Replant Bootcamp

EP 227 WORKING GENIUS

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Hey Bootcampers, we hope all is well with you and yours! The guys took some time during the deep freeze and snow to talk about leadership styles as defined by the Leadership Guru himself, Patrick Lencioni. His organization, The Table Group, does a great job of defining leadership styles and how they work together for good in organizations and even churches.

In this EP the boys break down the six types of working Genius and talk about how they might play out in the life of your church.

JimBo Stewart: [00:00:00] Here we are, back at it again. Bob, I hope you’re ready for the next episode. As we keep diving into the boot camp, I’ve now safely arrived, update from last episode, to central Arkansas where it was, I think, 17 degrees or 15 degrees when I landed. which is just what I call bitter, angry cold. I just immediately, my mood shifts when I feel something that cold and it’s not a good shift.
Bob Bickford: Well, Jimbo, I’m sorry. We’re, uh, we win the cold battle here. Uh, Tennessee is nine degrees feels like one. So I think I gotcha. but you know what? I’m, I’ve been in the Midwest for a long time and, uh, just recently relocated to the South. So I’m pretty good. And my apologies to the bootcamp listeners if they hear Daisy pup in the background.
She’s protesting being in the kennel. She’s misbehaving.
JimBo Stewart: I get it. Look, I’m at my parents house, sitting in their dining room and their dogs are wandering around. So they could, they, you know, Daisy and them could end up going [00:01:00] off each other. I mean, who knows what might happen?
Bob Bickford: Yeah. Well Barb is out of town visiting the grandkids and uh, I love my Daisy pup, but she’s getting on my last nerve.
JimBo Stewart: I mean, I love my kids, but I feel that way about them sometimes, you know?
Bob Bickford: Yes. But we don’t feel that way about our wives ever. Like they never came on our last nerve.
JimBo Stewart: No, we both married perfectly.
Bob Bickford: Indeed we did.
JimBo Stewart: speaking of pairings and, ways that people work together, I wanted to introduce a, tool, a leadership way of thinking, that I’ve, I’ve been reading a lot about lately that, the reason I want to bring it in is It is similar, but not the same as we did a lot of episodes on the predictable success framework and visionary operator processor synergist in those four specific leadership styles.
And, we did a whole series of that with leadership judo, and understanding that. So honestly, when I first heard about working genius, I thought, ah, this [00:02:00] is just like visionary operator processor synergist. I don’t, I don’t need to add this to my toolbox. But as I delve a little deeper, there is some nuanced differences that I think can be helpful.
and again, the reason we talk about these types of things on the podcast is not because we want you to be some leadership gurus and, and just do worldly, things with leadership, because these are good tools of self awareness and, self reflection and just help you think about how you lead. Now you think about leadership, how you work and, We use this as a conversation with the replant team recently, and it was a really fruitful conversation, to work around and work through it.
I would say the main difference, Bob, as far as the framework is visionary operator process synergist in the predictable success framework is the life cycle of a whole organization. Whereas working genius is kind of the. I wouldn’t say life cycle, but the workflow of a [00:03:00] project from beginning to end, right?
So instead of the organization as a whole and its whole life cycle, this is like, Hey, we’ve got this big new project. Here’s, here’s where that starts and here’s where that finishes and where we each kind of plug in along the way.
Bob Bickford: Yeah. I like that because it sounds like VOPS is kind of your, the way you operate, what you bring to the party. But this, this talks about how you would go about a project, and, and attack that and then how all that makes really good music or good leadership energy together.
JimBo Stewart: Yeah. So I mean, it’s how you approach the work. And, so the way it works is there are six working geniuses, and the way the kind of survey, if you were to take it, would play out for you, is you would have two that would be called your working geniuses. So those are, those are your two where you’re going to find the most joy in your work doing, operating in these two phases of a project, [00:04:00] whereas you’re going to have two that are going to be what are called working competencies.
So, you’re, you’re probably good at them. You could probably do them for a long time there, but eventually you’re probably going to be frustrated if that’s all that you’re doing because it’s not in your working genius, but it’s kind of energy neutral, but then there’s your two working frustrations. And even if you have a high competency on these, if you stay in, in these.
phases of the project, it’s going to frustrate you to no end and you’re going to be a miserable person. And so that’s kind of how the six end up getting paired out.
