Patrick Lencioni on The Secret to Aligning Talent with High-Impact Work

Episode #316 Patrick Lencioni on The Secret to Aligning Talent with High-Impact Work

TRANSCRIPT:

Martin G Moore (Marty):

Pat, let me start by saying, after the number of years that you’ve had (and you’ve seen everything — there’s not much that would be new to you), you chose to go down the path of developing the Working Genius framework. I’d be really interested for you to just give a brief explanation on why you actually decided to go down that path, which I see as being a slight tangent from where you’ve been. I want to know why that was so important to you.

Patrick Lencioni (Pat):

We did not think this was coming. Praise God for this. So we had all this stuff around organizational health, and that’s what we were doing. And then about four years ago, almost exactly four years ago, in fact, we were doing work, a lot of it on Zoom because it was after COVID, like three months into COVID, we went back to the office, but we were doing things online, and I had a day that was not uncommon, and I was really excited doing a call and then I was kind of grumpy in my next call, and then I was excited on my next one… and the woman sitting next to me said, “Why are you like that?” She’s a friend of mine. And I said, “I don’t know.” But I’ve been like this for 20 years. I’d come to work excited and I would be kind of grumpy sometimes. And I loved the people I was with and I loved what I did.

And so she asked me that question, and this will become important in a second, and as a result of that, I said, “I want to figure it out.”

And I got a whiteboard and a pen and I was sitting there, like, “What is going on?” And I figured out, oh, there’s six different kinds of work that we have to do around here, and two of them I love to do, but I’m always getting asked to do something I don’t love, always, and it drives me crazy and I get grumpy. And all I was trying to do is explain my own behavior, why some days I loved work and some days I didn’t.

And then we came up with this theory of these six things, and then somebody saw it that day on the board and they shared it with a CEO client who was in tears when he saw it, and he goes, “Oh, this explains my situation.”

And then I went home and put it on the whiteboard in my house and started working on it with my wife and my colleagues and my kids, and we realized, oh wow, there is a fundamental need here for people to understand the kind of work that gives them joy and energy, and the kind of work that deprives them of joy and energy.

And I had been a big fan of Myers-Briggs and DiSC and all these tools. I’m a junkie. But none of them ever explained to me the detail, the kind of specific tasks that a person is meant to do.

And so, three months after we came up with that, we realized there’s something to this. We developed an assessment, released it, and almost a million people as of today have taken this in the last three and a half years. And we’ve come to the conclusion this is bigger than anything we’ve ever worked on.

We’re watching people and teams and organizations get transformed just by being able to say, “Oh, so these are my geniuses and these things over here I suck at, and these things I’m okay at, but I don’t love,” and they look at it as a team and they go, “Well, why don’t we reorganize the way we’re getting things done to lean into your geniuses and to lean into yours, and hey, the rest of you, stop feeling guilty about the stuff you hate doing. Sometimes you got to just suck it up and do it… but why would we put you in a job where you are going to be miserable?“

And, when companies do this, they’re not firing people for the wrong reasons. They’re actually freeing people up to do… And people are discovering things in themselves that they’ve spent years feeling guilty about, and they’re going like, “Oh, this is who I am.”

And so anyway, that’s really the kind of overview of Working Genius. And it definitely affects organizational health, but we came up with it in a completely different context and we are convinced that this is the biggest thing we’ve ever done.

Marty: Yeah. Well, congratulations on the Working Genius podcast because that’s growing gangbusters right now.

Pat: Yeah, that’s growing like crazy.

We thought that podcast would be for a handful of people that were kind of junkies for that, but it’s growing like crazy because there’s so many people that are understanding their teams better, their leadership, their marriages, their careers, their kids.

We even came up with a student version for high school and college students because people are really demanding. So thank you, God, for that gift, and now it’s something we get to steward.

Marty: Of course, the first step to recovery is admitting there’s a problem — “My name is Marty and I am an alcoholic.” That sort of thing, right!?

Understanding what drives you, what you take joy from and what you don’t, is a great measure of self-awareness. When it comes to organizations though, and I absolutely accept what you say about organizations using it to change the way they work, do we find that organizations are typically using it in job design or they’re just using it to shift people to jobs that more suit them?

Pat: Well, this is a great question, Marty. I’m looking at your Working Genius type now, and you have discernment, which is like you listen to things and you ask the right question.

You’re insightful. That’s one of the things. You respond to these things, you go, “Wait a second,” and you get right to it. That’s the next thing. Because so far it’s been like, okay, let’s just understand who we are and what we’re doing and how we can shift things around.

