PTSD.”

And sometimes it could be something horrible, like you got beaten up by somebody or something like that. Sometimes it can be embarrassed in front of the…and that was the only time, but you remember it. But often, what people realize is they go, “Oh, actually, I was kind of treated like, ‘You better not mess up. You better not mess up. You better not mess up.’ And then when you did, it was like, ‘Oh, it all came crashing down.’”

And there’s really good normal psychologists out there. I’m a believer in using one that has faith because, for me, that’s critical. And they help you go through, and they go, “I wonder if other things, anything else happened.” And they can help you think through those things, reprocess them, and let them go so you can move on in your life.

So this isn’t about wallowing in self-pity or making a big deal out of something small, but it’s also not about dismissing things, like, “Oh, just dust yourself off.” Sometimes stuff happens when you’re young. For me, there was kind of an implied thing, like, “You kind of need to be perfect.” And there’s reasons for that.

And so from age five, I was like, “Well, I better please my parents, my teachers, my coaches, my bosses.” So I became this pleaser of everyone, which is not healthy.

So I had to kind of go explore that. And, boy, thank God for that, because I’m learning how to enjoy life more and do my work from a place of excitement about getting to use my talents, as opposed to running from the possibility that I might fail or let somebody down.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Pat, so much good stuff. And this is just a warmup. We’re talking about Working Genius.

Patrick Lencioni
Well, luckily, Working Genius connects to all this.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, absolutely. Well, tell us, what’s the big idea behind The 6 Types of Working Genius?

Patrick Lencioni
So I’m going to start with this. It’s really about avoiding guilt, shame, and judgment in life. Now, people are going to be like, “But wait, I thought it was a working tool.” Working Genius is about understanding the reality that you’re really, really good at a few things. And those are gifts that God gave you, and you’re meant to use those.

And you’re also not very good at a few things. And sometimes you have to do those things, but you shouldn’t feel bad that you’re not great at those. So, let me tell you how it came about, and I think it might be helpful. You know, it’s so funny, when I was on your podcast in 2020, I think, we got to look at the, it might have been the, do you remember the month I was with you?

Pete Mockaitis
I can look it up right now.

Patrick Lencioni
Because I think this idea came about in that very month.

Pete Mockaitis
We published it in March of 2020, just when things were popping off, huh?

Patrick Lencioni
Oh, okay. So two months later, I was back at work, so it was right after I was on your podcast last. And I was doing my work on Zoom because COVID was still kind of lingering there. And so I was in this one Zoom call and I was with a bunch of Catholic priests, teaching them how to be better leaders and managers. And I love that because I work with a lot of churches. And I was really excited and really in a good mood.

Then I had to have another Zoom call with a team that had worked on something I needed to give them feedback about how they needed to work harder and do more, and I was really bummed. I didn’t like doing that. And then I had another meeting where I talked about a podcast we were starting. I was really excited.

And the woman with me, Amy, she said, “Pat, why are you like that?” And I said, “What?” And she said, “Why do you get so excited and so bummed out and then so excited?” And I thought, “I don’t know why I’m like that, but it’s been going on for 20 years and I want to figure it out.”

And that, by the grace of God, prompted me with a whiteboard and a pen to sit down and figure out, “What is it about those moments when I get bummed out and the moments that I’m excited? What am I doing in those moments? What kind of actions, activities am I involved in?”

And the next thing I knew, I had these six circles on the board, which were the different kinds of work that are involved in any kind of project or any kind of work at all, at home, at the office, whatever. And I thought, “Oh, I love doing these two. These two, they’re okay. These two, oh, I really don’t like those. What’s going on?”

And what I found out was I was doing something that I wasn’t really great at every day. Every day, I’d come to work and people in my office go, “Do that for us. Do that for us. Do that for us.” And I thought, “Well, I’m the leader of the company, I guess I have to do it. And I think leaders are supposed to do this.” And it was burning me out. Burning me out hard over the course of many years.

Well, I wasn’t coming up with a book or a new product. I was just trying to explain my own behavior. One of our consultants saw the model on the whiteboard, and we told him about it, and the next day he was working with the CEO who was really struggling. He goes, “Let me show you this model I just saw yesterday,” and he put it up on the board.

And the guy had tears in his eyes, and he was like, “Oh, that explains it, why I’m so unhappy.” And so we were like, “Whoa, maybe there’s something universal here.” And so five months later, we introduced an assessment to help people understand their Working Geniuses. And now we’re going to get up to two million people doing this. And it’s growing like crazy right now.

