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[Music]
scaled up nation i get people asking me all the time how do i read so much as
busy as i am and the secret is a lot of my reading people do for me that’s right
i use audible audible is a service that will read books to you and allow you to
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[Music] you are listening to scaling up h2o the
voice of the water treatment community hey everybody trace blackmore here the host of scaling up h2o
trying something a little new this week of course we normally introduce scaling up h2o where we scale up on
knowledge so we don’t scale up our systems just trying something new let me know
which one that you like i love that there’s so many people that let me know
what it is that they want to hear let me know that they enjoy the podcast so i definitely think we are the voice of the
water treatment industry and we are the voice of the scaling up nation you of
course are the nation thank you for letting me know all the things that you want me to talk about
something that i love talking about is the business of business i love water treatment and i
love the business of water treatment in running a business i’ve just learned so
many things and running a business properly is something
that you never stop doing it’s something that you never stop learning about
and just like water treatment just like all the things that we’ve got to know when we’re working with clients we’ve
got to know similar things in order to run a successful business now maybe you
don’t run or own your own business but i guarantee you run or own
your territory we’re all in charge of something and we all have to run our own
individual businesses and the business of running a business is just
fascinating to me and one of the things i absolutely love to do in addition
to being the host of this podcast is facilitating
other companies meetings of course i love doing that for my own company but i will say it gets difficult to work in a
company and facilitate a meeting because those are two separate things and i get
very passionate about all the departments that i’m in charge of here at my company and because of that i
can’t always be the best facilitator to make sure everybody’s getting heard so
that’s a service that i offer and i do for several other water treatment companies where i will come in and i
will facilitate a leadership meeting or some type of business meeting that they are
conducting and that allows everybody in that company to wear their prospective
hats and make sure that the areas of the company they represent are being represented
properly well when i do these facilitations i normally come with a bag of exercises
i have a certain way that we will conduct the meeting and then we’ll take little breaks where
we’ll work on some aspect of that company maybe it’s their core values
maybe it’s how they work with each other as a team maybe it’s defining some of the key
roles in their company maybe it’s looking at a particular issue that
they’re having and running through an issues track to help them
eliminate that issue there’s always something that i try to do because i try
not to just run a meeting i try to teach the leadership team
something during the meeting so they when they go back and lead their regular meetings
they have better tools out there that they’re constantly
getting better they’re constantly improving themselves they’re constantly improving
their teams so i’m always looking for new ways to do that and i’m reading
books to do that i’m going to conferences to do that i’m talking to people that are in that industry to
figure out what they are using and by doing that i keep myself sharp i
also make sure that i’m sharing the best practices with the people that i am
working with so if you have a team i urge you to look at it the same way
don’t just do the same thing over and over again figure out how do you make each
encounter an improvement upon the last and we’re going to get into our
interview today which is around one of those tools that i found that have
really helped not only my leadership team but every team that i
work with before we get into that i want to share a couple of dates with you of course we
have the hang coming up and the hang is where we all get together we meet each
other and we go into breakout rooms you will meet probably a dozen people on
this hang and you never know one of those people will be able to help you
with an issue that you are having in order to reserve your spot
go to scaling up h2o.com forward slash hang and mark on your calendars july
14th at 6 p.m eastern time some conferences that you might also want to put on your calendar
the american water works association is having their transformative issue symposium
august 1st through 3rd in cincinnati ohio this is where they bring together
water treatment professionals all across north america to figure out what issues
are happening and how we can help each other solve them more information about that
it will be on our show notes page another conference is the international water association is having their world
water congress and exposition september 11th through 15th
in copenhagen denmark i mentioned on another show that we do very well as a
podcast in those areas so maybe we’ll have some of those fine folks join us on the hang so the
international water association is having their congress and exhibition and they are engaging all people across the
water sector and making sure that they can focus on water services how can they
make sure that architects urban planners soil and groundwater experts hydrologists social scientists
financial people and everybody else can get together and start solving some
of our water issues more of that on our show notes page and then finally november 6th
through 10th in orlando florida the international water conference the iwc
is having their conference and they of course if you’ve ever been to an awt
it’s a lot larger than awt and larger companies go to that of course awt got its start at
an iwc conference if you’ve never been to one you
definitely want to see all of the vendors that they have come in all the different papers it is a very
different style of reviewing papers where instead of just somebody presenting a paper somebody will present
it and then there will be people that have already critiqued their paper they’ll have somebody there that’s for
it somebody who’s there is against it is just a very interesting way one to present a paper
there if you’ve ever had the privilege to present a paper there but also to watch they have a very interesting
way of making sure that you get a lot of questions answered that you might not
even have thought to ask so again that’s november 6th through 10th in orlando florida all of that
information about the iwc will be on our show notes page folks i’m really excited
about this interview i know you are going to learn
so much during this interview here it comes
my lab partner today is tim cooper principal consultant of the table group
and the table group is pat lincione’s company five dysfunctions of a team the
advantage you know all the things that we talked about here on the podcast before and so many wonderful books and
tim thanks for coming on the show i’m so excited to dive into all the things that you do oh man i am so excited to be here