Bob Bickford: Well, I’m familiar with working frustration Jimbo, having been, a person who’s worked for a good portion of my life now. So, uh, I’m excited to, just to become aware of not only the genius, is it genius or genii or geniuses?
JimBo Stewart: I think just genius. I think, yeah, I think just working G because, uh, they end up getting like a pairing, you know, [00:05:00] like, so depending on what your two are kind of even helps further describe, the way you approach work or at least the way you get the most joy out of work.
Bob Bickford: Okay. So genius competency and frustration.
JimBo Stewart: Yeah. So those would be the three categories. So let me just walk through the, the order, the workflow. of a project one at a time. I’ll just list the names and then we’ll go one at a time. So Wander, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity. Those are the six working geniuses. And then, let’s go through them a little bit one at a time.
Wonder. So it starts with wonder. People with the genius of wonder love to speculate and question. They ask questions like, why are the things the way that they are? Is there a better way to do this? They love to sit around in ambiguity and just imagine the possibilities. People with the genius of wonder help create the conditions for the next step of invention, which is where we’re Answering those questions and solving those problems, [00:06:00] but Wander is where we love to just sit and look and think Huh, I wonder why that is or is there a better way to do that?
Bob Bickford: Yeah. I wonder about a lot of things, Jimbo.
JimBo Stewart: Yeah, I mean, I think I think probably one of your working geniuses is wonder
Bob Bickford: Yeah.
JimBo Stewart: Because you’re you’re you’re very good at that of sitting in and kind of thinking through is this the best way to approach that or Why do we not do this or why does that not exist?
Bob Bickford: Yeah. I think about, um, in our season that we worked together for the replant team, a lot of, a lot of the data that we were looking at caused me to really wonder about things. A lot of, what I was experiencing in the field caused me to think. And there’s got to be a better way. Right. And what if we did this?
Or I, I wonder if we could start this initiative, all those sorts of things. So yeah, that, that’s familiar. And the burning question that I, I wonder about, uh, in the last couple of weeks is what the heck are the Dallas Cowboys going to do Jimbo?
JimBo Stewart: Oh, man,
Bob Bickford: No, we don’t, we don’t have to answer it now, but I just want to put that out there.
I wonder about that a lot. I
JimBo Stewart: you [00:07:00] called it that the season was over a long time ago. They outlasted your prediction, but you always, you always call it pretty early.
Bob Bickford: the first time they don’t convert on a third down and along, I call it. Right. I call it like, and I could statistically, I think we should get Josh dryer to do a little bit of research. Here’s what I would, here’s what I postulate before we move on. If the Dallas Cowboys, whenever they face a third in long, the very first time in the season, if they do not convert on that third and long, Their season ends right there.
That’s, that’s what I’m going to postulate. The very first third in long, that they face in the year, if they don’t convert on it, it’s season is over.
JimBo Stewart: You know, one of the things I wonder is the Buffalo bills. Have you seen, the news about the. the pit, the muddy pit that they have that where they’re building a new stadium and a fan went to go visit the big muddy pit where they’re just getting the grounds ready to build this new stadium [00:08:00] and the fan fell into the pit.
and when they got out, the bills won the game. And so, so now, this is a real thing, Bill’s fans are, before the game, giving a sacrifice to the pit. And one fan is just throwing themselves into the pit.
Bob Bickford: Well, I saw something online just tonight where there was a, a Bill’s guy, like half of his uniform was like blue and white and red and the other was like totally brown. So maybe that was somebody, putting that out there that maybe I had not heard that Jimbo. I have not heard that.
JimBo Stewart: So it’s a whole thing, man. So, alright, so things get started. so this is where a little different, similar to what Les McKeown would say with visionary operator. He would always say things get started with a visionary, but part of that visionary process is before we’re even inventing any ideas, we are, we’re just asking questions and we’re wondering about things [00:09:00] and we’re wondering, Hey, I wonder, is that the right thing to do?
Brandon Moore is a high W on our team. He brings a lot of wonder to our team. The next step, once we start asking those questions, if we want to move on into something, then we have to look at invention. So, people with the genius of invention get joy from taking the challenges and generating solutions.