So that’s how we came up with it. And it was to explain my own frustration in a job where I loved the people I worked with and I liked what we did, but I was, every day, coming to work and getting frustrated. And once I explained that, we introduced it to other people, and they were like, “Oh, you mean I don’t have to do this because I’m not meant to?” And we’re like, “No.”

The shame that gets lifted off your shoulders when you realize the things you’re bad at are probably for a reason, and trying to pretend you’re good at it or prove that you can be good at it is actually not good for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, I like that. When you talk about shame there, it’s funny. And so we’re going to talk about the six types in a moment. And I’ve got my own little PDF report here handy.

Patrick Lencioni
Ooh, good, I love to go over it with people.

Pete Mockaitis
And my areas of Working Genius are invention and wonder.

Patrick Lencioni
Oh, my wife is that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, fun. So that combo puts me in the creative dreamer pairing. So we’ll talk a little about what these words mean. But what’s interesting is like, I really do. I love thinking about new cool ideas, and the implications of it, and how that might unfold, and how that could be super valuable and transformational for folks. And it gets me so fired up.

But then, when you talk about shame in terms of, like, my email inbox is rarely, rarely at zero. And it feels like a slog to just, “Oh, I got to do this. I got to process this stuff.”

Patrick Lencioni
What are your lower letters? So you’re W and I, first two. What are the others?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, wonder and invention, and then my lowest ones were discernment and enablement.

Patrick Lencioni
Okay, so in the middle you have G-T. It’s so important to understand these things. And we were just talking today, I have a Working Genius Podcast where this is all we talk about.

It’s almost more important to understand your frustrations because that’s where we get our shame. People say, “Well, yeah, you come up with lots of good ideas and you’re a deemed thinker, but how come you don’t respond to people faster when they need your help?” And you’re like, “Oh, man.” And it’s like, “Because you don’t have an enablement.”

And it’s not an excuse. It’s an explanation for why that doesn’t give you joy and energy. See, that’s what this is all about. It’s like, “Pete, what gives you joy and energy?” You are naturally going to be better at that. God wired you to be good at that. You should lean into that as much as you can.

And when you struggle with something, you can say, “Hey, I’m really sorry. I didn’t get back to you. It’s not a strength of mine and I’m okay with that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Now, they may or may not be okay with that on the receiving end.

Patrick Lencioni
But when you can say, “It’s not because I don’t care, it’s just because that is one of the things that I really struggle with. And I’m not going to try to get good at what I struggle with at the expense of exercising the things I’m supposed to be doing.” You know I’m saying?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I hear you. I hear you. Well, thank you. So, Pat has spoken, and I am absolved from shame.

Patrick Lencioni
And I picked up my phone because you would not believe the number of messages I have. My wife cleaned this out for me the other day, but I have 549 voicemails that I haven’t processed yet.

Pete Mockaitis
Mine just says it’s full. It just stops at a certain number. Okay. Well, so we would drop some words, some wonder, invention, enablement. So you got six words. Could you unpack each of them for us?

Patrick Lencioni
Yeah, I’ll try to do it fast, too. So there are six types of work. I don’t care if you’re launching a new podcast, or starting a company, or rebuilding your home, or planning a vacation, I mean, any project of any kind involves six different tasks that you need people to do. And none of us have all of them. It’s wonderful that we need each other to do that.

Here are the six types of work. And I’m going to start from up in the clouds where it happens in a fairly theoretical way, all the way down to landing the plane on the ground. So the first one that’s up there in the clouds is called wonder, which is one of your geniuses.

The genius of wonder is something that most people were never rewarded for as a child because you don’t see people doing it and it’s not very practical in the school kind of sense. And that is people with a genius of wonder get joy and energy out of pondering big questions.

They can sit for a long time and like, and they literally say like, “I wonder why things are like that. Maybe there’s a better way. I wonder if our customers are really happy.” Or, “Why do we live here? Do we really need to live here?” They’re asking the big question, and this is where all new things start.

And these are people that they love to be curious. And they can do it for a long time. I mean, a lot of people say, “Well, I can do that for five minutes.” No, no, no, these are people that can ponder things deeply. That’s the first genius.