trace i love talking what we’re gonna getting to talk about today especially anything around org health and helping
people function better as a team i love getting to talk about it i can’t wait to get started on that
before we do do you mind telling the scaling up nation a bit about tim
absolutely so the scaling of nation my name is tim cooper i am in atlanta georgia
from ohio originally but i got out you got out it was prison
yes i got out atlanta is home my wife and four kids we all live north of
atlanta and i have been a fan of the table group for a long time and i was a
client of the table group for years trying to apply everything that i had learned through their books and through
some of their consultants and then have just recently joined as a principal consultant because
what i realized i mean you and i have talked about this and actually how we met is i was a pastor for the last 17
years and the thing that i love is helping teams and people have better
relationships and clarity around what it means to be successful and the table
group in my opinion are the experts at that so to get to join them has been
just a gift to me and and specifically when we’re talking about organizational
health two of the big components of a healthy organization are high morale and high productivity and the working genius is
the tool that you know you and i are going to be talking about that i think is the best at raising both of those so
i get really excited about that because i get to come in and work with teams and hopefully they feel more fulfilled in
what they do after we get to work with them and man is there anything better than getting to do
that right you know i was thinking back it was episode 45 we had rick packer on and
i believe the advantage had just come out and that was my favorite book by the way i know pat does a great job with the
fables those are wasted on me don’t tell me about people that don’t exist just tell me what i need to do
and i told rick on that episode that when i brought pat’s work into my
company that i had a whole new appreciation for how my team looked at it versus how i looked at it my team dug
into the characters they were like oh my gosh this is a business book that i can actually read and i’m enjoying reading
so everybody likes something a little bit different but my team just loved reading about all the people that did
not exist in every one of pat’s books that’s so funny there’s people that just skip to the back of the book but then
there’s people that are like i love the fable more than the rest of the book so you’re right there’s something for
everybody yeah on that episode rick said well trace i got a hint for you just read the last chapter and you’ll be done
so you were you brought up working genius and you are a master facilitator
at working genius did i say that right yes a master facilitator the working genius which you know i’ve told you i i
think i’m only a master for getting my kids names and birthdays but i happen to be a master facilitator of the working
genius which just means that i get to work with teams and i get to certify people in the working genius to allow
them to go out and take the working genius to their organizations and other clients well let me tell you my first
experience with working genius and then we’re going to let the nation know exactly what it is i found this through
our church and it was andy stanley did something on his podcast and i was like well this this sounds interesting
and i dug into it a little bit more and i really thought that this answered
some of the things that some other assessments didn’t even touch on to so
the type of work i don’t ever remember seeing an assessment that looked at that
where it was more personalities and we’re going to talk a little bit about temperaments and things
but not the type of work that you’re doing i’m like this is really cool so like i do as a visionary as a red as
somebody that you know just likes shiny stuff i sent an assessment to every one
of my team members they’re like what is trace doing now we got another assessment he’s already had us do a
dozen what is he up to so i had to go through that once we went
through that and once we started learning how to work within it it has just been amazing at how we can
delegate where things need to go but probably even more importantly is how we don’t
assign things that shouldn’t go to people and i’m just so excited about this i know the nation’s going to love
it i can’t wait to use this even more with my mastermind group i use it some
with my consulting clients already let’s talk about the working genius what is it
so trace every time i’m with a team i say hey how many of you this is the first assessment you’ve ever taken and
not a single hand goes up right and then i’ll ask them hey how many of you were really excited when you saw another
assessment come in your inbox and still no hands go my hand would have gone up because i really like assessments yours
would have i always tell them i’m like look i didn’t need another assessment to tell me i was an extrovert i know that
about me i did not need an assessment what i didn’t know that i needed was an assessment that told me why do i avoid
certain kinds of work that drain the absolute life out of me and then why do
i gravitate towards some kinds of work that i feel like i could do all day every day for the rest of my life
there’s never been an assessment in my opinion out there that makes sense of that gap and so
what the working genius has been helping i mean it’s only it’s just over a year old and we’ve got over 300 000 people
that have taken it the book you know we talked about pat’s books this book doesn’t even come out until september
and it’s had faster adoption than anything else the table group has ever put out because it’s so simple in nature
right like that you know hopefully the nation will hear we’re going to talk about this for a few minutes and in just a few minutes they’re going to start to
go oh that makes sense oh that helps me understand why i avoid certain kinds of
work trace you and i avoid very similar kinds of work we’ll get into that in a little bit and then why is there some
kind of work that just bring me energy bring me joy bring me fulfillment i’ve never heard of an assessment that makes
sense of that so what we talk about with the working genius is we say this is 80 a production tool and 20 a personality
tool where a lot of the other assessments that i’ve taken are not about getting
work done in a really great and fulfilling way it’s about our wiring or
our personality or our temperament or something like that so the working genius really is a production tool and a
production assessment at heart it has really changed how we do things
at our team i’ve used it with a couple of companies as i mentioned that i worked with and they’re seeing the same
results as well so why don’t we go into what the working genius is and of course the working
genius spells out the word widget why don’t we start there great so the working genius is really
like i said this is a productivity assessment and we break it down when you take the assessment online you’re given
two geniuses two competencies and two frustrations just meaning there’s going to be two of
these of the widget which i’ll walk through which each of those mean in just a second