They enjoy innovating from scratch and love a blank whiteboard piece of paper with which they can brainstorm. Invention is the most commonly recognized genius, but all six geniuses are needed to get the work done. This is that kind of visionary, new ideas all the time, always like, as the wonderer’s asking questions, the invention guy is just answering with ideas.
and so, these two together, would come together to, to be the first phase of work, which is called ideation. So we’re not actually even doing anything yet. We’re just asking questions and we’re [00:10:00] throwing some ideas at those questions.
Bob Bickford: Yeah, this is the spark and uh, it’s a good, it’s a good element to have and oftentimes if you get in a Church that needs renewal. These two have left the building a long time ago.
JimBo Stewart: I would, I would say so. I, I definitely think the idea of wonder of like, Hey, is this what we should be doing? Are we where we need to be questioning status quo? And then coming up with some proactive solutions, the ideation phase has probably left the building. So we got to move from ideas to like, Actually doing something right, but one of the mistakes that, we see a lot of times happen, I think, especially in ministry, but even in a lot of concepts, a lot of aspects is we go from ideation to implementation.
So we ask some questions. We threw some ideas out there, we grab one of those ideas, and we just start executing. and so, a missing piece of that puzzle, to make sure we’re doing the right things, [00:11:00] and we stick to them, is this, the middle phase, the middle two geniuses, which is discernment and galvanizing.
Activation. So, ideation is wonder and invention. Activation is discernment and galvanizing, and implementation is enablement and tenacity. So, the wonder guy is asking a lot of questions. The invention guy is throwing a lot of ideas out there. Now, discernment needs to step in. People with the genus of discernment have a natural ability to evaluate the workability of ideas.
They’re good curators of what’s going on around them and can recognize patterns. They know how to connect the dots and give people good feedback across a broad range of topics. even if they’re not naturally an expert at it, they just have really good intuition. So it’s not discernment in like the spiritual gift of discernment.
It’s just the the ability to discern kind of the workability of an idea. So the wonder guy asks the [00:12:00] questions and invention throws a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and discernment’s like that’s the one we probably need to go with but we need to tweak it, maybe just a little bit.
Bob Bickford: Hmm. I like that. That’s good
JimBo Stewart: So this is a missing piece that we often skip over and then once we’ve decided what the right idea is, Now, we gotta actually, like, get people to buy into the idea. cause we know that people who love to invent, love all of their inventions. And, and so, but not everybody loves their inventions as much as they do.
So somebody has got to galvanize them. Somebody has got to get everybody working and thinking the right direction. So people with the genius of galvanizing love to get things moving. They’re great at pushing people out of their comfort zone, inspiring them to get started. They enjoy rallying people around the idea of getting them moving in the right direction.
And so galvanizing can be a little bit of like the inspirational, let’s get everybody excited about this [00:13:00] idea. but it can also be the, challenging, Hey, I think we’re maybe putting our energy in the wrong direction. So let’s, let’s make sure we’re putting our energy in the right direction. And so galvanizing kind of, it’s rallying everybody and getting everybody focused on what they need to be focused on.
Bob Bickford: So I got a question about this one most of the time when we think about the work of a galvanizer we think of the person who you know stands up and says We got to do this, right? So two movies come to mind Dead poet society where the guy stands up on the desk. Oh, captain, my captain. Is that a galvanizer?
And then the The the guy at animal house who like, you know rallies the the guys and i’m not by the way I’m, not recommending that anybody watch animal house.
JimBo Stewart: Are these endorsements?
Bob Bickford: No the second one, especially not but you know, they’re they’re they’re at the end their fraternity’s been kicked out and You know, John Belushi is like, let’s do it.
You know, he runs out and nobody follows him, follows [00:14:00] him. And then, uh, then another guy stands up and it’s more of a guy who’s kind of thinking about stuff and you know, then he kind of, and so he’s not the charismatic guy, but he’s the guy that that once when he speaks, he speaks in such a way that kind of encapsulates everything about the situation and goes, let’s go do it.
And then everybody’s like, yeah, let’s go do it.