But when you ask the big question, then somebody else comes along with the next genius, just slightly down below the clouds but still up there in cloudiness, and that’s the genius of invention, where that big question that somebody asks, the next one is, “Let me try to come up with an answer. Let me come up with an idea. Let me come up with a solution out of nothing.”

And this is a genius, this is one of mine, I don’t have wonder, that I love to solve problems with nothing. No context. It’s something I do naturally. I can’t help it. I do it even when people don’t ask me to. I wake up every day and love to come up with new ideas. Now here’s the thing, I always thought everybody liked to do that because it’s what I do. And there are other people that hate doing this.

I like to say, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” And you’re a W-I, just like my wife, Pete, and you live in a world of ideation. These are the two ideation geniuses. And that’s just what you do.

Now, there’s things in jobs and things in life that we have to do that don’t fall into those. We have to do them but you are drawn to this, and so is my wife. And after 25 years of raising kids, and I helped her, I was very involved in our kids’ life, but she was home and driving them, and paying the bills, and doing the laundry, and making sure that the day worked, and they got to the appointments they needed to and the doctor, and solving all those tactical problems.

She read my book, and she said, “Oh, I really like this and I’m really pissed off.” And I said, “Why?” And she goes, “Because I spent the last 25 years living so far away from my genius.” Now, what’s interesting about that, Pete, is early, before we came up with this, I knew that she wasn’t wired to do a lot of the detailed stuff, day-to-day, and I said, “Why don’t we hire somebody to take some of that off your plate?”

And you know what she said? She said, “No, no, no, my friends are good at this. They can do it. And if they can do it, I should be able to do it, too.” See, she was comparing herself to others who had different wiring. And like Teddy Roosevelt said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”

So when you do have to do some of that stuff, because we all do, you can go, “Yeah, this isn’t my thing. I don’t get any joy and energy from that. I’m going to grind through this, but I’m not going to pretend like there’s something wrong with me for not liking it.” Make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
It does, yes.

Patrick Lencioni
So the first two geniuses are yours and my wife’s, wonder and invention. Those are your favorite things to do. The next genius that comes after that is called discernment. Now discernment is the genius of having, like, you can look at multiple variables and put them all together. You’re really good at like instinct, intuition, and pattern recognition.

And this is one of my geniuses, it’s not my wife’s, but I love guessing the answer, and I usually guess pretty close. And somebody can come to me, and they can say, “I need to make a decision.” And even when I don’t know a lot of detail about it, I can usually come up with a pretty good judgment.

A woman that I work with, Tracy, has discernment. And even when she was a child, her friends would come to her, and they’d say, “What should we do, Tracy? Ask Tracy, she’ll know the answer.” And Laura and I will be like, “Should we refinance our house?” She’ll say, “Ask Tracy what she thinks.”

Tracy’s not an expert on home financing. What she is, is she’s got really good judgment. And so in our company, I trust Tracy implicitly with everything in running our company. She’s one of the founders. And if it’s a financial decision or a strategic decision, I’ll always run it by Tracy because her gut is so on.

A lot of spouses, if they have I and their partner has D, they really misunderstand each other because they’ll come up with an idea and their spouse will tell them why it’s not going to work. And they’ll go, “Why are you so against my ideas?”

And they’re like, “No, no, no, I love you. I just want to make sure you don’t drive the car off a cliff in pursuing this idea. And I want your ideas to land so that you feel good about it. But my job is to make sure you’re seeing the potential downside.” And they can sometimes get frustrated.

Okay, after discernment comes galvanizing, the G. This is the one I didn’t have as a genius and I was doing it every day and it burned me out. People with galvanizing love to rally the troops. They love to push and to inspire, and to cajole people, and to get people to change what they’re doing to do something new or better. They love being that one to go, “Hey, everybody, close your laptops. I have an idea and I think we should change the way we’re doing things.”

I don’t get energy from that. Some people love that. They literally wake up, and go, “I hope I get to get up in front of the office today and inspire them to change what they’re doing.” And it’s really important in a business to have people that do that, but I was doing it every day and I’m not great at it.

So I found other people in my company that love doing that, and I said, “I want you to run the daily meeting where you get people excited again, because I did it once. I don’t love to do it every day. You do love to do it. And they were like, “Are you kidding? You mean you’re going to let me do this?”

