In This Post
- What the Working Genius assessment actually measures
- The 6 types and how they show up on your team
- Why it works differently than personality assessments
- How to use Working Genius results in the real world
You’ve probably sat through a team offsite where everyone shared their personality type, laughed at how accurate it was, and then… went back to their desks and carried on exactly as before.
Sound familiar?
Most assessments are good at telling you who people are. Where they fall short is explaining how people work: why one person thrives on generating ideas while another can’t rest until a project is finished, or why two people in the same role can have completely different experiences of the same job. Patrick Lencioni’s Working Genius assessment was built to answer exactly that question.
What Is the Working Genius Assessment?
The Working Genius assessment was created by Patrick Lencioni, the bestselling author behind The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, and introduced in his 2022 book, The 6 Types of Working Genius.
Unlike personality frameworks that describe who you are, Working Genius focuses on how you work. Specifically, it identifies the types of work that energize you, the types you can do but find draining, and the types that consistently exhaust you. That distinction matters more than most people realize. Misaligning people with the wrong kind of work doesn’t just hurt productivity. It leads to quiet burnout, disengagement, and the slow erosion of a team’s culture.
The assessment takes about ten minutes to complete and produces a profile that teams can start using right away.
The 6 Types of Working Genius
Lencioni identified six fundamental ways people contribute to work, organized by the acronym WIDGET:
W
Wonder
The genius of curiosity and possibility. People with Wonder ask the big questions, spot opportunities early, and keep teams from getting too comfortable with the status quo.
I
Invention
The genius of creating original ideas. Inventors generate solutions from scratch. They don’t need a playbook. They write new ones.
D
Discernment
The genius of intuitive evaluation. Discerners are the team’s gut-check. They assess ideas with remarkable accuracy even with limited data.
G
Galvanizing
The genius of rallying others to action. Galvanizers take an idea and turn it into a cause, convincing others to shift priorities and get behind something.
E
Enablement
The genius of responsive support. Enablers are the connective tissue of a great team. They step in where help is needed, often before being asked.
T
Tenacity
The genius of seeing things through. Tenacious people finish what others start and find deep satisfaction in crossing the finish line.
Lencioni groups these into three phases of work: Ideation (Wonder and Invention), Activation (Discernment and Galvanizing), and Implementation (Enablement and Tenacity). A complete, high-performing team needs all six represented, and a well-rounded project needs to move through all three phases to succeed.
Why Working Genius Is Different from Other Assessments
Most teams have already invested in some kind of assessment tool, and those tools genuinely help. Communication style profiles tell you how someone prefers to give and receive information. Personality frameworks help you understand how people think and relate to each other. That’s all useful.
But Working Genius is solving a different problem. It focuses on something most tools don’t address at all, which is how you connect with the work itself. It’s less about who you are in a social setting and more about what kinds of work energize or drain you. Think productivity, not personality. And rather than replacing the tools you already use, Working Genius adds a layer of clarity that makes all of them more actionable.
“Same job. Same team. Completely different experience. Working Genius explains why.”
You’ve probably experienced this yourself: two days in the same job can feel completely different. One day you get home exhausted, questioning how you’ll ever show back up tomorrow. The next day time flies by and you leave genuinely energized. Same job. Same team. Completely different experience.
Working Genius explains why. When your daily work lives in your genius zones, you feel energized and effective. When it consistently pulls you into your frustration zones, you feel drained no matter how capable you are. That’s not a motivation problem or a culture problem. It’s a genius alignment problem.
Geniuses, Competencies, and Frustrations
Every person has all six types present in some form, but each person carries them differently. The model divides them into three categories:
Working Geniuses
The 2 types that genuinely energize you. Your sweet spots, where you do your best work and feel most fulfilled.
Working Competencies
The 2 types you can do well, but they don’t light you up. You can sustain them, but they cost more than geniuses do.
Working Frustrations
The 2 types that consistently drain you. Not weaknesses, just areas where sustained effort costs you more than it gives back.
The goal for leaders isn’t to eliminate frustrations from their team’s work entirely. It’s to be thoughtful about not leaving people stuck in their frustration zones all day, every day. That awareness alone changes how you assign work, build project teams, and support people through demanding stretches.
What This Looks Like on a Real Team
When leaders start applying Working Genius, a few things shift quickly.
Meetings get more productive. When you understand that your Discernment-genius team member isn’t being difficult when they pump the brakes on a new initiative, they’re actually doing exactly what your team needs, you stop managing around them and start leveraging them intentionally.
Work gets assigned more thoughtfully. Instead of defaulting to whoever has bandwidth, you start thinking about whose genius zone a task actually lives in. A Tenacity-heavy person leading execution. A Wonder or Invention person in the early brainstorm. A Galvanizer presenting to stakeholders. Small shifts in how work gets distributed can produce meaningful gains in speed, quality, and team energy.
Team maps become genuinely useful. When you plot your entire team’s profiles, patterns emerge. Teams heavy on Ideation types but light on Tenacity will generate great ideas that rarely ship. Teams built around Implementation types without a Galvanizer will work hard but struggle to drive momentum. Seeing those gaps clearly is the first step to addressing them.
50%
reduction in team conflict when leaders operate with high self-awareness and mutual understanding
Source: American Management Association
And perhaps most importantly: people stop taking each other personally. Working Genius gives teams a shared language for talking about how they work, which makes it easier to navigate friction without making it about character or intent.
Taking It Further with Wildsparq
The Working Genius assessment gives your team a powerful foundation of self-awareness. The next challenge is making sure that awareness actually shows up in how your leaders lead day to day, not just in the week after the assessment.
That’s where Wildsparq’s TeamIQ comes in. TeamIQ brings your team’s assessment data, including Working Genius, into our leadership development platform and pairs it with an AI Leadership Coach that delivers real-time, contextual coaching in the moments that matter. Instead of profiles sitting in a slide deck, they show up exactly when and where a leader needs them.
See how it works in 60 seconds:
Related Reading:
Future-Proof Your Organization with Smarter, Modern Leader Enablement
Emotional Intelligence Is the Leadership Problem Nobody Thinks They Have