On this episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast, I had the honor of interviewing someone whose work has shaped how I lead my team and build my business—Patrick Lencioni. Patrick is the author of "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" and a pioneer in leadership and organizational health. For nearly two decades, I've been following his insights on creating functional, high-performing teams. So, when he released his new assessment tool called "The Six Types of Working Genius," I knew I had to dive in and see how it could help our community.

In this conversation, we delve deep into the Working Genius framework and how it revolutionizes the way you build and manage teams. Patrick explains how understanding your team's individual strengths and weaknesses can optimize productivity, increase job satisfaction, and ultimately drive your business forward. He shares how this new assessment is different from other personality tools—like Myers-Briggs and DISC—by focusing on productivity rather than just personality, making it ideal for entrepreneurs and leaders who want to get the most out of their teams.

Key Highlights:

Whether you’re just starting to build your team or looking to refine how your current team works together, this episode provides actionable strategies for creating a happier, more productive work environment. Tune in and find out how to put the right people in the right seats on your company’s bus!

I say the health of an organization, the functionality, the way people work together is the multiplier of their intelligence. You can have the best marketing plan in the world, but how much are you going to actually tap into that if people are dysfunctional?
When you make them functional, then the beauty of your intellect and the beauty of your plan and the beauty of your marketing program, you actually get all of that.
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Russell Brunson:
What's up everybody? This is Russell. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I got a really cool interview today for you guys. As you guys know, I own a company called Understand.me. If you go to Understand.me, you can go register there and you can take a whole bunch of personality profiles for free and it creates a page.

It tells you all about yourself. You can give to somebody when you're applying for a job or you're going to go on a date with somebody, or if you're hiring people. I have all my pre-employees, everyone go to Understand.me, create an account, and then from there it pops out a profile page.

It shows me all of their profile tests from DISCs, 16 personalities, Enneagram, StrengthsFinder, all that kind of stuff. It's really, really cool. But anyway, as you know, I'm mildly obsessed with personality tests and profiling, things like that. During today's podcast interview, I had a chance to meet up with the guy who, it's crazy, I read his books way back when I first got started in my business.

His name is Patrick Lencioni. We'll mention his books a little bit on the podcast interview. For the most part, we're talking about a new assessment he put together called The Six Types of Working Genius, which I'd never heard about prior to this interview and it was really, really cool.

I took it for myself, a bunch of people on my team, and it was really cool to help you and your teams make sure people are working in their zones of genius, and getting people out of the zones that are not their genius so they can actually be successful. Anyway, it was a really fascinating interview. Really, really cool thing. Something I want to eventually add into the Understand.me platform.

But for right now, I want you guys to listen to this interview, and then I would recommend go and taking the assessment for yourself and your teams and just start learning more about everyone's zone of genius and where they should be focusing on. Anyway, hope you enjoy this podcast interview with Patrick Lencioni.

Hey, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today I've got a really fun interview to share with you guys from someone who I first read about them, I think, 17, 18 years ago as I was building my company. I'll talk about what the books are and stuff like that.

Some really good books about leadership, how to build teams, and how to make your teams actually function, how to grow a company through teams. Anyway, I've been following him for a long, long time and I want to do this interview, because he came out with a brand new assessment.
You guys all know I'm mildly obsessed with personality profiles and assessments. This is a new assessment. It's called Working Genius, and it's the six types of working genius. It's figuring out exactly where you should be working, where you fit. We just finished the interview and it was really cool, because we talked about how if you've read the book Good to Great, it talks about finding the right people or getting the right people on the bus, and then from there, putting in the right seats.

This is all about figuring out a map to make sure the people working with you are in the right seats on the bus to make them successful, to help you grow your companies. It was just a fascinating interview. We went deep into this new assessment, what it means, how you can use it for yourself, but more importantly, how you can use it for your teams to get people working happier, having more joy.

The end result of that is you start growing your company a lot faster, which is really fun. If you want to learn how to increase your company's sales and traffic and conversions, all this stuff without actually working on the funnels, but specifically building out your team and getting your team working in the right roles, this interview is something that's going to be really fascinating for you.
With that said, we're going to jump into the interview right now I just finished with Patrick Lencioni. Hey, this is Russell, and I'm here today with my new friend, Patrick Lencioni, and someone who I've been watching for a long time. In fact, I remember when I first got into business, man, almost 20 years ago, and I went from me being the sole entrepreneur to trying to hire a team.