I’m like, “Yeah, it’s your genius.” “But I haven’t been here that long.” I said, “No, no, no, this isn’t like permission because of tenure. You are good at it. I’m going to give you a job that you’re good at, all right?” So galvanizing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and, Pat, it’s fascinating, if I may. So you are a renowned keynote speaker, and that sounds like fundamentally what one does is galvanizing. Are you telling me, “Yeah, I’m not so much into that”?

Patrick Lencioni
No, because galvanizing is the guy that comes back the next day and the next day and the next day, and says, “How come you’re not doing that? Come on, let’s go.” I like to inspire people once and then go on and go, “Okay, there’s more people that need to be inspired in other ways and I’ll move on to them.”

But coming back to the clients again the next day and the next day and reminding them and keeping them moving is not my thing. Now I’m not terrible at it, but the thing is, because I was doing it all the time, I got totally burnt out on something even that wasn’t a frustration. See, even our working competencies, which are the two in the middle, we’re not meant to do them all the time. And so I got burnt out on that.

So, okay, so those two in the middle are called activation. You ideate, Pete, then you need people to activate your ideas to make sure they’re on the right track and to get people excited. And then come the last two geniuses, and the next one is called enablement, the E.

And people with a gift of enablement, which neither you or I have at all, are the ones, they just love to come alongside other people and help them get it going. So, when somebody says, “I need help,” they impulsively, because they love doing it, they go, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” Like, they get joy and energy out of saying, “Yes, what do you need?”

And there are certain professions, like nurses, and we tend to say, “Well, they’re an angel.” Yeah, there is a wonderful virtue in that. But they also, if they’re built to do this, they just love when people say, “I need something,” and they go, “I want to be the one to say yes.”

And it’s not because they’re easily manipulatable or just nice, it’s because they really get fed. And there are certain customer service roles that people love, “Oh, yeah, I can do this every day, all day long.” There are certain flight attendants, when you call the flight attendant button, they come over and are like, “Yeah, what do you need?” They love responding and saying yes.

The last is the T, which is tenacity. And that is these are people that get joy and energy out of finishing things. They love the last part because they love to get things across the line. And they’re like, “Oh, I’m going to go to work today, and I have a whole bunch of things on my list, and I’m going to cross them off, and I’m going to hit my targets, and I’m going to just be so satisfied.”

And, Pete, I have none of this. And I’ve written 14 books. So people say, “Well, you must have tenacity. You finished all those books.” Yeah, but if I didn’t have a deadline and an editor and people making me finish, I would have 14 half-written books, because halfway through, I get distracted and I want to move on to the next idea. And I need somebody going, “Nope, get back in there and finish it, and finish it well.”

So, we all need one another. And if you’re going to be great at work, you know, how to be awesome at your job, if you want to be awesome at your job over a relatively long period of time, understand your Working Geniuses, try to make sure that your work lines up with those as much as possible, know what your working frustrations are, your last two, make sure your work does not depend on that.

So, Pete, I got the best job coming out of college in the country. There was a book written in 1987, the best jobs in America for college grads. And this woman from Fortune magazine wrote a book, and she said, “If you want to have the best job in America that pays well and gives you great experience, go to Bain & Company and be a management consultant.” So I applied for the job like every…

Pete Mockaitis
That was my first job out of college, too.

Patrick Lencioni
You worked at Bain also?

Pete Mockaitis
I did, yes.

Patrick Lencioni
Okay, so we know of some of the same people. I mean, you’re much younger than me. But I was miserable because I wanted to come up with new ideas and solve problems, and they wanted me to do exactly what they asked me to do and to finish it.

Now, you have more T than I do, so you could probably get through it, but it was exactly the wrong job for me. And for two years, I survived. How long were you there?

Pete Mockaitis
Three.

Patrick Lencioni
Three years. So, I survived for two years, and Meg Whitman was the partner on the case at the time, and she said to me, “Pat, you would be a great partner because you like to think about the strategic stuff, but you’re an analyst and you need to crank. You need to get things done and do details and specifics, and do exactly what we tell you to do. And when we tell you to do something, we don’t need you to say, ‘Hey, what about this?’ It’s like, no, just please execute. It’s about execution and implementation.”

And I didn’t know Working Genius at the time, but I appreciated what she told me. But I thought, “Why could I not push through and do that?” And I look back now, and had they offered me that job today, I would look at this, and I’d go, “Oh, man, I’m really honored that you offered me this job, but I’m never going to be great at it. I’m not going to enjoy it.”