two of them are going to be the kind of work that fulfill you that gives you
energy that that you really feel like man i could do that all the time there’s going to be two that we’ll talk about
that are in the competency which are kind of that mid-range and then two we call your working frustrations that are
the kind of work that you may not realize that you avoid at all costs that really do drain you so
at the top of that scale there’s six of these working genius types the first one is wonder and really the wonder genius
are the people that ponder the possibilities of greater potential and opportunities they’re really the curious
group that are asking the big picture questions the invention genius they’re the ones that create original and novel ideas and
solutions they love a blank sheet of paper and they love to dream up new possibilities
discernment is the one that are using their intuition their gut feel they
assess ideas and plans they can quickly kind of see patterns recognize trends
and they really help teams and people pursue the best answers the galvanizing the g the galvanizers
they’re the people that get people moving so on a team they get the team kind of focused and moving in the best
direction they bring a ton of energy and movement to an idea or to a project
the genius of enablement now this this one’s an interesting one because that’s not always a neutral word for people um
but the genius of enablement really is the most relational of all of these they’re the ones that ask how can i help
they are the first to volunteer to help they look at projects through the lens of people and relationships not through
the lens of tasks or getting stuff done and then the final one is the genius of tenacity and these are the people that
are all about execution there are list makers they’re the stuff that they’ll make a list just to check things off a
list right they love getting stuff done so those are the six types
we obviously can go into much more depth going over those really quickly but even as i’m starting to describe those i’m
guessing the people listening are going oh that one’s me or that one’s me or that one’s definitely not me
yeah and knowing that you’re able to make sure people are doing what they
want to do and then it doesn’t seem like work anymore absolutely i mean if you get to spend
most of your time focusing on the things that bring you energy that bring you
fulfillment it hardly feels like work and right now i mean you know in
almost all industries we’re in this great resignation right where people are leaving their jobs where people are
pursuing other things people are going to gravitate towards their working geniuses they might not even know it
they don’t even have this language but they’re going to gravitate towards the kind of work that fulfills them and
they’re going to move away from the kind of work that drains them so who wouldn’t want to know that as a leader who wouldn’t want to know that as
a team lead or somebody that is working with other people hey i want to give you the kind of work that’s going to fulfill
you how it’s really helped us on our team is as the leader of the team i would
want to help people i see people struggling they’re not getting things done they’re frustrated how can i as the
leader help them and okay well i can put more on my plate and that’s typically where leaders go
and i would think how can i take things off of someone else’s plate
put a little bit more stress on me but now i feel a little bit better because i’m helping somebody else
but i didn’t know what to take off their plate and most of the time i was taking things off of the plate that they
actually didn’t want me to take that’s the conundrum right so burnout i mean what you’re alluding to is burnout
and that’s such a huge part of any team but burnout is not really too much work
it’s too much of the wrong kind of work my two frustrations are invention and tenacity and i mean we live in a world
of tenacity you’ve got to get things done well for me that is extremely draining work so if you gave me a 20
hour a week job that was mostly focused on tenacity i’m going to be burned out and frustrated and
upset most of the time right i’m just going to live in that state but i could work 60 plus hours a week doing
discernment and enablement and forget that i’m working i mean it it does not feel like work because it feels like i’m
stepping into what i was created to do so i love the highlighting of burnout because nobody
wants to experience that but a lot of times people that get burned out they go on sabbatical or they get time off and
they end up doing nothing which brings them back to work just as miserable because they didn’t know the
kind of work that helped fulfill them so i would love it if we didn’t even need to worry about burnout because we were
focusing on uh the work that gave us fulfillment and joy to begin with tim do you find with the people that
you’ve worked with and they take the assessment that you’re just giving them language they always knew that they
gravitated towards certain type of work and they didn’t like the other type of work and the assessment gives them
language around that would that be a true statement yeah pat says you know pat was the kind
of he was the leader of this and really it started because pat is an inventor and he loves to invent he’s inventing
new ideas all the time and one of his co-workers like they just saw him inventing these new ideas and they said
pat why are you the way that you are and he was like i don’t know but i want to find out so we don’t really feel like
we created the working genius we feel like it really is something we unearthed
over 20 plus years of working with teams and once we started putting language to it the reason it’s had so much adoption
so quickly is we didn’t create this out of nowhere we we just started putting words around the stuff that people knew
to be true the thing that i think really helps differentiate the working genius
is giving us language around our frustrations a lot of us know what we are
and i don’t even want to say good at but a lot of us know the kind of work that gives us life we just feel a lot of
shame and guilt around the kind of work that doesn’t give us life so we say things like i should do this more i
should be better at this you know all those things that don’t produce any more of an ability for me to do the kind of
work that drains me it just makes me feel guilty about not doing that work this actually puts language around
the kind of work that i could do for a team and the kind of work that i really shouldn’t be majoring on when i’m
working with the team we have found that people are a lot happier because they won’t say yes to
something they’re competent in and normally they would say no to something that maybe we didn’t have a
language years ago but now like mine’s tenacity so i’m just going to say no i don’t want to do something that involves
that because that is my frustration but i would say yes to something that
was in my competency because i could do it and that’s where i was feeling burned out that’s where my team was feeling
burnout and it never ended they were good at it they could do it give them more i call the working competencies the
stealth joy killer because of exactly what you’re describing they’re the stealth joy