One of the very first books that someone recommended to me was this book called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I remember way back then reading it as I was first trying to build my team, and now I fast forward 18, 20 years later, whatever it is. We have a company now of 400 employees and all sorts of stuff.

I've learned a lot from him indirectly, and this is our first time actually hanging out and talking together. One thing we'll be talking about is a new assessment that he's put together, and I'm mildly obsessed with assessments, as my audience obviously knows.

I have a company where we just aggregate assessments. I took this last night and I don't understand it yet. I'm pumped to find out more about it and talk about team building, a whole bunch of other things. Anyway, I'm excited for today. Patrick, how are you doing?

Patrick Lencioni:
Hey, I'm doing great. It's wonderful to be with you, Russell, and I love that you just took it. We're going to debrief it for your audience and you and explain it in the process, because I'm also a junkie for assessments and I've been using them in my practice for years. Then four years ago we discovered this new model. We came up with this new model and it's unique, and so that's why we're very excited. It was by accident. We didn't think we were going to do that. I'm so excited to go over this with you.

Russell Brunson:
I'm excited, too, because I was reading through, you said it's 20% personality, 80% productivity, which is unique from other assessments. I'm excited. You probably don't know, but I have a company called Understand.me, and it's a site where someone signs up for a free account and then they can take not all of them yet. This is not in there, but I want to add this one now, too.

But they take DISC and Enneagram and 16 personalities and they take them all, and it creates a profile page where you can go see. If someone goes to Understand.me/RussellBrunson, you can see my DISC, my Enneagram, my strengths. All my stuff is in there. I'd love to talk to you maybe offline about adding this.

Patrick Lencioni:
I love that. I didn't realize that, although I think I saw that years ago. I didn't know that was yours. That's fantastic.

Russell Brunson:
It's been fun, because I started, and it's probably similar to you, I started hiring a team. I used to hire off of resumes, and then people paid people to write really good resumes, and they came in, they were horrible. I had a coach who was like, "Instead of interviewing people based on resumes, have them take these tests."

We started giving them DISC tests and stuff. What happens now is I know the profile of my dream customer or my dream candidate. We'll have them take these DISC profiles and all the other ones, and then we only look at resumes, only interview people who've gotten through that filter, because otherwise we're going through all this stuff that is not real.

People are relying on their resumes, and it, I guess, changed our whole culture. It's got us to the right people faster. I'm obsessed with these. I'm excited to find out more about this one specifically, because it's about working and that kind of stuff.

Before we get into assessment, I'd love to step back in time actually, because again, my first introduction to you was through the book, the Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Anyone from my world who may not be familiar with you, I love just some backstory of you, but also specifically your work with teams and leadership and things like that. I'd love to hear more about.

Patrick Lencioni:
Yeah. The real quick, I got out of college and I got a job at a company called Bain & Company as a management consultant, and it was all about analysis and data and strategy and finance and all that. I remember when I was there thinking, "But the problem is our clients aren't using this, because they don't know how to work together."

The human side of business was getting in the way of the analytics, and I thought, "Everybody is trying to be smarter, but what they're not is they're not functional, they're not healthy, they're dysfunctional." I had a couple more jobs and I was into this field and then I started my own company and I said, "I want to help CEOs."

It was mostly growth companies, figure out the human side of business so they can take advantage of all the intellectual side. That's when we started The Table Group almost 28 years ago and we had no idea how fast it was going to take off. I wrote my first book and then a couple of years later we wrote the Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

What we realized is that every CEO I worked with said, "We're pretty smart. We know how to do things, but we don't know how to work together." Because I was not a touchy feely guy, I came from kind of the analytical side of things, I could speak to them about that in a credible way, because they didn't want somebody to come in and hug and hold hands and get naked and all that.
They wanted somebody who understood human dynamics in the context of getting things done. That's how I got into this field, mostly by accident. The books I wrote were based on me just going out to clients and seeing things and writing a book about it, and it just kept growing and growing by the grace of God.

28 years later, we got all these books and this stuff and we had no idea that we were going to be in the assessment business until four years ago by accident in the middle of COVID. We came up with, out of desperation myself, this idea to explain me. Then we realized, "Oh, my gosh. This is universal." That's kind of how we get to today.

Russell Brunson:
Interesting. With assessments, I'm curious, before you guys put this together, what were the assessments you were using with your teams and with employees and stuff like that?

