EntreLeadership - #404: The 6 Types of Working Genius with Patrick Lencioni

Episode Date: December 7, 2020

Have you ever noticed there are some things that just drain all of your energy and others that supercharge you? Speaking at an event may fire you up, while bringing together the details of a large project feels like death by a thousand cuts. What’s that about? Organizational health expert and author Patrick Lencioni says the difference between work that’s draining and work that’s energizing comes down to your areas of working genius. These are the work skills you’re naturally gifted at. He breaks down how to determine the kind of work that aligns with who you are—and how this knowledge can help you build an energized, high-performing team. Use the code ENTRE to get 50% off The 6 Types of Working Genius assessment.   entreleadership.com/podcast The Table Group's website The Trouble with Humility by Patrick Lencioni The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni Good to Great by Jim Collins Working Genius' website Learn more about Summit 2021 The EntreLeader's Guide to Hiring 25 Things You Can Delegate to a Virtual Assistant from BELAY Review this episode for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, if you're leading a business, by now you know, the people that you work with have different talents than you. Sometimes that can be frustrating. But it's actually a good thing because we all have different strengths and different weaknesses. We have different personality styles. I mean, you guys know this. It takes a village. But what we do to try to figure out the space and understand our people better, if you're like me, you start taking these assessments. Disc, Myers, Briggs, Enneagram, all good things.

But here's what a lot of those things don't tell us. Can this person actually do their job? From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership Podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty, and my guest today is Pat Lanchone. Pat's the founder and president of the table group, where he spends his time speaking and writing about leadership, teamwork, organizational health. But here's the thing, guys.

He's not just another consultant. We have worked with him at Ramsey Solutions and Entree Leadership for years. We've given every one of his books to all of our team members, and we give them out at our entre leadership events because his stuff is so legit. When it comes to team, culture, values, you've got to be reading Petlanchone. Now, this is exciting. He and his team have developed a model that helps leaders identify their teams, areas of working genius. Also, the areas of life-draining weaknesses that if they're doing those activities too long,

they're going to burn out and quit. You don't want that. So this is going to be a lot of fun. But before we get into the model, we have to first start with understanding the foundation of a great team. Well, it all starts with trust, which is humility-based and vulnerability-based. If people can't come to sit down with their team

and say, I don't know the answer, I need help. I'm sorry, I was a jerk yesterday, or I don't know what to do here, somebody else, or you're smarter than I am at this, I want to be like you. If people can't come to work and be emotionally buck-naked, if you will,

then you're done. Because if people can't come and be raw, open honest. They're not going to be able to engage in good conflict because they're not going to be telling the truth and they're going to feel like that's too risky. They're not going to commit to decisions because they never really weighed in. They're not going to hold each other accountable and say, hey, you're my friend, but you got to do better than that on this one, which is a great thing on a team, but if you can't be vulnerable, you're not going to do that. And then they're not going to actually do what's in the best interest to the team. They're going to look at themselves. So that's the basic

way that teams function from trust to results. But in order to do that, you really need to be a hungry, smart person, which is, I don't think too much of myself. I think others are more important than I am. I mean, you know, I honor them. I work really hard. I'm hungry. I'm interpersonally smart. I know how to deal with human beings. And if you can find humble, hungry, and smart people and put them in an environment where they build trust, have good conflict, hold each other accountable and do all those things, it's going to work. It's not complicated. I know I just went through that very quick and I talked about eight different things, but it's very simple. Are there blockers to trust aside from not having those people who are hungry, humble,

smart? Well, I would say there's blockers if the leader doesn't have that. And it's countercultural, by the way. I should say that too. People don't grow up thinking about being vulnerable. They teach you to grow up and, you know, reveal just the parts of yourself that you think people will like. And this is a problem.

So that's why human beings have a hard time being vulnerable is because we think we're supposed to come into the world and protect ourselves. But that's not what makes a team great. So I think that if you have people that are humble, hungry, and smart, and the leader gets that and nurtures that, I don't know that there's other blockers. I'm trying to think what might that be. I mean, there's environmental factors. Maybe you work in a company that doesn't like that, doesn't reward that. But if the person at the top thinks it's important and creates an environment from the top, and I will tell you, Daniel, that, you know, one of the reasons I work with CEOs and their teams is because it needs to be modeled from the very top.

And it's not that they're more fun to party with, like, oh, or I want to be important. I just think if you can get the people at the very top of the organization to do that, you have a fighting chance and the rest of it. And when I go into an organization and I start at the bottom someplace, they're constant looking up and going, do you think they're ever going to get this? So it just makes more sense to come, which is why I love talking to entrepreneurs, because it's like, you can turn your, you can turn your company into a trustworthy, good team quickly if you make that so with you and your leaders. Well, it sounds like what you're saying, in some ways

is similar to our friend John Maxwell. He says everything rises and falls on leadership. Absolutely. And if you're not working with the leader, you're not working with the highest leveraged point of culture. Yeah. That's their job. Yes. And when they don't realize that, when they think their job is just figuring out the technical parts of the operations, then it's really difficult. So yeah, John and I would be in complete alignment around that. And that's why the leader is so important. But that leader can't believe that they're inherently more important than the people they lead. Their actions and behaviors are just more important. Yeah. I think the difference is they're more important, but not more significant. Yeah. You know, it's the, it's the, it's the,

challenge of humility. I wrote an article years ago called The Trouble with Humility, and that is that as a leader, I have to believe I am just like anybody else here. I'm just a child of God. I'm a person that's, I don't have more significance, as you say. And so I have to believe that. But my words and actions are going to have a disproportionate impact on everything else around here. The problem is when people realize that their words and actions are disproportionately important, sometimes they start to personalize that and say, man, I'm pretty important here. Similarly, people that say, hey, I'm not that important.

Sometimes they forget that people are watching them. I've had a leader early on, you know, Daniel, when I started this business and I, I wrote my first book, there was this leader. His name was Mark Hoffman, and he ran a company called Sybase, and Mark just didn't think he was that important. And people were drawn to him because of that. Like, he'd walk down the hallways and treat people like, and here he was the CEO, this company was growing, he was a billion dollars, and he just didn't seem to think

he mattered. The problem was, there were times when I needed him to step up because I worked for him and actually be a leader, and he was like, oh, do people care what I think? Oh, but they do. And so the trouble with humility is when a humble person discounts the impact they have on others, rather than discounts their significance but then understands their behavior. I hope that makes sense. It does.

I've struggled with this in my leadership journey because I have a pretty charismatic, grab the bull by the horns, jump in there, make it happen. I hope you can keep up kind of leadership style. And there's times I've realized that's not that healthy. I've got to slow down. And there's even times I almost artificially go to not saying or doing anything because I'm so concerned that my dominant personality is going to flood out everybody. But then that doesn't feel authentic. Like there's this tension of depending on how you're wired.

How do we find that sweet? Well, I think that's one of the reasons why we look at this stuff about working genius. Because now that I know what your working geniuses are, I look at this and I think, no, you're actually gifted in a few areas that you need to lean into. but there are certain times when they're not necessary or appropriate. And so you should not feel guilty about the gifts and the geniuses you have, but you should be humble enough to recognize there's times when other geniuses are being called for. I love that. So working genius is a model that you've been developing.

I hope that that didn't sound like I was trying to make a segue. No, now I get it. I want us to dive into this because I think it's brilliant. So the idea is we all have unique strengths and unique ways of working, unique ways of finding energy. talk us through there's these six types of genius. Right. So there's six different geniuses, different skills that are necessary to get any work done. So these six things are, if you're doing a project, launching a program, running a family, a school, a church, whatever else it is, if the team that's responsible for that doesn't have all six of these geniuses, there's a gap there that needs to be filled.