killer because these aren’t my frustrations these are things that i’m probably pretty good at you know i’ve learned to do over time
and now people are gonna ask me to do it and so it’s the stealth joy killer because you’re like sure i’ll do it sure
i’ll do it and over time you might be spending a whole bunch of time in your competencies you’re probably not
spending a lot of time in your frustrations but if you’re spending a whole bunch of time in your competencies it’s the thing that’s just gonna end up
killing your joy over time and killing that fulfillment so i am more aware to
make sure and to help teams not tap into people’s competencies except for when
they absolutely need to i’m sure there are people out there that are listening and they’re thinking hey this makes a lot of sense i can see some
issues that possibly this can help my team with but they might also be thinking is i’ve only got just a very
small handful of people on my team i’m not going to have all six of these people on my team what do you say to
them absolutely the easiest analogy for me to make sense of that is the marriage analogy so my
wife and i have taken this assessment and it has helped us immensely because i
am discerning an enablement she is wonder and tenacity so that means we have a gap around
invention and galvanizing so one of our kids one of my oldest kids
was recently in trouble and so i was actually on a plane and i’m texting with
my wife we had to invent some uh punishments right we were trying to get creative around some punishments
and i just stopped and i said hey remember this is neither of our strengths or
anything we enjoy so let’s just remember that as we’re ideating like as we’re ideating let’s just remember this and i
was more talking to myself because she’s actually really nice i’m the one that has the tendency to not
so i’m sure she was like great i’m glad you reminded yourself so i didn’t have to but i went down that road of like hey
just before let’s do this i share that example to say even on a small team okay
if we have to leverage invention and there’s no invention on this team let’s be really kind about doing that because
none of us are going to get energy or fulfillment or anything from this process or
i mean if you’re a small team and you and you’ve got to figure out something maybe that’s a good chance to borrow a
genius like hey is there anybody we know with the genius of invention that can come in and help us ideate around
solutions that we can then run with you know or can we borrow the genius of galvanizing or wonder or you know if we
know what to go and look for it’s a lot easier to make that ask for people like hey let’s i need your help in this
specific area and if it’s their genius it doesn’t feel like work right it’s like oh i’d love to help i’d love to i’d
love to ideate a solution that i don’t have to carry through to the finish line like of course i would so i don’t think
the answer is go out and hire a whole bunch of people it’s be aware
i work all the time with teams and i’m sure you get this question on like any time you jump into assessments or any
kind of model they’re like well what’s the best kind of leader right or what’s the best this i always say the best
leader is a self-aware leader there is no makeup of wiring and letters and
temperaments and tests that churn out the best kind of leader the best kind of leader is self-aware so
if you know here’s what i bring to the team here’s what the team is great at and here’s what the team is lacking
i don’t want to lead them to a place of burnout we need to be really kind when we’re operating in people’s competencies
or frustrations and we need to be really generous in giving people opportunities to lean into their geniuses that’s just
an aware leader right it doesn’t matter what your what your makeup is it matters that you’re really aware about what you
bring to the table and about what your team brings to the table can a project go smoother if you do have
all of those people coming together i absolutely think so because here’s
what i say trace like we talk about breaking it down into three kind of steps
ideation activation and implementation so your wonder and invention are in that
ideation stage your discernment and galvanizing are in that activation stage
and then your enablement and tenacity are in that implementation stage so anytime we’ve got a project
we want to give the appropriate space to the ideation the activation and implementation but what normally happens
with a business or with teams is they go from ideation to implementation right oh
i have an idea great let’s go get it done but here’s where this gets kind of
serious for teens when you skip over a stage you’re not just skipping over a stage of work you’re skipping over
people who are trying to bring their best to the team so as somebody like i mean for you your
discernment and galvanizing you live and love that activation stage well if
you’re on a team that’s with a real ideator and some tenacity people the tendency would be just to skip over you
which nobody wants to feel skipped over right and now you’re fighting for a place in your team you’re fighting to
add value you’re doing all these things that are kind of bringing out negative behaviors all because we didn’t slow
down long enough to kind of honor the stages of the creativity process so
i think can you skip them of course is that going to create long-term health on a team i don’t think so
it wasn’t until i started learning about working genius that i i don’t know if the table group came up with it but the
ideation activation and implementation that made so much sense to me i thank
you guys for giving language around that when we looked at projects that did not go the way we thought they would it was
always because we were missing a part and normally it was the activation piece
yeah it’s always the most skipped stage and i believe we came up with it i did not come up with it i’m a parrot for it
uh i’m just repeating what i heard but it is so wonderful and sometimes i’ll
get in front of teams and i’m a little sheepish about sharing it because it seems so simple but it is the thing that i think i do an
exercise called analyze a past project which you were just kind of referring to and i’m like hey tell me about a project
that went well tell me about one that didn’t go well and where did we get stuck and a lot of times it’s somebody
jumping from ideation to implementation and they’ve skipped over the discernment
stage where they really refined this idea to make sure it was a really good one and they skipped galvanizing which
is so important like does everybody have buy-in like are we getting everybody moving in the same direction they just
jumped to how do i get this done as quickly as possible you brought up temperament earlier and
kathleen edelman has been on this show she’s the author of i said this you heard that the best i totally agree
she’s helped me tremendously we’ve talked about the colors before red yellow green and blue
most people have a primary and a secondary i do not i am a red red and i i needed a lot of help i just
didn’t understand why how i was communicating was not landing well with other people and vice versa and kathleen
really opened that door and i can’t thank her enough for that the last episode she was on was episode 117.