Patrick Lencioni:
Myers Briggs or the 16 personality types was the one we used most, although we were very familiar with all of them. We know DISC and we know StrengthsFinder, and all the other different things. We have some of our favorites. There's good things about all of them, but none of them were really about how you specifically go about getting things done on a daily basis.

How do you get work done? I'm an ENFP and a high I secondary D on DISC, and you know all these things. But what I didn't realize is I was coming to work frustrated after 20 years of working in a company with people I like doing the things I like, but I was doing the wrong kind of work.

I didn't know why and I was getting grumpy, and somebody said to me, "Why do you get grumpy and then happy and then grumpy and then happy?" I was like, "I don't know, but I want to figure it out." I sat down with a whiteboard pen and a whiteboard and I said, "What is going on and when am I grumpy and why?"

We realized that there were these six different activities that were required in every single kind of work, and I was doing every day. I was coming to work and getting asked to do things I didn't like to do, and it was burning me out. We figured that out, and then somebody saw the model that night that we came up with and they shared it with one of their CEO clients the next day.

The guy had tears in his eyes and he was like, "Well, this explains everything for me." We said, "Wow. Maybe there's something universal. This isn't just me." We put together an assessment over the next three months, just released it, and just last week more than a million people have now taken this, and it is growing faster than even The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. This is growing faster than anything I've ever done, Russell.

Russell Brunson:
Wow. That's really cool. A million people have taken it. That's insane.

Patrick Lencioni:
Yeah. We're just a small company. We didn't do a lot of marketing. We're starting to now, because people are like, "This is changing our companies and changing our lives." We thought we were doing a tool that was just helping people understand themselves, but what we realized is when a whole team understands it, it changes everything about the way they get things done and their productivity goes up, their morale goes up.

People are borrowing and begging from one another and doing things that they're meant to do, and they're getting out of doing the things that they shouldn't be doing. It is a crazy productivity tool, which was an accident. We thought it was just we were trying to help people understand themselves.

Russell Brunson:
So fascinating. I'm excited. Like I said, I took it last night and I started going through. I got the assessment right here. I was going through it all, but I would love first off, so I can understand, but I think for other people, too, when they start taking this to be able to have some kind of framework as they're going through a lens to understand this. What's the best way to dive into this and look at it together?

Patrick Lencioni:
Well, let me really quickly run through the six different kinds of work.

Russell Brunson:
Awesome.

Patrick Lencioni:
Because once you know what those six are, then it's a lot easier to go, "Oh." People are naturally like, "I want to know what my geniuses are." Here's the deal. There's six different kinds of work that need to be done in any kind of a project, whether you're launching a company or rolling out a new product or just managing something or building a house or planning a family vacation.

Any endeavor involves six different activities, but only two of those activities are what we call your working genius. Russell, two of those six things you can do and you get joy and energy out of it, and you could do it for 12 hours and be excited and not tired, not burned out.

Two of them are what we call your working competency, which you're okay at it and it doesn't crush you and you can do it for a while. Two of them, the last two are your working frustration, whereas when you do those, it absolutely drains you of joy and energy.

I like to say your working genius is like a Yeti mug. You pour coffee into it and screw the lid on, it'll stay hot all day. Your working competency is like a Starbucks cup you pour the coffee into, put a lid on, it'll hold the heat for a while. Your working frustration is like pouring it into a coffee cup that has a hole in the bottom of it. It just drains out right away.

Here's the deal. If you don't know what your working geniuses are and what your working competencies and frustrations are, it's tough to love your work. It's tough to put somebody in the right job. We've had people that were good fits for a company's culture, but were failing because they were put in the wrong role. When you realize what your working geniuses are, everything changes. That's kind of the idea is that nobody is good at all six of these things.

Russell Brunson:
And I assume if you’re building a team or a project, it's probably the same. We need to have all six of these people for this project to lift off, otherwise something is going to be falling around, right?

Patrick Lencioni:
Exactly. So many teams take it and they go, "No wonder we failed at that. No wonder we're good at this." Here's the six things really fast, and I'll do it in the order that they generally occur in theory, and it goes from 50,000 feet up in the clouds to five feet on the ground landing the plane.

The first one is the genius of wonder. People that have the genius of wonder, and this is not one of yours, they just like to sit around. Not just sit around, but they ponder things and ask questions. They're curious and they're constantly saying, "Is there a better way? I wonder if people are happy with that. Is this the best way?"