And those six things are the genius of wonder, which is pondering the bigger picture, like what's going on? here and why is this like this, the genius of invention. I'm going to solve that problem. You're wondering about the genius of discernment, which is I have a good way of evaluating things and knowing if they're going to work or not. The genius of galvanizing, which is I'm going to get people excited and moving and inspired. The genius of enablement, which is I'm going to get in there and make this work and I'm going to be the supporter and the helper and the, I don't be available to people. And then the genius of tenacity, which is I'm going to push it across the finish line. So those are the six things. And they're all geniuses. Some people will say, well,

invention is the real genius. Nope. Without wonder, without discernment, without all the others, you don't have genius. It all comes together. The issue here is only two of these come naturally to any given person. You and I both have two that give us joy and energy and where we're naturally gifted. It's a God-given talent. Now, the problem is we'll want to use that talent all the time because that's where we're drawn to. So when my wife asked me to clean the garage, I'm going to use my geniuses, even though they might not correspond to what she needs. We also have two that we're uniquely poor at. Okay. You know, God gives us gifts, and he also gives us deficiencies. And so there's things that we're not good at. Well, if we don't know what we're naturally gifted at and we don't

know what we're naturally poor at, how in the world are we going to maximize the goodness we bring to our teams and avoid the things that will probably drag us and our teams down? And that's what this assessment is about, which came about by accident, you know, I was, I've been frustrated in my work in, in mild ways for 20 years, because there was parts of it that I didn't like, and I didn't know why. And my team would be like, Pat, you love what you do, why do you get so grumpy? And I was like, I don't know. And so one day at work, we just sat down and figured this out. And we were like, oh my gosh, I think this is universal. The 12 hours after coming up with this, Daniel, we wrote it on the whiteboard. One of our consultants saw it, shared with one of his clients, and the client

started to cry and said, this is the problem I have. This is why I'm so, he was emotionally moved. He said, I am struggling with this, and now I understand why. So out of that, we decided, I think there's something here. And then now we have this assessment, and it's out there and people are using it, and it's crazy. So fun. And people look at it and say, I finally figured out why I'm good at certain things and why I'm not and how I need to adjust my career or my job or my family. I want to talk more about the assessment in a second. First, I want to stay at this kind of this philosophical level. There seems to be an unspoken, maybe even an unconscious expectation that's probably a myth, and that is that, well, all these things matter in everybody. I think leaders often think,

I want all my people to care about all those things, almost like they're virtual. that we should all be aspiring to do all of this. Why is that not the case? Because none, you know, I think it's because we need each other. You know, we didn't get put on this earth to live separate. I mean, you know, and I'm a follower of Jesus. And if you think about God makes us need each other. And if we, if any one person had everything, we wouldn't need each other.

And I think this is what makes teams great. And people talk a lot about diversity. Well, diversity is primarily in diversity in your game. gifts. And so you have a team and if you can say, oh, I'm so glad she's great at those things and really celebrate her for that. And I'm so glad that he's great at those and celebrate him for that. It allows you to appreciate one another, allow people to do what they're meant to do. And it's what makes an orchestra great. But too often, and you know, Daniel, I'll tell you, I think the two biggest impacts of this tool are people feel guilty for the things they don't have.

Like, oh, I'm lacking that. I'm just bad. I'm not, I don't work hard enough. I don't care enough. It's a false thing. Secondly, they judge other people. They're like, well, you don't have that. We don't call it a genius or gift. You're just not good at doing that. You must not care or you must not work hard enough. And so when you do this, it's allowed me to feel less guilty about the things I'm not great at. Doesn't mean I still don't have to do them sometimes. It also has prevented me from judging up. others. Oh, I've done that so many times. Oh, my gosh, we totally do. It's the fundamental attribution here. Well, you're not doing that well because you don't care. No, that's not their gift. So now I can say to somebody at work, oh, that's okay. That's not your gift. Let's get somebody in there. Or, hey, that's not your gift, but I need you to push through this just this time. Okay. I like, I like, I like this. And I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I'm like this. I imagine we go back to Hungry's Humble Smart. Exactly, exactly, because we all have gifts, but then we have to decide what are we going to do with them. And if a person has great gifts and they work really hard using those gifts, then they have passion. They just might have some big blind spots in other areas. Well, I can deal with that. But if they're not even working hard in the areas of their giftedness, that's a hunger problem. Okay.

So we've got wonder, invention, discernment, galvanizing, enablement, and tenacity. And you notice it spells widget. Now, I have to tell you this. we got to the fourth one and we were like okay this says whidge and you wouldn't have found too that started with an e and a t just to have a widget no it was actually even better than that the e we couldn't think of a word for and we came up with the e and we're like okay we're at widget and we thought all right what's the last one and and the tenacity really is a good word for it there might have been a couple others but we thought it might as well spell widgets because people can actually remember it that

okay so here's uh let's look at you you sent me this thing a couple months ago I think in the beta mode. Oh, no, you were one of the first people to take it. And I filled out, I answered a lot of questions. I don't remember 40. Much about the questions. 40 questions. Forty two, actually. And I'm actually just seeing my results for the first time right here as we're recording this. So talk me through what's wrong with me. Well, we've brought your wife in to help us with that. All right. So your geniuses are invention. You love to come up with new ideas. A whiteboard and a blank slate is a good thing for you. Yes. And that is a natural gift. And you know what? You're saying whiteboard. We say that metaphorically. I love whiteboards.

Yeah. Actual flip charts and markers and whiteboards and doodling and notepads and non-digital aspects of creation of just like getting the stuff on the wall. Like sticking. I love that. So do I. In fact, my whole office, we just painted all our walls with whiteboard pretty much. That's the best use of a wall pad. Isn't it? We don't even have windows. We just go in there. So you're good at, it's like you thrive in that early part of the creative process. Yeah. You get energy. and joy out of creating new ideas out of nothing. Original novel solutions to problems. It might be a product.

It might be a solution. It might be just coming up with a new way of looking at things. But having an unstructured need to solve a problem is actually a stimulant for you. Do you know how many people will say, oh my gosh, that crushes me? They're like, I don't know what to do when that happens.

Please don't put me in it. And here's you and I. This is one of mine too. we're like, that's the greatest job in the world. And other people are like, no, that would be my misery. You know, I found this invention thing. This is what we're talking about, invention. And as you're describing it, I'm going, I definitely have that.

I've struggled when people ask me how you do the thing. So one of my favorite things is leading strategic sessions in a room with a bunch of people with large personalities like Dave Ramsey and we've got a lot of conflict. And I'm the guy with the marker on the whiteboard. And I walk in with a very loose plan in my mind, very loose. In fact, it needs to be loose. And when we start talking, things come in my mind to start drawing on the board, frameworks and models and things that help us communicate better. And it just flows out of me.

And people have said, hey, can you teach us how you do that thing? And I'm like, I don't know how I do it. It's a natural, it's a gift. It was given to you. And so it's not a, oh, well, I read this book. Right. That's called expertise and knowledge. This is one of those things you were probably doing as a kid.

Totally. And I was. Yes. And you know, it's funny, that's not one that was really nurtured in me. So it was a frustrated eye, my invention. Nobody was saying, hey, Pat, you're an invention. My parents were both very, you know, by the book and structured. And so I wasn't really given many opportunities to do this.

And our education system doesn't do that at all. Right. I struggled so much in school. Yeah, because your teacher didn't go, hey, why don't you come up with any, here's what I'm going to teach. Now just come up with something out of nothing. Because anything that was super structured or the lecture is going on and on, and I'm doodling on my paper, I would get in trouble for doodling, but it was actually my coping mechanism to stay engaged. Yeah. Like I'm actually a little bit more engaged in an auditory lecture format if I can write and draw and sketch out pictures of what I'm hearing.