But what we’re working on right now, we have an AI tool that we’re developing so that people can put in a job description and plug it in and get their Working Genius type and they can go like, “Oh wow, maybe we should design the job to fit what we need and to hire people that actually fit that. Rather than just look at it as a reflective tool, let’s actually be intentional about how we do that.”

Marty: Okay. That’s awesome because that’s really using it in a practical way that goes beyond the self-awareness piece, which is great. Let’s just take one of the very common and hard to solve problems that all organizations face. For example, the technical stream of development and career path growth with the leadership and management stream and career path growth.

Pat: Wonderful. I love it.

Marty: Can you use Working Genius to help solve that problem?

Pat: Yeah, it’s so great. I had a guy in my organization recently who’s so good at getting things done, and he’s adding so much value. His name is Alan. Alan is so valuable in our organization, and I talked to him about his career and, looking at his Working Genius, he said, “Pat, I love getting things done and influencing people that way. I don’t really want to be in charge. I don’t really want to be formally a leader.”

And it suits his type. It doesn’t make him less important or less influential or less productive. It means that he knows what he’s good at doing. And everybody’s geniuses are equally important. They’re just different.

But when we take a person, we say, “Hey, you’re a great salesperson, but you should be in sales management,” sometimes we lose our best salesperson. Or a person that just because John Eales played rugby doesn’t mean he’d be the best coach.

But we tend to think that people rise up this ladder and then we screw things up. And it’s hard to know how to make that decision. But when you look at a person’s Working Genius, you can go, “Oh yeah, this probably wouldn’t be very fulfilling for you.” Because that’s what Working Genius is about. It’s where you get joy and energy, and it’s so great.

So, Marty, my first job out of college was miserable for me. My working frustrations, the worst things in the Working Genius, the two things that I’m the worst at that drain me of joy and energy were the very things they wanted.

But of course, they didn’t describe it that way. They didn’t tell me that. They didn’t find out what I was… They just said, “We’re going to pay the most. This is the job everybody wants.” I interviewed. I guess I did a pretty good job interviewing, they hired me, and they said, “Your life is set, Pat. You make more money than anybody your age and your career is set.“

Well, those two years there, which I barely survived, was the longest decade of my career. And you know something else, Marty, you know what was worse than those two years was the years after that where I was like, “How did I fail? I must be dumber and lazier than I thought.”

Marty: But did you fail?

Pat: And now I look at it and I go, “That was an enablement, tenacity job. Those were the things I’m worst at.” Had I known that, I’d have said, “Hey, thanks for the job offer, but I’m not going to love that, you’re not going to love how I am. I need to find a job that leans a little bit more into what I do.”

Marty: I mean, I know I haven’t drilled down much onto you personally here, Pat, but this is a great way to do it because that job, I believe with one of the MBB consulting firms, like, the top consulting firms in the world? Bloody hard to get into, they only take the best of the best of the best, and then once you’re in there, you’ve got high salary, the best clients, the most interesting problems, the travel – it’s almost a dream job.

What they say is not overselling it, right? Yet you had the maturity even back then to realize that it wasn’t what you wanted to do. And very, very, very few people-

Pat: Oh, no, I did not have the maturity. I actually had to be told

Marty: Am I overselling you, am I?

Pat: No, if they had have said, “This is the job design,” and then they’d have said, “Let’s take a look at you,” they’d have said, “Hey, Pat, you got great grades and you’re a great interviewer and you’re going to be very successful, but this is not the place or the job for you.”

Marty: Right.

Pat: You know what’s interesting? The partner on my case, I was there two years, she pulled me aside… She’s famous. Her name is Meg Whitman. She runs…

Marty: I know Meg. I don’t know her personally. I know of her, of course.

Pat: Yeah. She was actually the partner there. This was 38 years ago. And she pulled me aside and said, “Pat…” It was so great. She goes, “You’d be a really good partner. I think you’re really good at this stuff, I do, but the work that you’re doing in this job, this is not good for you.”

Marty: Right.

Pat: And it wasn’t one of those… She was right. But you know what they did at that company? They took people, they put them in this job, and they said, “The way to qualify to become a partner is to be good at this data analysis.” But that’s a totally different skill set.

And had I known that, I would’ve not been so hard on myself, and I probably would’ve been able to turn the job down without feeling like I was walking away from the keys to the kingdom, when in fact, it was not the keys to the kingdom – it was a handcuff and it was going to be miserable.

So, I wish I had been more aware of and mature enough at the time to say no. Now, I learned great things from that, and everybody’s going to have a bad job sometimes, but man, some people get into those bad jobs or a bad industry or… It’s not an industry, bad jobs, and they stay with that forever. And in fact, all they’re doing is trying to get good at something they were not meant to be good at.