My wife has this genius. Nobody who has this genius gets rewarded for it when they're young. Their teachers are like, "Hey, why are you daydreaming and why are you still asking questions? Just do what we tell you to do." But every new project, any activity starts with somebody saying, like that woman said to me, Amy.

She said, "Why are you like this, Pat? Why do you get so bummed out?" I was like, "I don't know." But you have to ask the question. The genius of wonder is a real genius, and when a team doesn't have it, oftentimes they miss things. Then nobody is asking the question, "Do you think our customers are happy? Or is this really the best way we can do it?"

The genius of wonder is where it starts. The next genius is the genius of invention. You have this and so do I, Russell. That's people who get joy and energy, and by the way, this is all about joy and energy. They get joy and energy out of coming up with new ideas. They just do it naturally. They were born this way. People say, "Hey, I wish there was a better way to do this," and you go, "Okay. Let me try."

Russell Brunson:
Twenty two ways I can do that.

Patrick Lencioni:
Exactly. It's just for us, that's a God-given source of joy and energy. Now, what's amazing about this is we tend to think that other people probably like things the way we do, but there's that old saying, one man's trash is another man's treasure. There are people when I say, "Oh, I would love to come up with a new idea." They're like, "Don't make me do that, because I would hate my job." I'm thinking, "You're kidding. But that sounds so fun." They're like, "Not to me."

Russell Brunson:
That's hard.

Patrick Lencioni:
Invention. Somebody wonders about something and asks the question, then the inventor comes along and goes, "Oh, let me solve that. Let me try. Let me try."

Russell Brunson:
Interesting. Wonders, they don't ever solve. They just create the questions.

Patrick Lencioni:
Unless their second letter, unless their genius is W and I.

Russell Brunson:
Gotcha, gotcha. Okay. Interesting.

Patrick Lencioni:
There are people with just W and they wonder. One of my sons who works for me, he has W. He has another one. He'll say something. I'll go, "Well, what do you think?" He goes, "I don't know. This is one of my least favorite things, but I know that that won't work, but don't ask me to come up with a better idea."

Russell Brunson:
I think about my teams, as someone who does invention, I probably get frustrated with someone wonders about this. "Solve this. Why are you not solving this?" They're like, "That's not my job. My job is to be aware of it." That's interesting. I can see how that can cause dysfunctions between the two if you don't understand that. You know what I mean?

Patrick Lencioni:
Exactly. When you understand what it is, you're like, "Oh, I'm not going to blame you for that." See, that's the thing about working genius. It helps us avoid judging people unfairly or feeling guilty about ourselves unfairly, which people do all the time. W and I are the first two. By the way, those two, that's where ideation comes from. The first two.

Russell Brunson:
In a room you would get those two people together and, "Okay. Go figure out how to solve or create the next thing."

Patrick Lencioni:
They brainstorm naturally. But the next one is really important, and the next genius is called discernment. This is fascinating. People with discernment have great gut feel instincts. They have pattern recognition. They see things that other people don't see, and it's not magic. It's just the way they look at things.

They're good at seeing patterns. They're integrative thinkers. These are the kind of people you talk to and you ask them a question and they always have a good response. A woman in my office, I like to talk about her, Tracy. She has great discernment and she edits my books.

She wasn't a book editor. She didn't study this, but she'll read a chapter of my books. My books are all fiction. She'll go, "That doesn't work." I know she's right and I'll say, "Why?" She goes, "I don't know. That character doesn't ring true to me." She just sees it.

Hey, my wife and I'll be saying, "Should we refinance our house?" We'll always say, "Ask Tracy." It's not because she knows a lot about finance. She just has really good judgment like, "I don't know. It doesn't seem like this is the right time." "Hey, where should we go on vacation?"

Tracy always has a great idea. She has great instincts, and our company relies on that. We go to Tracy and go, "Well, if we haven't run it by Tracy yet, we probably shouldn't feel confident that it's the right thing, because she just has incredible gut feel." It's a real genius. It's not magic. It's a genius.

W, I, D. Now we're getting a little closer to the ground. Next comes galvanizing, which is your other genius, by the way, Russell. Galvanizers are people who love to wake up in the morning and rally the troops and get people excited and remind people.

They're motivators and they're good at selling in the truest sense of the world, convincing people and moving things forward. They get joy and energy out of doing that. I don't and I was doing it every day at work for 20 years. I'd come to the office ready to I and D, and people would go, "Galvanize us."