You know, the two that lend themselves to being good in school are your least. And mine too. This explains a lot. And mine, too. We share the same lower ones. Now, your other gift, though, your other genius is you have the genius of galvanizing. What does that mean? That is the person who loves to get people moving, like to get people, hey, let's get in a room and talk about this.

I want to get you guys excited. I want to recruit you. I want to do the initial part of organizing, just like, let's all start moving. Yes. And it's like, so you like to come up with new ideas and get people excited about them. I do. And I love, when I see a problem and I realize we can do something about it, I've found that I'm really good at helping people understand why it matters. Right.

To change course. Yep, that's Calvin. And getting, recruiting people and promoting the idea and the direction of where we need to go, the problem we need to solve, or the opportunity to take on. I love that. And I come from a sales background and I was always really good at sales, but only when I believed in the product. Right. I've been in sales jobs for about two weeks where it's a crappy product. I'm like, I can't hang.

I have to believe this is going to be better for the people buying. And today I sell ideas and vision and direction. And I love it. Oh, my gosh. See, because you are now in a job that allows you to work in your business. geniuses. Now, if I said to you, Daniel, what I want you to, we'll go to your two weakest areas. Okay. By the way, the way to understand these is like your two geniuses are like this cup right here, a cup of coffee. And if you were to pour coffee into it that's hot and put a lid on it,

it's going to hold that energy, that heat for a long time. That's your genius area. It's like, I could do that forever. Your weaknesses are like a cup you pour into and there's a hole in the bottom of it. And it just leaks out the bottom. It holds no energy or joy for you. And your two areas of weakness are the genius of tenacity, which is finishing things and doing the last details to make sure it gets completed and the impact is had at the end. And enablement, which is coming alongside of somebody else's idea and providing whatever support they need. Yes. That doesn't mean you're not a nice guy. It just means you like to determine the new idea and get people moving, and then you kind of like to step back.

You know, it really rings true with me. And I struggle sometimes, even with my colleagues, about my. My lack of, they might even be said sometimes as lack of follow through. I was going to say, that's mine. And I'm like, oh, that hurts because it sounds like I'm not hard work ethic or hungry or doing, you know, but I have had feedback that kind of sounds like, hey, you're really good at getting everybody excited, but then you don't do the real work. Right. And this is where we have to get rid of our guilt and our judgment because this is real work. Yeah.

But people think this is real work. When I was a kid, God rest his soul, my dad, a good man, a wonderful man. He would take me out to mow the lawn every weekend, and I hated it. I loved my dad, but I hated doing it. You know why? Because he would say, just follow me around and do whatever I tell you, and then make sure you finish it and you do it perfectly. And if he had said, hey, see the yard, you go figure it out.

I'd have been like inventing like, oh, you know what? I think there's a new way to do it. But no, I had to do it on his terms and according to his specifications. And I wasn't lazy, but I felt like I was like, what's wrong with you? me, why don't I just follow him around and rake up the leaves? And it was like, because that goes against my grain. Now, that doesn't mean that in my life as a child and in my life now, there's not times I have to do that. We do. Of course. But we need to go, I'm doing this. It's against the grain. It's not my job. I'm doing this today or this week because it's required.

And I can gut through this. Yeah, be a freaking adult. I mean, you've got to do some things out of duty. That's leadership. But if there a job that makes you do that every day, you are going to go to work and get very depressed. So do you have a loose, like, percentage of your time that should be the max on your weaknesses and then the max? Like, what's the ideal? Because you can't be 100% in your genius all the time. No, I mean, so I'll guess right now. This is such a new thing, but I would say you ought to be spending 70% of time in your geniuses. Okay. You know, more than 50. And by the way, there's the two in between. So if you have two geniuses and two frustrations, the two in between your, I call working competencies. You can do those.

And you can even do them fairly well, but over time you're going to get burned out. And so these two are not so bad. So basically, if you're spending more than 15% of your time and your working frustrations, you're probably pretty frustrated. So it really depends on, is it the first two? Is it the second two or the third two? But if you're not spending any time in your working genius, so I should probably say 80% of your time should probably be spent in your top four.

So my working competencies, these are my middle two. wonder and discernment. Dissermint. And which makes sense because you do have to evaluate whether, now, when you're inventing something, though, our discernment tends to go away. We need other people to discern our ideas. So if you go, oh, I just came up with this new idea, you need to go to somebody with discernment and go, what do you think?

A discernment, like, should we actually do this or not? Or is it how practical it is? It's that gut feel like, I think this is a good idea. Or I think this sounds bad. Or, oh, I think there's a few things missing. Cody on my team has great discernment. when I first burped out this idea of the working geniuses, he's the guy I go to and say,

there's people I know that I would show it to and they go, oh, yeah, I don't know. And I go, yeah, but they don't even think that way. But Cody was the guy I could go show it to, know that his reaction, and he looked at it and it was like, oh, wow, this is bigger than the five dysfunction. Really? He goes, oh, yeah, the applications of this are far bigger.

And his gut I need. Gotcha. Because I know that he has good instincts, good intuition, sees patterns. And so every inventor needs a good discerner. You know, it's funny you say that. I struggle with judging the value and the utility of, I have a thousand ideas a day.

Right. But I get so overwhelmed with all the ideas that I create in my genius about trying to figure out which one should we actually go do. Which one's a good one? We were working with one of the, Cody was working, one of the people helped develop this, with one of the leading innovation companies in America. Everybody knows that they have products.

Everybody used them. And he met with one of their senior innovators and went through this. And their team, because this is a team tool, their team was great at wonder and invention, but there was no D or G. So they would invent something, throw it over the wall to the enablement and tenacity people, and half their ideas wouldn't stick because nobody was discerning it. They would just go, yes, let's invent it. No, let's not. Nobody was actually looking at it and talking about it and working with the inventors. So they were like, how come 50% of our new products don't, they fail?

And they realized, we're doing no discernment or galvanizing. We go from invention to work. Yeah. It sounds like the discernment person has the ability to see the playing field and kind of sense the idea and then sense it active in the real world out in the wild and go, that animal's going to die in the wild or no, it's going to go eat all the other animals. And if you ask him how they do it, just like the invention, they're going to go, I don't. I don't know. They were good at this as a kid. Huh. You know, they're the ones that can look at a movie and go, oh, yeah, this was a fantastic movie.

And I see this and you're like, what do you mean? And you're like, I don't know, I can just tell. They're curators. Are they kind of prophetic? Are they good at forecasting and seeing the future and what's going to be a dog and what's going to run? Dave is really good at that. Dave's greatest talent is his discernment. He can look at something and go, yeah, that's a great idea right there.

And then his next one is tenacity, though. So he goes, I just had lunch with Dave, and he goes, and then I go to, okay, we're going to do this. Yes, he does. Sometimes I leave people in the dark because he discerns very quickly and sees like, that's a great idea. And then he drives right to, so let's get it done. Well, and you know, I've observed this, I work with Dave for 17 years, and we're very close and can finish each other's sentences at this point. And I've seen him have a really high batting average on his ideas. That's discernment.

And it gives him a confidence that I don't have to explain all the details. If he has that intuition, we should go here most of the time he's right. Yeah. That's what discernment is. And it's not expertise. Right. Because it's even in new areas. He has a really good gut.

Exactly. Right. A lot of the time. But the breakdown that we've experienced with this as our CEO, as the team gets bigger, in some of these people who need more information about how we're all going to get there together, especially if we have responsibilities to go execute what's in his gut, and it's not super clear. It's just a feeling he has. If he was by himself, he'd be right.