JimBo Stewart: Yeah,
Bob Bickford: So I mean, you can have a, you can have a charismatic galvanizer, but I think you’re probably really, it’s really a galvanizer who can sit back and evaluate and then have substance to their, uh, galvanizing work. Probably is going to get a little further down the road.
JimBo Stewart: yeah, so the the kind of making sure we’re doing the right thing is the discernment and then Or the right ideas and then the galvanizing Yeah, it’s it is that kind of halftime speech dead poet society animal house if you will on that angel like moment that we’re We’re we’re we’re rallying the troops.
We’re getting everybody [00:15:00] headed where they look that angel is so great
Me and my boys, me and my, we still haven’t done it, but me and my boys have decided one day we’re going to watch John Wick on VidAngel. And if you’re not familiar with VidAngel, listeners, you can custom filter, whatever you want to filter out of a movie, right?
And so you can filter language and violence and nudity or sexual content or anything. And so we’ve decided one day we’re going to watch John Wick and turn on every single filter. and so we’re going to block out all the language, all the violence, all the everything. And so I looked and I think it makes it like a 37 minute movie.
Bob Bickford: that’s what I was getting ready to say. Animal, Animal House would be a five minute movie.
JimBo Stewart: But yeah, it is, it is that kind of, you know, so here’s the deal. Not surprising. A lot of. Pastors are naturally [00:16:00] galvanizers, right? Like we, you know, you get our replant. Team in a room and you’ll pick up real quick. There’s a lot of gallonizers, man. We can rally some people around an idea. we just got to make sure we bring some discernment in there and make sure we’re actually rallying around the right ideas.
Bob Bickford: Yes. Absolutely. You don’t want to lead people to a party and not have any chips. If you know what I mean?
JimBo Stewart: yeah. And so, this is the part where like. We come in and get people bought into an idea. So, you know, kind of the, if you were to go visionary on, predictable success, this would be part of that probably. so again, we’ve gone from ideation, wonder, and invention, asking the questions, giving some answers, to, activation.
So how do we start moving in the right direction? So we got to discern the right things and then we got to galvanize. And now we actually get to the implementation piece. And so there are two there and enablement [00:17:00] and tenacity. Uh, enablement, people with the genius of enablement make things happen. they know how to help, when to help, and can flex to whatever the situation calls for.
People with the genius of enablement are people oriented and want to help realize a vision. this is not the casting a vision. This is when they hear the galvanizer. These are the first ones to get up, right, and go like, yeah, let’s do this. this genius provides support needed to move, move solutions into the first stages of implementation.
So, if the wonder asks the questions, inventor has some answers to the questions, discernment makes sure we’re looking at the right things, and then galvanizers get us motivated and, and focused in the right direction. Enablements are the first one to step up and start doing it. they’re the ones that jump in, they anticipate needs and they jump in and they make things happen.
Bob Bickford: Yeah, you want, I think every pastor wants like a truckload of people, like this in his
JimBo Stewart: Yes.
Bob Bickford: [00:18:00] And what I would say is, these, some guys might be listening and go, I just need a lot of doers. I need a lot of busy bees. Right. And all that kind of stuff. Well, maybe. Right. But they’re still dependent. That kind of model is still dependent on your leadership to give direction.
Right. And it’s only going to scale as much to the level that you can actually give very clear direction. Right. And so I like how this is described here, because what you’re asking, or what this role is doing is it’s taking the vision. That’s maybe three bullet points and structuring around those bullet points to pull it off in a way that the visionary can’t so This is a very very critical Role, it’s gas in the tank.
So to speak gets to get some things going moving down the road.
JimBo Stewart: Yeah. I’ve heard the, the table group, Petra Colentioni, who kind of built all this talk about like people with the genius of enablement feel like it’s. It’s weird to call it a genius because they’re [00:19:00] like, I just do stuff. Like it’s not, I’m not coming up with anything. I’m not, I mean, like, it doesn’t feel like a genius.
and what are you saying is like, yeah, but you get joy at it, out of it. And you’re really good at it. And we wouldn’t actually get anything done if you didn’t step in and get things moving for us and start putting some of that in. then the final piece of it is tenacity and people with the genius of tenacity are task oriented.