Marty: Yeah. Isn’t that so interesting? And the number of people that will persevere because of the money, the status, the title, and the career path that goes up. It’s amazing.

People live in misery.

Pat: Or their fear of failure. Like, “I’m just going to prove that I can do this.” It’s like, “Do you like doing it?“

“No, I hate it, but I’m going to spend the next 40 years proving…” And it’s like really bad things happen. I mean, it destroys families and there’s drinking and there’s drugs, and there’s all kinds of things because they’re swimming against the current, thinking that they’re actually proving themselves when all they’re doing is proving that they can live a miserable life and still try to get by.

Marty: Yeah, that’s just such a good way of putting it. So, Pat, I just want to drill down a little bit on the use of Working Genius in teams. And I’ve had those situations before in my working career where I’ve sat down with my executive team, we’ve all taken out our LSI results and talked about what we learned from them, in aid of trying to get a better understanding of who we are, and who we’re working with, and what our preferences are. Can you use Working Genius in the same way? And if so, how would you do it?

Pat: Yeah. In fact, when we came up with this, we thought it was just a personal development tool. And then right away we realized, actually, it’s even more of a productivity tool because… and in fact, a team of executives or any team can take it and create what we call a team map where you can look at this one single piece of paper and see, here’s all of our geniuses, here’s all of our frustrations, the worst thing, and here’s how that meshes together.

And then suddenly people are like, “Well, why don’t you do this? Why don’t I do this.” And they’re reorganizing, not in some formal way, but they’re literally just saying, “We understand one another’s strengths and weaknesses and we can...”

So it’s really a productivity tool even more than a personal development tool. And it’s hard because it’s both. And we’re a management consulting firm and a think tank, and so most of the people, we do organizational health, but it’s actually, we developed one for students because we know that kids need to understand it when they’re in high school and in college.

So it’s both great for individuals and families and all that, but it’s also fantastic for a team to realize we have a gap.

A great story, Marty, is that we had a team of a multi-billion dollar software company and hardware, and they took the Working Genius and nobody on the team had any invention.

Marty: Oh, really?

Pat: Yeah, except one guy. The lawyer. The chief legal counsel was the only guy with invention.

Marty: It’s the only guy you don’t want to have it!

Pat: Exactly! You know what they did? Within an hour, they were like, “Hey, we want you to take over new technology acquisition.“

And the guy was like, “But I’m the lawyer,” and they’re like, “Yeah, but you’re good at this.” He goes, “Oh, I would love to do it.” Two years later, I looked at their website and I was like, “Oh, no, that guy’s gone. He is no longer in… Oh, he’s now full-time in technology.”

See, they discovered his genius, which was so applicable outside of what they thought he did. And that’s the kind of thing that teams do all the time. They’re like, “We have talent that we’re not using.”

And even in my organization, I don’t like to galvanize every day. I don’t like to constantly resell my ideas and constantly get people motivated. I mean, I can do it once or twice. And I found a guy in my organization who was fairly young, and I said, “Hey, Cody, you got galvanizing. Why don’t you be the chief galvanizing officer?” And he goes, “Well, I haven’t been here long enough. I don’t have the credibility.” I said, “No, no, it’s a gift.” And he goes, “I would love to do that.” I go, “Then you’re going to do it. You’re going to take that off my plate.”

I still have to do some of it, but I got him to do things he loved, I had to do less of what I didn’t love. Oh my gosh, our productivity went through the roof.

Marty: Isn’t that amazing? And that’s Cody, famous for At The Table, Cody?

Pat: Yeah.

Marty: Yeah. He’s awesome. He’s really cool.

Pat: And he is your same Working Genius type.

Marty: Right. Discernment and galvanizing. Yeah. That must be why I like him so much!

You can feel that come through in the energy of each of the people that sit on your panel for At the Table. You can feel their energy come through in a way that says, “I love what I’m doing.” And you can’t fake that for long, right? You’ve got few hundred episodes out there where you can’t fake it.

Pat: You know what Cody said to me? Because he and I have… By the way, so we have the same Myers-Briggs type, but that’s more about who you are and what your… It’s not about the work you do, you know?

And so he felt bad because I have invention, and we’d be in meetings and I would be coming up with new ideas, and he said he would sit there and go, “What’s wrong with me?” He literally said, “Why am I not inventive like that?” This was before we did Working Genius. He goes, “Do I watch too much TV?“

And then we did this and he goes, “Oh, you have invention. I have discernment and galvanizing.” He goes, “I don’t have to feel bad about that. When you come up with an idea, Pat, I’ll help us figure out is it a good idea and what should we do with it.”