Do you know what I did when I was there, Pete? This is going to be amazing, because you remember the crazy hours you worked at Bain. I would stay at night from 9:30 at night when I stopped working until 1:00 in the morning and write screenplays just to get myself through it, just to tap into my creative skills, because I’m a writer.

So after they would say, “Okay, it’s 9:30, you can go home now. We’ll see you in the morning,” I would often stay and work on my screenplays, and I realized now I just needed to feed my creative side. So knowing that, Bain should never hire an analyst that had my profile. I was not going to be awesome at my job there. I was not going to be awesome at my job there.

And, man, I just want every student to figure out what their Working Genius is so they don’t take a job that they’re not meant to be great at it, and then come out of there with no confidence and feeling like they should be ashamed of themselves. I struggled with that for years after I left Bain.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, yeah, I hear that, and that’s well said. And it really does a great job of demystifying, you know, because long hours, it’s interesting, sometimes long hours are a brutal slog that turned you into a burnt-out depressed mess. And other times, long hours are like, “This is one of the most thrilling seasons of my life.”

Patrick Lencioni
Oh, and burnout is not about you working too much. Some people can get burned out just because of the hours they’re working, but 98% of the time it’s not about the hours you’re working. It’s about the nature of the work you do.

And I can come home from work after a 12-hour day, and my wife can say, “Wow, you’re energized, aren’t you?” And I’m like, “Oh, it was a great day. I was inventing and discerning. I was using my I-D, and I was doing this.” I worked at a bank as a bank teller. Three hours into every day, I’d be staring at the clock, and I swear it was like moving backwards, like, “Hey, what’s going on?” It’s about the nature of work.

And so, when somebody is getting burned out at work, and they go, “Oh, just take some time off.” It’s like, “No, I’m just going to go golfing and be depressed about the fact that I’m going to have to go back and keep doing the thing I hate.”

When you find work that gives you joy and energy, it’s such a gift because you’re almost never going to burn out, and you’re going to go home at night to your family with more joy and energy for them, too.

But when you have a job that’s draining you, you know, I like to say that your two geniuses, Pete, are like pouring coffee into a Yeti Mug – I have a Yeti Mug thing around here – and screwing the lid on tight. It’ll hold its heat forever, right? You can get burnt after eight hours like, “Hey, why is this so hot?” because that’s your Working Genius.

Your next two, your working competencies, and for you that’s G and T, which lends themselves to Bain, that’s pouring coffee in a cup and putting a lid on it, like a paper cup like this. It’s going to stay warm for a while. Your working frustration is pouring coffee into this cup, but there’s a little hole in the bottom of it, and it drains out almost immediately. It robs you of joy and energy.

So, if you don’t know what your genius is, your competencies, and your frustrations are, you can’t possibly know about how to be awesome at work. Now here’s the thing, I love talking about this, you don’t need to change careers or even jobs to find a better fit for your geniuses. Sometimes you just need to go to your manager, and say, “Hey, I want you to look at my report.”

We had a guy, shortly after we introduced this, who had a performance review, and he said it was not going to be pleasant. He goes, “I’d had a bad year. So I go in there, and I sit down with my manager and my manager’s manager. And the night before I did it, I did Working Genius. And I looked at my Working Genius results, and I said, ‘Hey, you guys, could you look at this before we get started?’”

And they looked at his report, and they said, “Well, it’s no wonder you’ve had a terrible year. This is a horrible job for you, isn’t it?” And he goes, “Yeah.” And they go, “We have that other job in that department. You’d be perfect for that.”

And he goes, “I got promoted because all I did is I said, ‘Here’s who I am.’” And if you’re a halfway decent manager, you’re going to be like, “Well, why don’t you take that job? You’ll be great at that. And we’ll find somebody else who actually is good at this.”

We have to stop trying to prove that we’re going to be good at things that we’re not meant to be good at. So to be awesome at your job, find a job that you can be awesome at. And it probably already exists in the organization you’re in.

When I hire people, I design their work to fit their gifts rather than trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. And unless you’re working at a pencil factory where everybody’s doing the same thing, most organizations have different needs for different things.

And it’s crazy, Pete, because, like, I talk to pastors and priests and teachers, and two people with the same job can go about doing it differently based on who they are. Like, a teacher could say, “Well, I’m an E-T, I have a great lesson plan. I’m very organized. And when a parent needs help, I’m very responsive to them.”

