610R: How to Help Team Members Find the Right Work, with Patrick Lencioni
Coaching for Leaders
Dave Stachowiak
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 7 July 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Patrick Lencioni is founder and president of The Table Group, a firm dedicated to protecting human dignity in the world of work, personal development, and faith. Pat is the author of twelve best-selling books with over seven million copies sold. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team remains a national best-seller and he’s also the author of The 6 Types of Working Genius: A Better Way to Understand Your Gifts, Your Frustrations, and Your Team.
Many of us have heard the invitation from Jim Collin’s book _Good to Great_ to get the right people on the bus. But once the right people are on the bus, how to do you find the right seat for each person? On this episode, Pat and I discuss how to utilize the Working Genius model to find the right work for the right team members.
Key Points
When addressing burnout, the type of work someone does is more significant than the volume of work.
Three stages of work are present for almost every team: ideation, activation, and implementation.
A cup of coffee in an excellent thermos can stay hot an entire day — that’s true of us when we’re aligned with our working geniuses.
Finding the right work for a team member is far easier than finding the right person culturally. Before you look elsewhere, be sure they are in the right seat.
To fill gaps in your team’s geniuses, you can hire, borrow, or find people where competence will suffice for now. Resist the temptation to immediately jump to hiring.
Resources Mentioned
The 6 Types of Working Genius assessment
The 6 Types of Working Genius: A Better Way to Understand Your Gifts, Your Frustrations, and Your Team by Patrick Lencioni
Interview Notes
Download my interview notes in PDF format (free membership required).
Related Episodes
How to Get the Ideal Team Player, with Patrick Lencioni (episode 301)
How to Lead an Offsite, with Tom Henschel (episode 377)
The Mindset Leaders Need to Address Burnout, with Christina Maslach(episode 609)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Dave Stahoviac. I'm taking a studio break for the next two weeks, so I'm bringing |
| 0:05.0 | you today a conversation that originally aired a couple of years ago. If you didn't hear it |
| 0:10.5 | when it aired, it's an important one for you to hear. And if you did hear it, it's a very critical |
| 0:15.8 | conversation to revisit. Patrick Lencioni has been leading the conversation for many years on a bunch of |
| 0:22.6 | aspects of leadership, especially in relation to teams. His book, The Five Dysfunctions of a |
| 0:29.2 | team, has influenced so many of us in how we lead teams effectively. And it's his more recent book |
| 0:35.4 | on the six types of working genius that has had me referencing |
| 0:39.9 | this conversation to our members and listeners for the last few years. And if you ever read |
| 0:45.9 | the Jim Collins book Good to Great, you know the analogy of getting the right people on the bus |
| 0:51.6 | in your organization. The hard part, though, is in addition to getting the right people on the bus in your organization. The hard part, though, is in addition to getting |
| 0:56.0 | the right people on the bus, figuring out where they should sit. Are they in the right seats? |
| 1:02.1 | In this conversation, Pat and I look at that question in detail and how we can do a better job |
| 1:08.5 | as leaders of making sure not only do we have the right people, |
| 1:12.0 | but are they doing the right kind of work? |
| 1:14.7 | This is a rebroadcast of Coaching for Leaders, Episode 610. |
| 1:20.1 | Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential. |
| 1:29.0 | Greetings to you from Orange County, California. |
| 1:32.1 | This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stahofiak. |
| 1:36.5 | Leaders are born. |
| 1:38.3 | They're made. |
| 1:39.3 | And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. So much of leadership |
| 1:47.0 | is about not our own effectiveness, but how we can enable and support our teams and being as |
... |
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