Until that he thought he had to be like me. And that’s the great thing on a team is when you can go, “Hey, I’m so glad you’re good at that and I’m not, and I’ll celebrate your strength and you can celebrate mine.” And this goes a long way toward trust and vulnerability, which allows us to have difficult conversations to bring it full circle without feeling like we’re judging each other.

Marty: Oh, for sure. One of the things that occurred to me while you were speaking, Pat, is that it also seems as though the Working Genius model would be resistant to stereotyping and pigeonholing.

One of the things that I found probably the least useful, the dark side of Myers-Briggs, is that it’s very easy to pigeonhole. I’ve been in meetings where one person’s turned around to another and said, “Well, you would say that because you’re an ESTJ.“

That sort of response, I found to be not really that useful. And so this seems to be resistant as a model to that type of pigeonholing. Have you found that?

Pat: Yes, we have found far less resistance. Because I know what you mean. People are like, “I don’t want to be typed because I feel like you’re going to put me in a box.” And yet, because it’s about joy and energy and because it’s not the noun of who you are, but it’s what you like to do, people don’t feel like… You’re not saying I can’t do that. You’re saying that if we make you do that too much, you’re going to burn out.

And everybody wants to tell everybody else, “Yeah, please don’t burn me out.” But burnout is not about don’t make me work. Burnout is please don’t make me do too much of the things that crush me.

And so what we find is that people are actually hungry to type themselves and announce that.

And they even celebrate – and I love this – because they celebrate what they’re bad at, knowing that the more they celebrate it, the more people will give them grace when they struggle. It’s not an excuse, but it is an explanation.

Marty: Sure.

Pat: So, my son, Matt, who’s like your daughter, Emma, who produces our show, he doesn’t have tenacity, which is one of the six types of Working Genius. He does not have tenacity, but he has to do tenacity work sometimes. We all do. And if you’re a parent, you have to do tenacity. You can’t go, “Oh, my kids need their diaper changed. Well, I don’t have tenacity. I don’t like to finish things. I’m not going to do that.” We all have to do things outside of our genius.

But when Matt has to do tenacity, he can say, “Okay, I don’t like this part of my job, but I’m going to go in that conference room for two hours. I’m going to lock myself in there, I’m going to come out and be done.” And it’s his way of saying, “I have to do something I don’t enjoy, but I’m going to push through.” As opposed to saying, “I hate doing this. I guess I’m bad at it. This job is hard for me and I’m lazy.” So it’s so much better to know it.

Marty: Doesn’t it just prime the mindset differently when you’ve got to take on something that you’re not in love with.

All right. Let’s play a game. Now, for my daughter, Emma, who you just mentioned, who’s the CEO of our company, what’s she going to do to give me the sort of work that I want? My Working Genius is discernment and galvanizing, my working competencies are tenacity and enablement, and my working frustrations are wonder and invention.

Do I need to tell her that she can’t keep throwing content production at me?

Pat: If she comes to you and says… And this is so funny because invention is one of my geniuses. I love inventing. And for you, if somebody were to say to you, “Hey, Marty, Dad, you need to come up with three new ideas from scratch. I hope they work, and just do it. I’m not going to give you any parameters. Just come up with something.” You would not love that. I find that my staff will say to me, “Pat, we have two podcasts to do tomorrow. We don’t have anything.” And I smile and I go, “I’ll probably come up with it tonight in bed or in the shower.”

And so one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, right?

Marty: Of course.

Pat: So my son, Matt, has great discernment like you, but he does not have invention. And so I’ll come up with an idea and then he’ll go, “No, that one’s not a good idea.” And I used to go, “Well then what’s your idea?” And now he goes, “I don’t know. I don’t have invention, Dad, but I do have discernment, and I know that was not good.“

And it’s fair. It’s fair. He’s like, “Dad, I don’t know. I’m not going to come up with something new, but I can respond to yours and tell you it doesn’t work.”

Marty: Pat, this conversation has been absolutely fascinating…

Pat: And, what a blast!

Marty: I really, really wanted to let you know how much I appreciate your openness and generosity in the conversation, because not all interviews are like that, as you well know.

I’ve had a heap of fun, and to talk to one of the people whom I consider to be a global thought leader, par excellence – someone who has made a real difference to generational leadership, it’s been an absolute privilege and an honor for me to interview with you and spend this time.

So, Patrick Lencioni, thank you so much.

Pat: I’ve had a blast. Thank you. God bless you, Marty.