you’re very familiar with her material i had somebody that i consult with ask me
where do the temperaments and working genius come together and fall apart
i am a high yellow i’m a yellow red um love the temperaments it has helped me relationally
um it’s helped me professionally i mean it’s it’s helped me in all sorts of different ways here’s what i say about
every assessment assessments are about awareness not about permission so any time you’re
taking an assessment this is not permission for me to just be
more of who i am this is hopefully about awareness so that i can become a better version of myself so
just because i’m a yellow and like to have fun does not mean that every situation requires fun you know there
are times where i need to make sure that i’m toning that down because that’s what’s best for the team so
when you’re talking about any of these assessments i mean you know temperaments and working genius specifically
i think there’s overlap because they’re allowing you to gain awareness around different things to me the temperaments
i know they don’t quite fall in just personality i i know myers-briggs would be more personality and the temperaments
are a little bit different in that sense but to me the temperaments explain a lot
of my emotional needs and they explain how to emotionally understand people
different than me the working genius as i said in the beginning is a production tool so
it’s really about the art of getting work done both individually and on a team so i think they complement each
other well but i do think they measure very different things
both are good like i want as much depth and understanding and awareness around myself and around my teammates so i love
using all of them because just because you have the genius of tenacity doesn’t mean i necessarily understand your
emotional needs i mean you could be a high red and have a lot of tenacity but you’re a high red with very low tenacity
right so that creates very different people and how i would respond to you changes based on the makeup of those two
and that was where the person that i was talking to was getting at well are reds normally more tenacious or yellows more
wonder does that work at all obviously i’m i’m just proving that with my assessment well and so am i i’ve had
somebody you know somebody was like i wonder if discernment people are more introverted and i’m as i’m as
extroverted as they come and i have discernment you know so it’s like i have not seen a correlation i’m sure there is
but i could see somebody with the genius of wonder they could be a blue or they could be a
green or they could be a rhetoric like i i can see how those would work all over the map i’m sure the more data we get on
this the more we’ll be able to figure out those kind of pairings but at this point i tend to see it all over the
place more than i see reds being this one type of thing i appreciate that i always like to make
patterns out of things when i read things and i haven’t been able to make it out of this i’ll tell you how we’ve
been using it it’s basically what you just said that what type of work should we be
making sure people are gravitating to so we all know that not just that person but the entire team so if they’re taking
on things that we know they shouldn’t we make sure they understand what that
means and maybe even encourage them to hand that off but if they really want to do it then they’re big people they can
do that and then as far as temperament what we make sure we’re giving each other kind words we’re making sure we’re
communicating in the lens that the other people needs to hear that we know the needs of
that other person and we’re making sure that we’re fulfilling those trace i feel like the working genius is
a cheat sheet on how to complement people i led a team for a long time and i had a
galvanizer on my team and i would text her every now and then and just say hey i’m so grateful for how you keep getting
this all moving in the same direction and focusing on what’s most important and it meant the world to her right the
tenacity people i’m like man you do so much for us and you probably do more than i’m
even aware that you’re doing i just wanted to say thanks you know you could pinpoint each one of these and just
shoot off a quick text to affirm people and it’s amazing how much that hits core
to who they are and how much it actually means to them whereas i made the mistake in the past of not having or
understanding this language and i would send my tenacity person to a creative brainstorming meeting thinking i was a
great leader like oh look at me giving them a chance you know to to go to this meeting and i’m like why
are they miserable i’m like trying to do something that’s really nice for them and they’re miserable because i didn’t understand this language i didn’t
understand that there was certain kinds of work that they would gravitate towards and they would hate i just thought everybody
else liked the work i liked and that we all hated tenacity work or we all hated the things that i hated rather than
being like oh wait i’m just a part of the puzzle right i’m not the whole puzzle so if you were to come in and you were
working with a company that’s never heard of working genius before but they’re saying there’s just something
off we know we can work better together we’re more self-aware now and we know we can do things a little bit differently
what would you then do what’s your process well i mean first of all i love kind of
what you said i want to understand the pain points like hey give me a future
version of what this team could look like if everything was going really really well okay well what are some of
the things that are keeping us from getting there and a lot of times it’s productivity like we don’t know how
to tap into everybody equally it’s morale it’s confusion about what makes us successful all those things that are
more of the healthy side of the company rather than you know focusing on strategy and marketing and all those
things that we would say are the smart side both are needed for success it’s just the health side is what gets
neglected most of the time pat talks about that so much in the book the advantage so for me i think taking the
assessment and then one of the great tools it’s not just about individual awareness it’s about team awareness so
i’m sure you’ve seen this where we create a team map that shows people’s geniuses and frustrations and we
actually put it on one piece of paper and kind of take a team through those
assessments so once the teammates understand their individual wiring and then they understand the
depth of the model i like to take them through these team exercises that show them this is the team map
and this is the people on the team that gravitate towards this type of work and this is the people that avoid this kind
of work because when you have a grouping on the team of one frustration or one genius it operates like a magnet on the
team so if there’s a lot of tenacity if there’s a team with a lot of tenacity as their genius
they are going to have a really hard time in the brainstorming meetings
because they’re going to be like a magnet trying to pull everything towards the tenacity well how are we going to
get that done well when is that going to be due how is that even possible those kind of questions which are really
important questions for tenacity but they can kind of kill the creative process
for the people that have wonder and invention if we don’t label these things and help make sense of these different