So if enablement is kind of the people oriented, their motivation is let’s serve, let’s jump in and serve. Let’s anticipate needs and I want to serve that galvanized need and tenacities are the ones that are going to make sure it actually sees the finish line. People with the genius of tenacity are task oriented.
They love to take things across the finish line. They ensure that a project is going to have The impact is supposed to have and lives up to the agreed upon standards. People with tenacity usually have very high standards. They can be perfectionist. They don’t respond to the emotional appeal of the galvanizer.
[00:20:00] These are the ones that are usually not bought in and sold. They’re kind of the, maybe the more processor side of things out of Les McKeown’s, right? So they’re They hear the galvanizer, they hear the invention and the emotional appeal doesn’t really pull them, but the need to see the work completed pulls them in and they get, and they get great joy and energy from checking off a box on the to-do list.
Mm-Hmm.
Bob Bickford: Yeah, I think if you are, you know, an opposite of this person in terms of the scale that you’ve just described or the range of folks around the room, this can feel like a relationship that is rife with conflict, right? especially if you start. Talking about a lot of ideas and even if, if you’re, if you’re the enabler, you’re like, okay, well we need to do these things.
And that person’s like, wait, wait, slow down. Like I need to, I need more clarification. I need this. Or here’s what I’ve also seen. a person in this role, if you have tenacity, my encouragement would be, man, [00:21:00] listen and ask really good questions. And understand what the person is saying and what the task at hand is more than you just want to write a little bit of something down and check off the box,
right?
And, I’ve recently been working with someone who has this kind of strength. and the challenge is they, they’ll take a little bit of information, write something down and then they want to check the box off. Like they don’t want to, they don’t want to develop the idea, kind of massage it, make sure it’s the right idea and make sure they’ve understood every aspect of it.
They just want to get that done to, to do, to done.
JimBo Stewart: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s one of the key things is we gotta recognize, again, just like what we did with Vs. What I like about these kinds of things, especially for pastors, is it helps us recognize. In a structured way, that we are not enough in and of ourselves. we know that theologically, we know [00:22:00] that spiritually, we know that in the sense of like, we are the under shepherd, Jesus is the true shepherd, but just even practically, in the sense of, you, as an individual, will only have two working geniuses. And you’re gonna have two that are gonna be frustrations, and two that you’re gonna be alright at. nobody has all six. And nobody can, nobody can consistently and sustainably do all six of these things by themselves. It, you know, if you’re a high capacity guy, you can push through, and you can find your way pushing through, and you can start a project, and you can get all the way done, done, you know, all the way to finish.
And, you know, I think about things like a doctoral dissertation. Man, you gotta do all of these things, right? And it’s up to you. I mean, you can’t outsource any of that, but man, you can’t live there, right? I mean, you can’t, you can’t live in doing all this by yourself. So, a couple of negative things I think you have to avoid in this is one is guilt and the other is judgment.
so on the guilt side, you may, you [00:23:00] may, if you were to take this and you look and you see what you’ve got, you may go, Man, I wish I had different geniuses, or I wish I was good at those things, or I found joy in those things. but again, you know, you were never meant to do this alone. You don’t need to be turning that in on yourselves to feel guilty, but then also judgment.
Like if you If you look at people with kind of an opposite genius of yours, like you were talking about, Bob, like you can’t look at that with judgment. and be like, man, you just, you need to get your stuff together because you need to be wired like I am. And, and I think that’s something we can easily, we can easily do.
And we need to avoid both of those extremes.
Bob Bickford: man, no doubt. Like I, you just described to me in my thirties, right? It’s like, look, if you, if you look, and I would be sitting as a youth pastor at a staff meeting. I’m like, man, look, if all y’all were just like me, this church would really be rolling. Right? Like, come on.[00:24:00]
JimBo Stewart: Yeah. And so, man, as a, as a pastor, here’s what I encourage you. Like think through. Yeah, I’d encourage you to figure out what your two working geniuses are and, see what insight that gives you on what it’s like for you to lead. and how you can bring others into projects and things you’re trying to accomplish at your church better.
and so like for me, I learned my two working geniuses are discernment and galvanizing. and so my competencies were wonder and invention, and then my frustrations were enablement and tenacity. And so here’s, here’s the negative I realized of that pairing of. Discernment and galvanizing. discerners will oftentimes internally process their evaluation.
others ideas and of their own ideas. Like they’ll kind of, they don’t necessarily say it all out loud. And so they get, you know, 17 steps ahead and then, and then what are they going to do with that? Depends on what their other pairing is, but because mine’s galvanizing, like I just, [00:25:00] I will just make a lot of decisions by myself and then just galvanize others towards those decisions.