I'd get grumpy and I'd be like, "Oh, do I have to say it again?" Because I felt guilty for doing it. There was a guy on my team who loves galvanizing. It's one of his geniuses. I said, "You're the new chief galvanizing an officer." He goes, "Am I old enough to do that?"

He goes, "It's not about your age." "I haven't been here that long." I said, "You're a genius at it. You love doing it. You're going to rally the troops every morning around our goals." He's like, "I would love that." His genius, which is his joy and energy, we might as well let people work in their areas of genius and we might as well minimize the time we have to work outside of it, even though we all have to do things outside of our genius.

It goes W, I, D, G. Now we're getting closer to landing the plane and we get to enablement. When you galvanize people, Russell, somebody has to say yes. You want a response for somebody to say, "Yes, I will do that. I will volunteer." People with enablement, which is a good word. It's not enabling a disorder or something like that.

Enablement are people that come alongside and they actually get joy and energy out of saying yes and helping people on their terms. There are people in the world who have God-given genius to say yes. They volunteer quickly and they love to help and they don't want to be the center of it.
These are glue on teams. These are the kind of people that are like, "Absolutely. If you think it's a good idea, I'm going to help you with this. What can I do?" Now, I'm a follower of Jesus and a kind person, I think, but I don't have a genius of this. When people ask me for help, I want to help them in the way I like to help them. I'm not good at just going, "Yeah. What do you need from me? I'll do whatever you need."

That's a genius, and teams that don't have people with the genius of enablement really struggle to get things going, because nobody wants to dive in and help. The last genius is called the genius of tenacity, and these are people that it's not about helping. It's about finishing.

They want to get it done. They like to see it pushed across the finish line, plow through obstacles, hit the numbers. They actually don't rest until something is finished. Now, Russell, I have no tenacity at all. If I didn't have people on my staff around me that had more tenacity than me, I would've written zero books instead of 13, because halfway through writing the book, I want to move onto the next one.

Russell Brunson:
The next idea.

Patrick Lencioni:
People are like, "No. We're going to finish this." They make me stay with it, because my natural inclination is to move onto the next thing quickly.

Russell Brunson:
Interesting.

Patrick Lencioni:
Those are the six things, and you can just imagine if you're missing one. How many people did you have take this? Four. Four of your people, right?

Russell Brunson:
Yeah.

Patrick Lencioni:
Well, I'm looking at your team results right now, and there's a couple here of those four, and I know you have 400 employees, so these aren't the only ones. But of those four, if you're a team, there's a few areas where you have nobody with that genius. In fact, there's only one area where you only have no genius. You look at that and you go, "Oh, yeah. I can totally see."

I was with a team last night, a priest and his executive counsel at a church. We did this and I spent an hour with them going through their results and their minds were blown, because they're like, "Oh, no wonder you frustrate me. I always thought you were tweaking me, but you just hate doing that." The priest was like, "I hate doing that." They're like, "Well, we can help you with that." It's nuts.

Russell Brunson:
That's so cool. I'm excited now that I understand it better. Again, we had some of our team, but it'd be cool. We have our departments, like the marketing team. People are working together. It'd be fascinating to see where it all falls amongst each of the individual teams and then as a company as a whole as well.

Patrick Lencioni:
Now, by the way, your type, by the way, you're an IG. Each type, each of the 15 combos, because there's 15, have a label. It really helped people understand. You're the evangelistic innovator, so you come up with new ideas and love to get people excited about them.

Russell Brunson:
I sell them. Yes. That sounds like me.

Patrick Lencioni:
Anybody that knows you will go, "That's him." It totally makes sense. I look at the picture of you on here, the Marketing Secrets picture, and it's like that's you. You're excited to share things with people and go, "You can do this."

Russell Brunson:
My whole life is we launch ClickFunnels, and then the marketing guy. We write a book. That's my favorite thing. I love coming up with the ideas, creating the thing, and then going out there and selling it and letting the world know why it's important.

Patrick Lencioni:
Exactly. Now, here I have a great marketing story for you. When this first came out, A CEO took this and he had a woman who was in charge of sales who she was an E and a T, which is the last two. That's the implementation part, the enablement and tenacity. Those are the ones closest to the ground.

That meant she pleased her employees, she pleased her customers, she made her numbers. She was really good at responding to the needs of people and getting things done. Beautiful. The market changed and they needed a new sales strategy, because the old one wasn't going to work anymore.