He'd go off, he'd do it, and it would win. But as a leader, we've got to, and I have a little bit of this, too, like we can leave the team behind. We can run off and do it without them. So part of this, I think, is we're getting our team to all work through it together or understand it as a level they can execute on. Right. And you need to know what your team members, what their geniuses are, too.

Because there are literally people you go, hey, we're in the discernment phase of this. And this is hard, but your D isn't so high. I have people that work with me, they go, I don't have any D. So let me just let me know as soon as you guys discern that this is the right idea. I'll weigh in if you want, but you guys know that I'm not good. I need data, linear, all this other stuff. So when you guys decide it's the right thing, I'll jump back in. I'll sit at the meeting, but don't.

And there's people I've worked with that it's like, I really don't think this is the right time for you to be weighing in. Just like me, when we get later in the process and I've used my I and my D, my invention and my discernment, that's like Pat, we're in tenacity. So if you want to come and help, that's great. But don't be bringing any of your new ideas. This is not a time for new ideas. But think about Dave back in his house with Sharon in the card table. He had D.

He saw that right answer and he went out and executed. It makes sense that a guy like that, but he had to have the big picture like, I knew this was the right thing, and I'm going to get it done. So how do we set up our teams when leaders are often tasked with vision? and figure out where we're going. And not all leaders are vision. That's true.

But they're still responsible for a vision, right? Absolutely. So if vision is our thing, we've got to figure out how we set up our team to follow us and be bought in, have the data, whatever the case may be. Or if vision's not our thing, we have to have a vision. How do we fill the gap, the deficit, and make sure that we're cohesive with the team that's going to get there together? So I have a small company, right? So I can relate to all the entrepreneurs out there. I mean, many of you guys have bigger companies in mind.

We have a small, we're a think tank in a consulting firm, and we partner with a lot of people like yourself. So we sat down and we did this, and right away, the answers became obvious. So I was doing all the gene, all the galvanizing in my company, and it wasn't one of my geniuses, and it was exhausting me. And I finally said, that's why I'm grumpy, you guys, because I have to galvanize everything. Amy, Tracy, Karen, three of my co-founders and early people, none of them liked me. That was their working frustrations. So they go, well, Pat, at least you're good at it. So you're going to have to galvanize everything,

and it was driving me crazy. So what I did is I said, okay, Cody, you have G. We have a 22-year-old kid on her team. He has G. We said, Liam, you're going to start Gene. And he's like, what do you mean? I don't even know what I'm doing here. And we're like, doesn't matter.

We can teach you that. But you have the gift of galvanizing. And he's like, but the rest of you guys are like 25 years older than me. I'm going to galvanize you. And the people that were 25 years old, I said, yes, please. We want you to rally us and kick our butt. because we will lose our way, and we will come alongside and do what you ask us to do

because you are good at that. And he's like, I get to do one of my geniuses, even though I've been in this job for two months. Most places would say, well, and when you've been here 10 years, we'll let you do that. No, it shouldn't be about senior. It should be about your genius, your gift. Gotcha.

And so your job as the leader, Daniel, is to figure out what the gifts are the people around you. You've probably got a W on your team who loves to sit, and you're going to go, I need to hear what you have to say. And then you've got E's and T's on. your team that you need to just, when they say, yeah, you don't follow through,

and darn right, I don't. And I'm so glad you do. And I'm going to champion you for doing that, but I am not great at it. Now, in a pinch, you let me know, and I'll set myself on fire for you. But I am not good at this. And if you rely on me to finish tasks and to provide what other people need like that, that's not my genius. Hey, you guys know there's so many details that matter if you're going to run a successful

business. but all those details and doing them all comes at a heavy cost of your time. And often as leaders, we just say, hey, we'll do it all. We have a superhero mentality, and we pull out our cape, and we say, I'll just take it all on. And then we hit the wall, and we go, I can't do all this. There's so much. And, hey, you know what? No one can.

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being able to delegate things to them and they do their stuff and I can steer their energy. But even though I'm a galvanizer, I really struggle to hold people accountable. Yeah. Week in, week out, week out, check in, what's the latest update on the project? Okay, how's it going? Okay, you know, I'm going to challenge that. I think you could do that. Like pushing on people consistently over time.

Because once I launched the idea and I've rallied people, I'm just expecting them to be adults and go get it done. And all of my headspace goes into the next idea. I forget to stay in touch with the team. These people are usually better at that because they understand. The E and the details. Yeah, because I'm kind of like, do you guys need me to go in and do another cheerleading session? They're like, no, we need you to go and look at our plan and say, hey, you've got to do more here, you've got to do more here.

And you and I are like, because we have similar profiles. Yeah, I think my energy for that is pretty low. Now, that's not an excuse. What you need to do is sit down and go, maybe I need to work that into the system and make myself do it. But just know that you're not going to naturally do it. And you're not going to be awesome at it. Maybe there's a way to build that into your system. Let me give you an example from my home life.

Okay. So my wife and I are, her and I, we share what the lowest area is tenacity, the finishing of things, which is often detail and pushing through to the end. One day I came home from work and the lights didn't work in my house. And I thought, oh, wow, you know, power goes out. Hey, I think the neighborhood, the power's out. And she said, no, no, it's not. Well, no, but these lights aren't working. She goes, yeah, it's not the neighborhood.

What's going on? And she says, yeah, we didn't pay the power bill. Well, they usually said you would notice, yeah, we kind of set that aside a few times. And I thought, and I look at this now and I go, that is predictable given our, now Dave would go, well, you knucklehead, you got to do your bills every day. You know what I mean? But Laura and I, we don't pay attention to that. Now, that's not an excuse.

Like, well, kids, we don't have any power. We realize, though, that is understandable. Now, she and I both love invention and wonder. So we can talk about big picture things and come up with new ideas all the time. But if I don't have somebody with me to help me follow through and get them done, and I'm going to happen. I'm really fortunate that my strengths and my wife's strengths, I'd love for her to do the test,

but I'm already seeing kind of how we are much more complimentary instead of the same deficits. And she actually keeps me on track on the finish, the follow through and the tenacity kind of stuff. Oh, isn't that great? And you want to celebrate that. You know, like, I love that. that you're the way you are. We use it in our house now, my wife will say, I need your G.

I need you to galvanize the kids around their homework because it's not working. I'm not good at it. I don't like to do it. I'm just nagging them. With the same thing. And I enjoy it because I'm like, all right, cool.

What creative way can I come up with? To trick them into loving eating their broccoli. Exactly. And she's like, how do you get them to do that? I'm like, I don't know. I made it fun. And she's like, oh, I don't have patience for that, you know? Right.

And the thing is, she shouldn't feel guilty for that. Yes. She should go, I'm so glad my husband does that well. I don't. I really like that. Because we beat ourselves up, especially as parents. Oh, my gosh. I feel like we have to have all the skills and be super parents.

Well, think about this. If there's two parents, there's four geniuses if you don't have any overlap. That means two of them you don't have. That's true. So every family is going to look at this and go, oh, yeah, we never, we never do that. And it's really helpful. You know, we price this dang thing at $25. And everybody said, you should price it more because it's really an enterprise thing.

And you could get companies to do it. We were like, no, we want a mom and a dad to have their college kids take this. We want a person that's starting their career or in a job they've been in for 20 years and they're not for it. We want them to go out and be able to take this and read the report and really digest it and go, I know exactly what I need to do now. And by the way, if anybody takes this, there's a discount code for 50% off. and it is entree. Yes.