Another one, you would be a W-I. Like, I come up with the most creative ideas for learning and they’re very innovative, but I need a teaching assistant who’s going to make sure that the papers get graded, and that the parents get responded to, and that we get the grades turned in on time. Two people can have the same job and go about it in totally different ways and be really fulfilled. But if they try to do that job in exactly the same way… No teacher is good at all of it. No CEO, no anything is good at all of it.” So design your work around what is needed.

And if I were to go back to my dad when I was a kid, and I felt guilty about not liking doing the lawn, I’d have probably said, “Hey, dad, I want to help you. Could I have some input into how I do this? Would it be okay if I came up with a new way to plant flowers or to do this? Can we involve some of my invention and discernment?”

And there’s a dang good chance he’d have said, “Sure. I just want you to come out here and help me.” But I thought, “No, I needed to do it exactly the way he told me.”

So, man, bring this to the people you work with, your colleagues, your manager. Bring it to the people you live with. It’ll change the way you talk and it’ll change the way they see you and you see yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
And now, when you say bring it, so practically, tactically speaking, how does one get those letters? We get the book, the six types of working genius, we go to a website, you’ve got a code. What’s the…?

Patrick Lencioni
Yes, before you read the book, go do the assessment. The book explains it in more detail, but you get so much out of it. So if you go to WorkingGenius.com, and when you check out, you type in awesome. These are in capital letters. I don’t know if it has to be capital letters. You might as well give it a shot. And you’ll get 20% off. That means when we designed this, that means it’s going to cost you $20 to do this.

And when you do it, read the report. It shows you the combination you have. There’s 15 different combinations. Like, you’re the creative dreamer. I’m the discriminating ideator. The E-T is the loyal finisher. You read those types, and you go, “Oh, this is totally me.” And really dive into that, and really ensure that it’s you. And then go share it with other people. This is a great thing.

Teams do it. Like, everybody on a team in a company does it. And they’ll look at the map. They can make a team map that shows what all their types are, and they can go, “Oh, we have nobody who’s good at that. No wonder that we struggle there.” Or, “We have a ton of people who are good at that. Maybe, the next person we hire, we might want to hire somebody that’s good at these other things, too.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, as we wrap up, I want to hear quickly about a few of your favorite things. Can you give us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Patrick Lencioni
I mean, most of them are from the Bible, okay? I love, “My burdens are light. Come follow me and I will give you rest.” I love, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” I love that. We compare ourselves to others and we just feel bad, so don’t do that. So that’s a favorite quote, too.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experimental or bit of research?

Patrick Lencioni
I love that one that says when somebody asks you to do a favor for them, you’ll do it. But if they try to pay you to do it, you’re less likely to do it because you’re thinking about it in economic terms.

And we tend to think, like, people have a, generally, good nature. And when you need help, realize it’s not an economic decision for most people, it’s a desire to help.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Patrick Lencioni
I think my favorite book ever is a book called Brother Odd. O-D-D. It’s about this character named Odd Thomas who’s really interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Patrick Lencioni
Every day, I wake up and I listen to the readings of the day from church, because I used think, “How can I do this?” And I listen to, you know, in the Catholic Church, there’s an Old Testament reading or a letter, and the Psalms and then the Gospel. And every day, I listen to those when I wake up and I start my day like that.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that has really seemed to connect and resonate with folks, a Pat quotation that seems to really have legs?

Patrick Lencioni
Yeah, that the most important things in life are simple but difficult. Complexity is not the answer. It’s, like, coming to terms, like, “Oh, what’s the simple solution to this that I don’t want to do because it’s hard?” And we need to avoid that, looking for that complex solution that’ll be easy, which doesn’t exist. So, life is simple but difficult.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where’d you point them?

Patrick Lencioni
My company is called The Table Group. And if you go to TableGroup.com, you can find out about all the other stuff we do around teamwork and leadership and meetings and consulting and all that kind of stuff. And then we do have a podcast called The Working Genius Podcast, and we do one called At the Table, which is just about work.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Patrick Lencioni
Yeah, be vulnerable, show people what you’re good at and what you’re not good at, and realize that that vulnerability will feel a little risky and good things happen through that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Pat, this has been a pleasure. Thank you.

Patrick Lencioni
I hope we get together sometime, Pete, since we’re living in the same city now.