things so when i put it on paper it helps us alleviate some of the tension between teammates it’s like oh
wait you you aren’t trying to kill my idea you’re just trying to bring your genius to the table and deliver on it
and so one of the things that i do absolutely quickly is to talk about meetings and to talk about labeling
meetings with the working genius so if you’re going to have a monthly
brainstorm or or something like that label it wi like hey this is a wi meeting so somebody with the genius of
tenacity knows oh i’m coming to this meeting not to bring my genius but maybe just to listen or ask questions and i
might not even find this meeting very energized whereas a daily stand up or a
weekly tactical meeting we would say these are more of the galvanizing discernment enablement tenacity kind of
meetings and the big picture question people probably should just kind of maybe save those questions for another
meeting but once you start to label those you allow people to bring the best versions of themselves because it’s a
predictable environment not just a whose opinions loudest do you ever get to the point where you
say we’re having a more visionary meeting we need the w and i’s the e’s
and the t’s you don’t need to come to this so that’s a great question pat wrote a
book called death by meeting which if you haven’t read it you’ve maybe experienced it um you know we’ve all sat
in meetings that are what he calls meeting stu this is all about how do we avoid meetings due so
sometimes i think it makes sense to not invite people but other times i feel
like they could be left out on something they’re gonna have to deliver on without hearing the conversation so i like the
phrase predictable environments and predictable meanings more than i like inviting and uninviting
people now per team and per industry maybe that that might make sense but i would rather
than just know like hey what’s expected of me in this meeting i think is a really really good thing because if you
just have meetings they just kind of move towards whoever’s the loudest but one of
the things we talk about with the working genius is as disruptive as a plane going from 30 000 feet to 10 000
feet in an instant is as much turbulence as that causes that’s how much turbulence gets interjected
into a meeting when somebody at that brainstorming upper level gets interrupted by somebody who’s at the
tenacity ground level saying well how would we get that done we call that turbulence and also just as disruptive
as if right before we’re about to hit record on this podcast if somebody comes in and asks a big picture question like
should we even do a podcast right that’s a very disruptive question causes a lot
of turbulence as we’re walking into the event we’re like wait a minute that’s not the time or the place for that
question and when you don’t set up predictable meetings people will just
they can’t help but being themselves so they will just ask those questions at all the wrong times because they weren’t
given an opportunity or a predictable place to be able to ask those kind of questions so i’m a huge fan of labeling
different kinds of meetings because it allows people to bring their best to the team
people listening today have heard us talk about the assessment they might be wanting to take the assessment
themselves or get it for their team what can you tell them about that just workinggenius.com it’s i mean it
takes i keep lowering the time it literally takes like eight minutes to take it like it’s 25 bucks it takes
maybe 10 minutes to take it one of the cool things about taking this assessment is you will take it and you will get
your quantitative results meaning the assessment will say here’s your two geniuses here’s your two competencies
here’s your two frustrations but then it will take you through a qualitative process which is it will
help you ask questions because maybe you want to change an answer based on what
you heard so you might answer the questions and it comes out that your discernment is a genius but you’re like you know what now that i’ve read through
these questions i really think it’s invention and so it gives you the final say of what you actually are because
even an assessment can’t tell you really what brings you the most joy and what brings you the most fulfillment
it’s up to you to answer that so it’s i i think it’s one of the only assessments that does that so even though it only takes about eight to
ten minutes to answer i always recommend people spend another 10 or 15 minutes just going through the assessment
results to really nail in what their answers are yeah i think the last part that you
mentioned is key and many of us aren’t familiar with that because we punch a couple of answers into a computer it
spits out an answer and we’re done uh i spent a lot of time with that and i think it was after i listened to one of
the working genius podcasts and so much great information on that
podcast and he was talking about how to really dive into that portion of the assessment
so i dug it back up and i did that and i i probably spent about 40 minutes on it
and i took his advice and i i lined through things that i would never say and i underline things oh i can hear
myself saying this all the time and i actually did confirm my working
geniuses but it did have me a little bit different with what my frustrations and
competencies were that’s so good i don’t think i’ve had a team that i mean maybe a team under five
but any team over five i don’t think i’ve been in there where somebody hasn’t changed something their geniuses or
frustrations after we’ve talked about it at length or they’ve gotten feedback from other tapes like hey i see you
doing this more is that because you find that more fulfilling or is that just what you think you’re supposed to do like surfacing those kind of
conversations allow people to get really specific about their answers so i i’ve seen that a lot with teams
tim my geniuses are discernment and galvanizing how can i best serve my team
knowing that so one of the episodes that you mentioned before the working genius podcast it’s
called the pairings episode so they took everybody’s geniuses and they put a
label around the pairings so yours is discerning and galvanizing so we call
that the intuitive activator so your team if they were to look at all
the pairings of the different options they would be like oh that’s trace right he’s the intuitive activator he has a
sense of which way we should go and once he knows where we should go he is probably getting us moving in the
right direction so as we talked about before the the best leader is a self-aware leader so for you to have
that awareness of i like to pull every meeting in conversation to that activation stage the discernment the
galvanizing that’s where i like to pull it but that doesn’t mean that every conversation or meeting needs to be
there so really i think as a team leader it’s about how do i bring my best but
then how do i set others up to succeed in the areas that i’m not going to gravitate toward so
you surrounding yourself with people that love tenacity that love to finish which i know you’ve done
hiring people that are great at getting things across the finish line and owning that each person kind of
brings a piece to the table and a piece to the team is really healthy for the team because you’re asking to do what
brings them energy and you’re not doing the kind of work that frustrates you because people don’t want to work for a
frustrated leader have you worked with teams where they’re hiring new people and they use this
assessment to figure out who their next hire is going to be absolutely pat has written a book on what we call