E-N-T-R-E capital letters. R-E, capital letters, and they go where to get their... WorkingGenius.com. So, guys, go to workinggenius.com, and for those of you just listening, Pat's pointing to, my results are printed out here in front of me, and it's a really compelling, simple-to-digest dashboard, essentially, that gives me a summary of my genius. And I'm literally seeing this for the first time, and in this conversation, I'm understanding it and processing it.

But, man, light bulbs are already going off with my team. and my family, things I could lean into more. I'm thinking of projects that I'm responsible for at work right now that I need to raise my hand and go, hey, I shouldn't be doing this based on my genius, and I should be helping them over there more because I have that genius. And just a few minutes of working through this. And I want business people to get this because this is a really great tool. And if you have a small business and everybody in your team takes this, you're going to

look around and go, hey, let me do that for you. And people are going to go, thank you. I can do that for you. And productivity goes up, job satisfaction goes up. up, let me tell you, that makes everything work. That's the beauty of this. It's good for the individual and it's good for the team. It's a win-win.

But if you don't know what your geniuses are or your frustrations, you don't know how to do this. So tell me what do you think about incorporating this into the hiring process. If you figure out what your team has and doesn't have, seems that you would want to backfill or staff up to some of these deficits in your team. This is the first tool, Daniel, that I've actually thought could be used for hiring. Like the Myers-Briggs, it's like, well, you're an ENFP. what does that mean? Well, there's a lot of things. That's more of a personality and underline. This is actually the kind of work you like to do. So it would be a favor for somebody to say,

listen, we're hiring somebody to be an office manager. What you need to do is respond to the needs of people and to make sure things actually get finished. That's largely enablement and tenacity. If those are your working frustrations, then we're going to make your life miserable and you're going to make our life miserable. I think staffing organizations should be going like, hey, this is a job. We've asked the people about it. It's really a, a DG job. Let's go find some DGs because it's going to be a great fit for them. It's going to be.

So it's not about you would never want to interview and convince somebody you were something you weren't because then you're just going to put yourself in a position to fail and to be unhappy. So this is the first, I think, objective tool that I've seen that you could actually say, this is a job for you. I think that's really cute what you're saying. Getting people to align with the role in who they are. You know, it's so key. And it seems so obvious.

Yeah. Jim Collins talks about you got to get the right people on the bus. That's the core values. That's the humble hungry smart. And you've experienced this, and many business owners have, sometimes somebody's so good at interviewing that they will chameleon and become something they're not because they really need a job, Pat. And they're like, I'll be that. Sure. Let me find a story of my childhood that can convince you that I am that. And then three months in, they're miserable. And you're like, why are you so miserable? You said you were going to love this. and you find out they weren't really being true to who they were. How do we in the interview process mine for who is this person really? Obviously use this assessment.

I think that's a great tool. But in the conversations, how do we sell that person, the candidate, on you should say no to this unless this is really who you are? Right. Well, first of all, you look for the behavior. Like humble, hungry, smart is something that Dave uses, and we wrote about that. And I think that's a great tool. But then you go, okay, are you a fit for the culture? Are you ego-driven, lazy, and bad with people?

You're not a fit. So if they're humble, hungry, smart, they're a good fit. But now you figure, like, should you be in this role? Okay. And that's what it comes in. And that's when you want to have, it's like you want to be like a brutally honest dating person. Like nobody should date somebody they're not meant for. So talking a young lady, because we're guys, into going out with us.

Now we're married, so we don't do that anymore. This is going down. Yeah. Talking a young lady into going to. out with you that is not a good fit for you. And pretending you're somebody you're not to make her think you are, that's just a great way to have a bad relationship. Okay.

But so you don't want to hire somebody. So what you want to say to somebody is, let me tell you about this job. The way we see it is you're going to have to do a lot of invention and a lot of discernment. So if you like that kind of stuff, you're going to do really well and you're going to be really happy. But if you don't like that, you're probably going to struggle. We're going to have to let you go eventually. And that's going to look bad on your resume and you're not going to be happy.

So let's figure out if you love invention and discernment. And you can go to the people that are struggling in your organization. People will say, like, they're a cultural fit, but they're struggling. It's like, well, find out what their gifts are and help them use them. So I think this is a great tool for figuring out what seat on the bus a person should be. And Jim Collins said, but get the right people on the bus. But what seat should they be on? This is the tool for finding what seat they should be on.

That makes sense. if you have a small leadership team, are there geniuses that skew more towards leadership, or do you want all these geniuses across your entire leadership team? That's a great question. I actually think you can be a leader. It depends on the organization. Whatever your role is, as long as you're playing that role and you are a good facilitator of other people's talents. And there are all kinds of leaders.

Some people started a business because they were good at two and they don't have the other four. and they can still be the leader. Now, I do think this, though, I will say this. There is one skill on here that I think it really helps in leadership, and that's discernment, because you kind of look around, you can kind of tell like, oh, I think I've seen this pattern before. I have good judgment, and I know when I'm being snowed by a vendor, I kind of can tell what customers might need. I know what my employees might need. So I think D is a pretty good one to have. If it's low, low, low on this and it's your working frustration, that might be a challenge. But other than that, I think it's a matter. of just, I worked with a team recently, and nobody on the team had wonder or invention, the first two. And this was a high-tech company. They're supposed to be coming up with new products. And not only did they not have wonder or invention, but most of their working frustration were in those areas. And they said, oh my gosh, this is why we're not coming up with new products. This is why we're not seeing what our customers need, because we're not pondering what's going on around us, and we're not thinking. We're all about execution.

And we rally people around things that we haven't even come up with a new idea in years. And so they said we have to start forcing ourselves to do more of this and bringing some people in that can help us. Man, I like that. You know, I'm thinking about my journey. You know, I kind of started entree leadership. I was a sales guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember. And then there was another sales guy.

And they said, okay, you can lead that person. And it turned into a little business unit. And I was the VP. And I had no idea what I was doing. But as I was hiring people, sometimes it would work. And then a lot of times it wouldn't. And we get somebody on board. And because I'm a galvanizer, I would sell people internally on why we got to hire this person.

And I thought I could sell them on why they would be great for the job. I'm the consummate. And I'm the invention, right? I'm high on invention. And so I have these ideas. And then I find the person. And I would have this tendency to look past all the reasons I shouldn't hire them. Yep.

And so the story continues, entree leadership's growing. and Sarah Sully, and you know Sarah, she becomes the VP of Entree leadership, and I move on to the board, and I'm like, okay, this is your baby, run with this thing. She's like, can I fire all the people that you hired that we shouldn't have hired? I'm like, what are you talking about? And we laugh about it now, but what we realized is Sarah has tons of discernment. Right. She's a discerner. And I threw a lot of pain of, you know, self-inflicted pain, of making bad decisions and hiring the wrong. people and also her having the pain and finally saying tardy i've had enough you've done all these things and i have to clean up all the messes and i could have told you that if you'd you listen to me the first time this was a bad idea and i started to trust like okay sarah if you say it feels funny to you i don't even understand it but i've learned that i've got to listen to that exactly because because and a discerner wants people around them to do that because they want people to go we trust your

gut because it's not a linear data-driven process. They have just good intuitions. Good judgment. Yeah, judgment is even better. And so when you know you have somebody like that and you're using them, they're coming to work going, it is so great that people come to me and ask me for my opinion about this. Whereas if they have to argue to get people to listen, it's like, oh, this is crazy. So I love the fact that you, that it's that she linked your I and your G providing D. That's why it works. Well, we partner so well, once we figured this stuff out and, man, this assessment, where was this eight years ago, Pat? Gosh, man. Somewhere in the back of my brain when I was frustrated in my job.

So we kind of figured it out through hard knocks. But once we did figure that out, we started getting a lot more clarity about our roles where I would function more like the CEO and that she was more like the C-O-O. And so she really became the chief of staff. Yeah. The hiring and are they the right people in the right seat and who needs to say who needs to go? I'm terrible at that stuff. Right. And I also don't want to be interviewing.

