Introducing our New Blog Series…
Happy New Year! It’s always good to get back into the swing of things in the new year, feeling refreshed after a festive break with friends and family. My trainers are on first thing every morning as I take part in the RED January challenge to increase movement at this time of the year, and for it to remain a sustainable part of life. Being part of the Resilient Reds team is helping hold me to account and proving motivational!
Meanwhile, at Bright Lead we’ve already welcomed our 9th Cohort of Senior leaders to our Group Coaching Programme, the 7th Cohort of our Leadership Training Programme for a major video-games publisher, and started a pilot of a Positive Intelligence programme to develop mental fitness, increase confidence and beat imposter syndrome - a great start to 2024! I’m also looking forward to delivering many in-person programmes and sessions in the coming weeks, helping leaders at all levels in different organisations to develop further.
Last September, we started the new academic year introducing a blog series linked to Patrick Lencioni’s ‘The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team’ pyramid. This January, I’d like to start the new calendar year by introducing our new series which will focus around his ‘6 Working Geniuses’.
The working geniuses are all about discovering what brings us joy and fulfilment in our work, recognising our strengths and the strengths of those around us, and then learning how to make best use of these strengths to optimise our team, and individual, potential. The six geniuses are Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity. They are collected together into the acronym WIDGET, and over the course of the next few months we’ll be looking at each of them in turn and how they interact. Every piece of work needs the 6 Geniuses, in 3 stages of work. For example, everybody knows people who love to have ideas and never complete the detail, and everyone knows someone who is a stickler for getting the detail done extremely well and to a high standard. Of the six geniuses, we really only have two which bring us joy and fulfilment, which are our geniuses, two are competencies and two are frustrations for us. While we must be prepared to complete all six stages in getting something done, if we spend too much time working in our frustrations, we will lose our enthusiasm for what we are doing, and perhaps don’t perform as well as we might, if we had a role that emphasised the use of our geniuses.
It’s always good to learn something new, especially when the thing you learn is about yourself. Self knowledge means you are better able to be your best-self and have a positive impact upon those work and home relationships. You may immediately think you can guess what your own working genius might be, but it can be surprising to find out your second. Learning more about ourselves and each other, can be a game changer in terms of building teams, team work, team communication, and productivity.
Reflections:
How has your New Year started?
What do you think your main working genius would likely be?
What is communication and understanding of each others strengths like in your team at the moment?
How might some guided reflection help you to get the best from yourself and your team?