And, so this helped me recognize, I need to bring other people in on the wonder. part of that process. I don’t need to skip that because their competencies for me, I can kind of do them and then I get to discernment and I just go ahead and figure out which one I think is going to work best. And then I just galvanize people towards that idea.
But I recognize I’ve got to bring people in more into that wonder and invention side of things.
Bob Bickford: Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny. I remember that you say that. I remember you just had joined the replant team and maybe we’re maybe a couple of weeks, months in, I don’t remember, maybe, maybe more than a couple of months. And, uh, you’d taken on a project and, uh, I think it was my day off or something. And the next thing I know, I get a call from Clifton because you’d sent out an email to galvanize a bunch of people to do this one thing.
And, and Clifton, Clifton was like, uh, [00:26:00] Hey, uh, what’s going on here?
And so, but I, I remember the, like, it was done. It was like put together. It was like, there’s no adjustments necessary. And the missing piece was we probably should have communicated that just a little bit wider than we actually did.
JimBo Stewart: Yeah. Yeah. And so it’s, it’s good. You got to figure out what it is and just bring others into, the process with you and don’t beat yourself up for what you don’t have. Uh, and don’t judge others for when they’re not like you.
Bob Bickford: yeah. I like the thing, too. And we skipped over this one. But the guilt thing, because I think leaders will do this a lot. They’ll say, If I was smarter, if I would have, I’d be a better leader, right? If I was, you know, fill in the blank, whatever. And so, or they look at a project and I, I think during the, during the phase of, you know, [00:27:00] church growth and like the Global Leadership Summit, Willow Creek and Andy Stanley Drive Conference and all these big conferences that were coming out right there, there were always two or three personality types that were consistent with the lead pastor who was on the stage, right?
And they would just be elevating their role in front of the whole audience. The business expert would be talking about how catalytic the visionary was, et cetera, et cetera. And so population general, population wide, the visionaries are, are smaller subset of the larger population. Otherwise we wouldn’t get anything done
right?
And so it’s just like that’s the way the Lord has orchestrated things. And so what I would also want to say is, ma, don’t despise your unique gifting and wiring. Just realize. You’ve got a different part to play and you can play it well [00:28:00] and sleep at night. And the other thing too is it’s going to be easy for you to function in that and have success.
And so feel good about how you’re wired, what you bring to the party, how you help an organization or your church or group move forward and accomplishing of a task. And don’t feel bad that you don’t occupy another seat on the bus.
JimBo Stewart: Hmm.
Bob Bickford: And there’s some seats on the bus that get a lot of fanfare. And, and they get a lot of, you know, recognition and, and sometimes they may come across at a conference is like everybody, if you really want to be successful, you should have this unique wiring in this gifting.
And what I would say is no, not so fast. You just be, you are who you are. And I think this is the gift of me being in my fifties Jimbo is I know who I am and I know what I can do. And I just do that. And I try to, I try to do that well.
JimBo Stewart: That’s a good word. You know, I’ll close with this. There was, when we were discussing this as a replant team, somebody asked, [00:29:00] so what is the ideal pairing for the leader of an organization or a team? Right? And, the answer was there’s not one. the, the ideal leader is self aware of their strengths and their weaknesses, they’re comfortable in their own skin, and they’re good at bringing others in around them to make sure that you’re a well rounded team.
And it doesn’t matter. You know, and I look around our room that we were in and when we had great pastors in that room, great leaders in that room with, with almost every pairing you could have, and they’re all equally good at what they do. And so there’s not a perfect pairing. There’s not a perfect profile.
This is not meant to serve as that kind of tool, which is a piece of self awareness so that you can be a self aware leader.
Bob Bickford: Mm hmm.