I want to be on a whiteboard color and pictures of the next thing. And she would probably say, and I don't know how that it works, but she might very well say, but once I discern that, I want you to galvanize people. She does. I didn't even realize we do this. But there's a lot of times she'll get an idea up to 90% on something that, a move that needs to happen internally. And she'll say, well, you come with me to the HR committee. use your rapport, your clout, your salesmanship, your whatever, because you need galvan, you know why we need to do this, right? I'm like, yeah, I totally got your back. Okay, well,

you help me make the sale. I'm like, oh, that's easy. Of course, I'll show up in five minutes, and everybody's going to see what I see it, and it's going to be fine. But for her, that feels like stress, and I might have to build a big presentation, and what if there's objections, I'm going, bring on the object. I'll give them their objections, and I'll tell them why they shouldn't be objections. You know, it's fun for me. You are naturally drawn to that moment. That's right. And knowing that means, like, And people take this, they can go and say, hey, boss, can you use me more to do this? Because we need this, and I'm really good at this.

This is a great way to reorganize your department or your company. We reorganized my company after 23 years. Wow. Four months ago, when we came up with this, we were like, oh, my gosh, I don't do as much gene anymore because I'm not a galvanizer. My staff says, let's let Pat invent. They were actually taking me out of inventing so that I could galvanize. They were decreasing my natural talent, which we needed at our small company, where a think tank, so that I could galvanize, and they were like killing the goose.

And they said, we want to put you back in a place where you can invent more. Let's let Cody and Liam and Chris galvanize more. And it's been a win, win, win all the way across. Or as they said on the office, a win, win, win, win. Three wins, triple win. Talk a bit about the tension that especially small businesses, as they're growing, you don't necessarily have the luxury of getting everyone on the team to be exactly in their sweet spot. As you get bigger, hopefully the ideal is people are shifting more

and more in their job descriptions to something that aligns with who they are and their genius and then what they do every day. But as a company gets bigger, you have more room and more payroll that's dedicated to specialist. That's right. But in a really small, scrappy company, a lot of people have to wear a lot of hats. How do we hold that tension and let people be be in their genius, but also go, hey, we can't afford for your full-time job to be in your genius right now. I love it. This is not an excuse for people not to have to do things outside of their genius.

Now, again, there's three categories. There's working genius, working competency, and then working frustration. So a team does this, and they all look at these things, and they go, okay, we're relying on her who has no tenacity and not a criticism, self-described. We're giving her all the final implementation stuff. and we're getting frustrated with her, she's feeling frustrated, we can now understand why that is.

Let's move somebody else into that role. But that doesn't mean she still doesn't have to work on that as a, anybody can do stuff against the grain if they know they're doing it temporarily and everybody understands they're working against the grain. Or when she has to do that, let's celebrate her for doing something that's hard for her, but she's taking one for the team. But if we don't know that,

we're going to be like, why aren't you just doing that better? And so it's not that a matter of everybody has to just work in their two areas of genius. Let's know when a person's actually stepping outside of their area of genius or even into their area of frustration. And let's thank them, celebrate them, and let them know that this is not most of what we need them to do. I think it's fine to say, you know, I know this is not your natural gift, but when we ask you to do it, you have to do it well. Anybody can do it well for a while. So this is just making it a little bit.

But what we don't want to do is deprive people of working. in their genius when we need that and they're not using it or we don't want to force people to make most of their job about their area of frustration. I mean, hell, it would be better to say to them, hey, we really need somebody with these two things. You don't have those. We know you've been frustrated. Now we know you're not a bad person. You're just not good at these. Let's help you find another job at another company because you should go use your genius and we don't need it here. I mean, that's actually a better breakup than saying you've failed in your job. But to say, oh no, you realize why you're failing?

Because we've actually hired you to do this, but you'd be better at this. We just don't need that here. So let's go find some companies that need that. Gotcha. You've become their avenue for finding better satisfaction in work. Their launch pad. Otherwise, what we do is we go,

well, you've not done a good job. You've failed at this job. We just don't want you here. Now they walk away feeling like there's something wrong with them as opposed to you deserve to use the God-given talents that you have. I mean, that's a much better conversation. I know this assessment is newer, but I understand that the thinking that's gone into this is decades old. Yeah, I mean, I've been struggling with this for 20 years.

You've felt this tension. So reach back in the archive and tell me a story about when this is going really well and what happens with a company when a leader is really intentional to get this orchestra singing off the same sheet of music. Everybody's got a different instrument, but we're all. playing Beethoven together and it sounds beautiful. Well, I can tell you in my, because we've had a number of clients already use this, but it's been four months. So I've been kind of in the cave developing it. And so with my team.

And but what I can tell you this is in the last six months, one of our people in our office, Cody, who we hired to come in and do a bunch of stuff, when we realized he had discernment and galvanizing, we elevated him to a position. of leadership. And everyone in the companies, even people had been there three times longer than he had, were like, oh, finally, this is great. You're going to lead us. We want you to. He was like, really? Me? And we're like, yeah, you have gifts in this area. We need somebody to galvanize us and to use your judgment. And his satisfaction. So here's another way. We hired two kids from college. Okay. One was my son Matthew and one was this other guy, a friend of his Liam. When they came in,

we were like, what are we going to assign them to? What projects? Most of the time it's kind of a crapshoot. Like, well, they need somebody, son Matthew over there. We actually did this test because we just come up with it and realized my son Matthew has discernment and enablement. We said, discernment. He's really good at a value. He's going to help us to construct this report. He has been amazing, way beyond what I expected, even with my son. And he hasn't been working for me. He's been working for Cody and Tracy. And because of that, Liam, we put on this, thing where he had G and T, both of them have done more in the first three months than we thought they do in two years. Had we swapped them, it would have been misery for them. Both of them would

have been in jobs they weren't suited for. We wouldn't have run as fast and two major initiatives wouldn't have happened in our company. We go to work every day and everybody in my office is like, I'm doing what I was meant to do. We'd work together for 23 years. We just really didn't understand it. You mentioned your son Matthew. He's working with you now. Did you see that stuff in him early? Like, when did you start noticing as your child who is developing, oh, these are probably his genius? Well, without this, without this language, I mean, it made sense, but I'm seeing things in my son who lived with me for 18 years. I'm seeing things I never understood because now I understand his genius. Like, I didn't understand that he had the genius of

enablement, because I don't have that at all. He is a really helpful person. And his leadership in every organization he's been in is because he comes along and serves others in exactly what they need. I never got that. Because you don't see that as a son and your family. And I've done this with my 14-year-old and my 18-year-old, and I'm getting glimpses into them. So what did that look like in retrospect, now that you know, what can you look back when he was 10 or 12 and see that same genius in action? Oh my gosh. So Matt has always been super smart.

If my wife and her were in an argument, he could come in and go, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, mom you're wrong about this dad you're right about this you guys shouldn't be arguing about this and we'd be like how do you know that and it was right he has discernment wow he sees patterns my other son connor his identical twin brother does not have all the same skills and so he wouldn't see the same things or be drawn to those things so now matthew is helping us develop this report and he goes that question right there people are going to interpret it wrong and we're like dude you're 22 we've been working at this for years and and he's like yeah just this and we're like we're how do you know? And it's like he has good gut. And so I didn't see those things. It's a weird thing to

see your kids in a new light and realize I was with them all the time, but I wasn't looking through this lens. It's a bit of a tangent, but I'm curious how our current education system is not really helping people develop into their geniuses. And how we can do something about that. So our current education, and you said you didn't like school, says this, do what you're told on our terms. I'm the teacher. This is the assignment. And finish it and do it perfectly. Now, that's great if your enablement and tenacity.