the ideal team player so there is a value set for a team that probably comes
before a role function so to talk about the phrase how do we
get the right people on the bus and then how do we get them in the right seat on the bus well
we use something called hungry humble people smart to kind of assess are they the right fit for this organization and
then i talk about the working genius for how do we get them in the right seat so yes i use it for hiring but not as
the only tool for hiring because just because you have tenacity doesn’t mean that you’re a good fit for this
organization like the role might need tenacity and that’s great you’re going to be satisfied in that role but there’s a bigger picture of what’s going on
within this organization that we’d want you to be a fit for before we figure out the right seat on the bus
so i’m dying to know the answer to this question as a member of the table group
how does the table group make sure that a new hire will live the core values
hungry humble and smart that’s such a good question well i mean really
you’re being interviewed long before you realize you’re being interviewed by the time you sit in a formal interview
they’ve already decided if you have those or not and then one of the things that in a formal interview that they’ll
make you do is rank yourself on those three so hopefully by the time you’re
around to interviewing you’ve rubbed shoulders with enough people for them to say hey i think this person will be a good fit
hungry humble people smart is what we’re looking for and we think this person has it and then they just i mean they asked
me to rate myself on those three and now here’s where a correlation did jump
out trace is hungry is what i labeled third for myself which coincides with
tenacity as a frustration if i would have said hungry is first and they knew my working genius results that would
have probably raised some [Music] like are you sure it’s hungry because tenacity is a frustration and i i
answered so quickly i didn’t have time to think about that but that was exactly how cody responded he was like well that makes sense if tenacity is one of your
frustrations that would make sense that hungary is your third so that that’s just kind of one of the
things that we do is we kind of grade ourselves against those because you’re going to be miserable
because that’s what we’re going to hold you to like hungry humble people smart isn’t just who we want on board it’s
what we’re going to also hold you accountable to so if you’re not drawn to those you’re going to be miserable here
and we don’t want people that are miserable here so that’s how we go about making sure that we’re trying to get the
ideal team player for the table group tim i’m sure we sparked some interest around the working genius we probably
created some awareness people are thinking this is probably the exact tool that i’ve been missing in my company
if you want to leave everybody with just one thing that they can think about
what would you say about the working genius so i would leverage an old description
of an old board game believe it or not called othello and the tagline of that
game is othello takes a moment to understand but a lifetime to master and i think that is the perfect analogy to
the working genius so really at its core it’s about six activities of work that
are required to get any project done we gravitate toward and get energy from two
types of work and we are frustrated by and avoid two types of work and so
very simple to understand that’s the elevator pitch there is a whole lot of depth that we didn’t even get to that we
could uncover on application of this tool but just at its core i would want
people to know that work doesn’t have to suck right work can be fulfilling work
can bring you joy work does not have to be the thing that you dread but you owe
it to the people around you to get awareness around what kind of work brings you energy and fulfillment i feel
like i owe it to my family to spend more of my time focusing on the things that bring me joy
and energy so that i can show up and be the best version of myself for them we have a lot of people that own their
own companies that are listening pretty easy for them to start something new but we also have a lot of people that work
for other people and they’re thinking there’s something to this i think that this can help the entire
team what advice would you give them to bring this to their managers to their
supervisors i see that a lot one of the things is just take the assessment
understand yourself and share those ah-ha’s with
your boss or your team people avoid a really you know
high-dollar solution for 25 bucks to gain the kind of awareness that i think the working
genius provides and the only reason i’m doing this for work is because when i was a user of this it changed the way i
viewed teams and led teams so i’m a terrible salesman i couldn’t sell if i didn’t believe in it i think
this tool really helps and so i would take the assessment and i would make
sure to share those results with the people you care about just if anything else so they can be more aware of you
and you’re practicing that really healthy discipline of modeling self-awareness which is really
contagious on a team so i would start there i would just start with learning yourself and sharing
those results and see what happens and i might recommend that after they get the results they go over to the working
genius podcast and listen to some of the conversations around what the assessment
actually means absolutely and they’re really quick they’re like 15 minute episodes so i’ve
binged on a lot of those at times just to catch up and they’re very insightful
and eventually we’re going to have a book that accompanies this can you tell us anything about the book
yes i’ve only got snippets of the book at this point but it’s coming out in september and i can’t wait the whole
point of the book is to drive people to the assessment not because we want to sell the assessment it’s we want people
to get awareness around the kind of work that brings them energy and joy and what
work to avoid like i don’t want to major on this kind of work because it is going to frustrate the heck out of me you know
so there’s so much there’s so much in that and there’s so much goodness and health and knowing that about ourselves
it helps our relationships it helps our teams and i could not be more of a fan
of having people gain awareness around this well tim i can’t wait for the book to come out in fact when it does come out
it’s going to be the next book that the rising tide mastermind reads i know we’re going to really enjoy that within
the mastermind group and i’m hoping you’re going to come in and help the mastermind group a little bit understand
it the way you understand it let’s do it that’d be so fun awesome well tim thank you so much for your time
if people want to find out more about you more about working genius what should they do i would love to connect with people
about working genius i’m on linkedin tim cooper also you could just email me tim.cooper
tablegroupconsulting.com i would love to connect and hear more about how you’re using it and what you’re learning about
it awesome thank you so much for coming on scaling up h2o
nation you have heard me interview several people from the table group on
this podcast i love all of pat lincione’s books they are just a wealth of knowledge if
you are in business if you’re working with a company if you own a company it
is a way to get your entire leadership team around