And you'll talk to people who said, I loved school. I did well. I found it pretty straightforward and easy because they were task-oriented and they took instructions and they did that. That's my wife. She loved it. 4.0, 7-Cumel. And she was incredible at the art of going through school. Exactly.

But if you said, okay, we're going to change. the educational paradigm, we're going to give you a case study, and then you're going to have to come up with it. And there's no right answer. It's going to be like, and you know those classes in school, like in college or when they actually said, go invent something. I never went to school. In my school, we never had the inventors fair or the science fair. So my kids actually get to invent new products. I would have been like, this is awesome. Some kids shine during that. And some of the ones that are good at classic school are like, I don't know, I can't come up with a new invention. And think about your own kids as they go through these things.

Some of them are drawn to this kind of activity and some are drawn to those others. So grades are great for people with enablement and tenacity. I have a son who's really good at wonder and enablement, which is my wife. And he's a wonderful team player and a deep thinker, but he is just not motivated by going above and beyond on all his assignments. So it's my job to say, hey, Michael, you're going to get bad grades. Just live with that. No, I have to say, Michael, your education system requires this of you. I'm not going to hold him accountable for being perfect.

I'm going to teach him to have a strong work ethic, but I'm going to tell him, someday you are going to love your job and you're going to love what you study because you're actually curious about it and because it allows you to serve others through that. It's interesting that you say that people with enablement and tenacity, need a scorecard. They're going to get good grades, and I've noticed people on my team going, hey, can you tell me if I'm doing a good job?

I'm like, we're telling you all the time. Of course, you're a rock star. How do you not feel like you're doing a good job? And they're like, yeah, but can you give me like a report or a regular check-in? Like, they really want that clarity. And I'm so like, I know I'm doing a good job, and I know what it looks like and feels like.

I'm always out front just going. And I don't need a lot of written feedback or an annual review. I know that I've ever had one or nor cared, you know, because it's just kind of like, I guess, if you want to write it down, but there's some people that really crave that concreteness of the report card, if you will. And you want to honor them because that's what feeds them. When they see, like, my teacher approved of me and he or she gave me this score, that gives them

energy. For me, I love ambiguity. I want to see people smiling and saying, anecdotally, that really helped me. And that's enough for me. Yes. I don't need to go give me all the data. I like the ambiguity because it really resonates with me.

And it's not because I want loopholes to not be accountable to something. It's because when things start getting more concrete, my inventor feels like I can't run and be free and create. You're being limited. And so it feels stifling to that invention kind of thing. You know something else? I don't trust the data. I don't either. I trust the look in some.

somebody's eye when I say, this really worked. And I found that when, like, I was a management consultant, and I would look at the data and go, I don't believe this. And they would go, well, if you can't put it in data, I'm like, no, but intuitively, this is, and they're going, yeah, they don't pay us for our intuition. They pay us for our data. This makes so much, I've always wondered why I'm so skeptical about data. And when people come in and say, data, data, data, I'm like, yeah, you can make data say whatever you want to say. Let's go talk to some people. That's right. And granted, there are certain things that we should never do because they really do require data. It's like, okay, we're going to buy this house, and here's the mortgage, and here's how we're going to

calculate. I'm like, no, I just have a good feel about this. And they're like, well, your good feel isn't going to make me happy when I'm losing money on this. So there's certain professions, certain jobs that require enablement and tenacity or tenacity and discernment and other jobs that require invention. And here's the beauty of this. When you take this, whether you're a parent, whether you're right out of college, whether you're in the career, or even toward the end of your career, it's going to give you such obvious insights that we find that application happens about 15 minutes after you take this. You take 10 minutes to do this. You read it for like 20 because there's really interesting stuff and a few videos in here.

And you go, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to go to my boss and I'm going to say, I could do this now. Or I'm going to go look for another job. Or I'm going to hire somebody to help me in my house because my wife and I are both bad at this. I love it. The application is so quick. It's very rich. You know, talking about the data versus intuition thing, it strikes me that there's probably even seasons of an organization.

Yeah. I think with Ramsey, you know, I've been here 17 years. There was a time when shooting from the hip, being a cowboy, going with your gut, being that inventor, entrepreneur, ship ideas, try it, fail a lot, move fast. There's a time that really got this thing off the ground. And then we got to a certain size and a certain scale. and we had some really smart people join us. Jen Ceverts in on our operating board,

Herb Jenkins, Michael Finney, these are data people. Yeah. And it took them a while to get the rest of us cowboys to listen to the data. But they started showing us at the scale that we were at why we needed to do some sample sizes and some tests. And don't throw the baby out with a bathwater. Yeah.

But you need to actually add these new things in order to scale and grow and all that happened. Now, you're going to come up with a new idea, and you're going to launch it like Entree leadership was. You're going to want people that are comfortable with wonder and invention and discernment. But then there's other parts of the business, like, I don't know if it's financial peace university, where we know what we're doing, we're scaling it. How do we get into more churches?

That person with wonder and invention might very well frustrate the crap out of them because they're like, we have to execute here. Right. And that's why you're right. Different stages of products, different stages of company, different kind of things we're working on, require different geniuses. And the people that have the right ones are so glad when you ask them to do those things. Well, here's what we figured out.

This is cool. So our buddy Jim Collins, we know Jim, he in the book Good to Great talked about the concept of the musket balls versus the cannonballs. And the idea is a musket ball is a small amount of black powder that you shoot to calibrate where the cannonball is going to go so you don't use up your sacred resource of black powder. And it strikes me that if you're doing this well, you get your wonder inventor people saying these are the musket balls we should be. shooting. But then your data discernment people can go, before we spend all the money on the cannibal, let's do some testing and validation in the marketplace, and then we can go whole hog. Right. And then that validation needs to involve intuition, because otherwise it'll be just data for the sake. It needs to have somebody going, what's the right thing to measure?

What's the right? It's not say you can't use data, but you need that discerner to go, let's measure the right things. Yes. And I know what those things are. And then once we've figured out, we've done that, let's galvanize people, and then the implementers can come along. By the way, the three stages are wonder and invention, that's ideation. Okay. Discerner and galvanizing, that's activation. And then enablement and tenacity is implementation. Gotcha. And you need all of that. Well, in the discernment part, the market validation piece, you know, we have people now on our team, they're full-time product managers, and their job is to get data, but then also spend hours and hours and hours talking to customers and putting little prototypes in front of customers about a page

that we're going to stand up and say, tell me how you feel about that page or tell me what you would click on if you saw that page. And so it's not just quantitative with data, but they're listening to our customers are confused. And they, like, they boil that all into their gut and intuition. They come back and they inform the teams before we go invest in a bunch of code to build the thing that we're going to have to throw away if we didn't have that feedback loop. And the data alone doesn't do it. It's got to be the interpretation. Even this report, people take this it's quantitative, right? But right after they get their quantitative, we say, now read the qualitative descriptions

of each of these types. And if you think you need to adjust any of these, adjust it now. And you will know because there's a qualitative element. Life is qualitative, not quantitative. Quantitative is to inform the qualitative. At the end of reading this, we want people to decide, yeah, that, yes. Now, as it turns out, people usually look at this and go, that got me. But we say, well, before you commit to that, read a little bit of the qualitative.

because we don't want you to get it wrong. Well, folks, I want you to go get this report, take it. It takes you five minutes to take it and 15 minutes to digest and absorb the results. It's fantastic. $25. And for our audience, you're doing half of that. Yeah, $12.50. $12.50.

$12.5. And we did that on purpose. Can we negotiate you down to $12, Pat? I mean, that feels like a... Let me see. What can you do for me? 50 cents. What can you get in $0.50?

I want people to take this. It's an incredible resource. I'm excited to roll it out with our team and for us to start, you know, using this. and all of our entree leadership companies. Really, really fun. As we wrap up, let's take off the, I'm really good at working genius and helping people with their personality styles.

Let's just Pat Lanchone, the business owner, talking to your peers out there who are business owners. What do you want them to know right now about moving forward in business in this country? It's been a tough year for a lot of people. And you guys have adapted and pivoted. We've been talking through some of those things and what's going on.

What do you want people to really know about as leaders out there right now who are fighting the battle. So we learned a lot. First of all, we've been in business 23 years, and we learned more in the last six months than we probably learned in the last six years. Because things got crazy, and we were like, okay,

we're either going to get better out of this or worse. We think it's going to separate hard. So we launched our two new biggest things during this time. But we had to be very intentional and scrappy about that. And so I think that what happens to you isn't as important as what your reaction to it is. And during this time, there's been opportunities. More people are at home.

More people are captive. More people are doing things virtually. Our company isn't. After the first two months of this, we came back to work and we've been working there. But there's a lot of people sitting in their homes that work for big companies that said, you're going to work from home for the next year. So we said, how do we adjust what we do to meet them there? So as a result of that, we feel like this has been the richest period of our company.

And so being scrappy and opportunistic, I don't mean that in a bad way, because COVID and all that stuff is not good. But you have to say, am I going to get out of this stronger or am I going to come out of this weaker? Also, during this time, we've tried to build even stronger relationships with one another because we feel like people are more human and more in need. So let's pour into each other more. And as a result, that we've been able to get more done as well. also I think that what I would say to listeners is you know I appreciate a society that's built on freedom, democracy, and capitalism more because it makes for opportunities. And we have to realize that's not a guarantee that if we lose that, if we lose that, we're going to regret that for the rest of our lives because you don't recover from that easily. So I would just say as a business owner, I want to make sure that we do not.

This socialism is a terrible, awful, horrific thing. Human cost, dreams, lives, everything else. So I just would say to people is really protect that and value that and know that this does not happen in every other country. Well, that socialism suffocates entrepreneurship. Absolutely. It's impossible to be an entrepreneur in a socialist. And nobody cares about what you're working genius in a socialist country. They're like, you're going to do what we tell you to do.

and you're going to do it the way we want you to. And if you have a dream or this bothers you, tough. I mean, working morale in socialist countries is terrible. And people go, I don't have a choice. I do what the government set up for me, or here's the three paths I can take. And we've, I think, taken that for granted in our country. And it feels like we're on the verge, and hopefully not,

of maybe losing that. And we had a fight for it. We've got to fight for it for our children and their children. So that's what I would say as a business owner, Let's not let that slip away. We agree. Well, guys, sometimes we have somebody on the podcast, and they're a new friend. They've got a book.

We like it, and so we bring them on the podcast. Pat's the kind of guy that has been our friend for over a decade. Yeah. He's helped us early on with Andre leadership. We've spent time in his office. The team there, you know, Karen and Amy, I mean, we've got such deep relationships with you guys. I've read every one of your books.

Our team is reading your books. Dave Ramsey's reading your books. We have all of your hungry, humble, smart is a part of our hiring process. I mean, your stuff is so integrated into Ramsey culture, entree leadership culture. And so when I tell people listening, please go buy this stuff, this isn't, well, here's the next guest and, you know, here's the thing. His stuff works, guys, and he's so passionate about helping teams be better and helping them actually enjoy their work and be more fulfilled, not just to be more enjoyable, but to actually add more value to the community. And we, it's what we talk about, entree

leadership all the time. We exist to serve. We exist to advance things for the better in the marketplace for the lives of the customers that we support. Well, it's just so fun to come here. And it's really overwhelming and humbling to us how you guys use this and that we've been able to serve you. And so we're just thankful for that. I'd come here every week if I live down the street. Well, we love you. And we're excited to have you on our stage at the Entree Leadership Summit event coming up in May. That's going to be big fun. Until then, guys, go get this assessment. It's really cool stuff. and while you're on his website checking that out, get all of his books for your team and go through it.

We highly recommend everything that Pat Lanchone does and the whole team at the table group. Thanks for being here today. Thank you for having me. I'll pass along your hellos to everybody back home. Well, if you've been leading a team for a while, you've figured out that there's this really magical thing that happens when as a leader you spend most of your time doing the things

that you're good at and that you're passionate about, and then you get everyone else on the team in their sweet spot doing things that, most of the time they're good at and passionate about. And you know what that creates? It creates energy. It creates passion, enthusiasm. It also leads to more tenacity and staying power

because people are much less likely to get burned out. Now, we all got to do hard crap. I mean, that's leadership, that's life. It's called being an adult. So there's not this utopian thing where you get to always do what you love all the time. But if you get this assessment and you start figuring out

what's the genius of each person on my team, you can shift some things around and pay attention to creating a much more sustainable team where people enjoy a lot of what they're doing as the majority of what they're working on. It's a real thing. I see you're all the time at Ramsey Solutions. We get somebody that's frustrated in a certain seat and you go, oh, they just suck at their job. You know what, they don't suck at their job. I'm willing to bet you if you got somebody in our team and you're like, they're just an idiot,

they're probably not an idiot. You go, how do you know that? You don't know them. You're right. I don't know them. But in my experience, I thought a lot of people were idiots, and we moved them to another seat, and all of a sudden they blossom. Whoa. What happened?

We moved them from a place of no genius and dread to a place of genius, and they came alive. So, before you write people off, get to know who they really are. Get to know what their genius is. Figure out their sweet spot. And if you can help it and you want to make it work, look around your company and see if you can find out a way to do just that. And when I think about what Pat's taught us today, and I think about those experiences of what happened when we move somebody into a different seat or even just changed part of their job description and they started to thrive, what happened was we brought them back into their genius. We brought them back into their sweet spot. But if a lot of the things that people are doing are draining all the time, at least to burnout, we don't want that.

We put way too much work into hiring the right people and building the culture to have them go out the back door when we could have them kept them. could have kept him more energized, gotten everybody a little bit more enthusiastic about going forward if they had a few more things that were in their genius. So this is a big deal. I want you guys to check it out, check out his assessment. You definitely want to take advantage of that. And you can even use this in your hiring process. Hiring is such a big deal.

You guys know this. We talk about it all the time at Entree Leadership. But the filter on your culture starts with the first interview with every candidate. we're so obsessed with making really, really good hires and so obsessed with guarding our culture that we put a lot of work into how we hire. And we put a lot of teaching into entree leadership, and our coaching team has put together a great resource for you guys specifically on hiring and how to do it well. This guide that we're talking about, the Entree Leaders Guide to Hiring, is going to give you

the 12 steps to a great hire. It's the same tips we use here at Ramsey Solutions. We've been teaching them out of entree leadership for years. So you want to check this out, especially if you're in the hiring process right now. Check it out. Start improving your hiring today. To get this free guide, just click on the link in the show notes. Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Entree Leadership podcast.

Hey, do you know somebody that would enjoy this episode? Send them a link. Hey, and thanks for doing that. You know, we love helping more business owners win, and the way this thing grows and the word gets out is when you share it with your friends, your family, and other business owners. So thanks for doing that. Also, you can follow us on social media at Entree Leadership.

You can follow me on Instagram at Daniel Tarty. And for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card, you can review this episode by clicking the link in the show notes. This episode was produced by Tim Hull. It was edited and mixed by Will Rudder. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty, and on behalf of the entire Entree Leadership team, thank you for listening.

Until next time, keep learning and keep leading.