lots of concepts and as i mentioned before i never really
enjoyed the fable version of it but my team absolutely got into the book
because of the fable so rather than reading just a business boring book
find one of lencione’s books that might interest or advance your team and it
will not be hard to do and you can have an entire discussion around the book as
people really get into the stories now in the near future there will be a book
around working genius i cannot wait for that book to come out
as you heard me tell tim we have been using working genius for some time now this is an assessment that
i didn’t know i needed i definitely didn’t want but when i understood it and allowed me
to engage my team totally different and as an employer as
the person that’s highest up in my company i hate to see people overloaded
with work and i would inherently take things off of their plate but here’s a
thing i didn’t know what to take off of their plate i thought i was doing them a favor but if i was taking something off
of their plate that was in their working genius i did the exact opposite of a
favor i’m now burning them out everybody on my team has taken the working genius
assessment if you want to take it we’ll have a link to that on the show notes
page but now that i know everybody’s working genius i know what to take off
of their plate so my working genius is galvanizing and discernment
and my frustrations are tenacity and wonder
pretty much by default i will eliminate anything that’s tenacity and wonder
what i will find is i will take things on around invention and enablement
and it’s that working competency that middle area
that we all get burned out in now we’re good at it we can do it we just don’t enjoy it
we’re competent in it and if we can start learning how to say no or getting
people to realize that that’s not what they should be assigning us it’s not that the workday gets any less
but we enjoy it a lot more because we’re working on the things that we love doing
and after i took this assessment and after i learned more about all of these geniuses i can tell you without a doubt
that galvanizing and discernment are definitely my working genius areas when i look at
when i am doing my most fun work i didn’t have language for before but it was always because i
was either galvanizing or discerning something that was going on
knowing that has helped me tremendously it’s helped my entire team and as i was working with other teams
i noticed that they had the same frustration they were also looking for what’s the
next hire that i need on my team and i never really found an assessment
that worked with that as i mentioned with tim the temperaments are great and i can’t
say enough about the i said this you heard that temperament study and we use
that like crazy here in our industry we use it at our family
we use it all over in in pretty much everything that i touch because it is just so powerful
but i don’t know if you don’t have a blue on your team you need to go out and hire a blue or same thing with any color
so it didn’t really work that way and with teams that i worked with they would ask me what is the next hire that we
need to bring on that leadership team and i just didn’t have a good answer for it until i found the six working
geniuses and we’ll look at it and we’ll say hey you do not have anybody on your team
with the genius of tenacity so maybe you should bring somebody on your team that
has that and now as you’re interviewing people you can now have them take this
assessment and when you find somebody that fits the core values of your team
somebody that you want to work with they want to work with you and they have the genius of tenacity well folks you just
found your new team member and i’ve heard people that have done that and it has
just filled in a gaping hole they always knew was missing but they didn’t have
language around it i can’t tell you all the wonderful ways that i have seen
working genius used so i’m going to have more information on the show notes page
around working genius so feel free to go to the show notes page and find as much
information as you like i’d love to hear how you were using the working genius
and i just can’t say enough good things about it nation i’m curious is there
something out there that you feel has just made your work or home life just 10
times better is it an assessment is it a book is it a seminar is it a tip
whatever it is let me know what that is i’m always on the lookout for the next thing this was the next thing for me i
now have to find the next next thing and i’d love for you to help me out maybe
i’ll even have a topic on that on the podcast nation i want to make sure that you are
thinking about how you can get better each and every week and of course the person that’s going to help us with that
is james mcdonald here’s a brand new thinking on water with james [Music]
welcome to thinking on water with james the segment where we don’t give you the answers we give you the topics and
questions for you to think about drop by drop now let’s get to it
in this week’s episode we’re thinking about a salt bridge in a water softener system
what is a salt bridge how do you know if you have one what impact can i have on a water
softener how do you remove a salt bridge how can it be prevented in the future
take this week to think about salt bridges in water softener systems be sure to follow hashtag tow22
and hashtag scalinguph2o share your thoughts on each week’s thinking on water
i’m james mcdonald and i look forward to learning more from you as always thank you james mcdonald you
are making sure that we are all thinking on water and getting a little bit better
each and every week by the way folks that’s what we do each and every week with the rising tide mastermind we’ve
got a waiting list getting ready to release the next cohort of the rising
tide mastermind so if it sounds like that you need a little push to get to
the next level you want to get there further you want to get there faster you want to get there with the help of
others while you’re helping others well by all means go to scalinguph2o.com and navigate over to
our mastermind webpage learn more about the rising tide
mastermind and if it sounds like something that you would like to do i would love to talk to you about that
very thing we’ve got well over 50 people in the rising tide mastermind we have five
groups getting ready to release group number six and maybe that is the group
for you i’d love to have that conversation with you and again to find out more go to the scaling up h2o
webpage and navigate over to mastermind so many people are going further faster
or having fun doing it or helping other people and i would love to add you to that name
if it’s beneficial for everybody involved nation i hope you continue to
do something that you can grow and challenge yourself and i hope you
will tune in next week for a brand new episode of scaling up h2o
[Music] scouting nation we have just started a
new group within the rising tide mastermind i am so amazed at how
successful and how well received the rising tide mastermind has been in our community and we are starting a new
waiting list for the next group if you want to get on this waiting list
so you can start with our next group go to scalinguph2o.com forward slash
mastermind to see if this is the right group for you and then after you and i have a brief conversation to make sure
the group fits for you and you fit for the group we can get you on that waiting
list i can’t wait to talk to you remember scaling up h2o.com forward slash mastermind