The CEO went to her, and this was a cultural fit. This woman was a great performer, one of his executive team members, and said, "Okay. You need to come up with a new sales strategy." She tried and she tried and she tried and she couldn't, and she didn't know why.

The CEO said, "I was going to let her go." I thought, "Well, if she's the head of sales and she can't come up with a new sales strategy." They did the working genius and she was an ET. She had no wonder and no invention. She hated going, "What would be a better way," and coming up with an idea.

They found a marketing guy that had invention and they said, "Will you come to our next sales meeting?" He goes, "Yeah." In three hours he came up with an entirely new sales strategy, because it was his genius. They said, "Hey, will you come to our meetings once a quarter and just make sure that we have invention?"

He goes, "Yeah. I would love to." He goes, "I almost lost one of my best employees, because I thought she had to be good at everything. Not until I realized she just didn't have that genius did I realize, hey, that's fine. I'll find somebody else to do that."

Russell Brunson:
Interesting. Do you find companies, if they don't have someone, is it better to hire, even to hire a consultant who you know that person is a WD? You know what I mean?

Patrick Lencioni:
Yes.

Russell Brunson:
To get the right energy into relaunch or re-change a strategy.

Patrick Lencioni:
Yeah. Let's say you have a team and you're missing something. The question is what do we do? You can hire a new person to do it. That's not the first thing you should do. Sometimes the team just needs to get together and go, "Hey, we're missing this. There's another person that we can pull into our meetings when we're having those kind of meetings who can fill in the gap for us."

Or we can find a consultant, but let's at least know what kind we're going to hire. Here's a great question, Russell. A company says, "We need a new head of marketing." We always say this all the time. What they do is they go out and get a resume and they find somebody who's been the head of marketing another company.

I always say, "Wait, wait, wait. What kind of head of marketing do you want? Do you want somebody who's going to be into branding and coming up with new ideas? That's a very different profile than somebody who did lead generation and totally cranks on translating that into sales."
There's an ET head of marketing and a WI head of marketing or a DG head of marketing. They're totally different profiles. Just because we call it marketing, or you're hiring an executive assistant, it's like, well, do you want one who's going to look around corners and solve problems when you're not there?

Or are you going to look for one that just does exactly what you need them to do? Or do you want them asking the questions? This is changing the way people hire. Job descriptions become less relevant, but what you need to fill in your gaps, because your head of marketing at ClickFunnels will be different than mine at The Table Group.

Based on your profile, your executive assistant would look different than mine based on how we're wired. People are realizing. We're developing an AI tool. You can put in a job description and it'll tell you what working genius is probably the right fit for that, rather than just going to the resume and saying, "Well, they spent five years doing that at another company. They're probably going to be good here." That's a crapshoot.

Russell Brunson:
Yeah. So fascinating. It almost makes you wonder what's more important, the working genius or the skillset. If someone can come in and they've got the genius, they can figure out the skillset. I don't know. What's your thoughts on that?

Patrick Lencioni:
Okay. I think the first thing is cultural fit. They got to fit the culture of the company, number one. Second one is the working genius. Third one is the skillset. Now, they're all great to have, but we usually start the opposite direction and that's why it doesn't work.

Here's a great story. I was working with a multi-billion dollar software company. I say that only because they were big, they'd been around for years, but they were way behind the curve on innovation. You've probably heard of this company before. They were terrible at innovation. The Gartner model, they were never in the magic quadrant of new products.

We take them through this, the executive team. Nobody on the team has W. Nobody of the entire executive team. There were nine people there. Nobody had wonder, so nobody was going, "Maybe this isn't the right thing to do anymore." Only one person on the team had invention and he was the lawyer, their chief legal counsel.

Not the head of marketing, not the head of strategy, not the head of technology, not the CEO. They were like, "Crap." They looked at their results and they said, "No wonder we haven't come up with a new product in 10 years." They were selling legacy products.

They were like, "None of us think ideating." You know what they did? They said to the lawyer, and it took an hour. In an hour they were like, "Why don't you take over new product acquisition?" He's like, "Well, I'm a lawyer." They go, "Yeah. But you're good at this."

He goes, "Oh, I loved it. I think I am good at it." They're like, "Yeah. Your job is going to be, in addition to being the chief legal counsel, you're the new head of technology acquisition." A year later I looked at their website and the guy was no longer their lawyer, and I thought they fired him.
He was no longer in legal at all. He was in technology, because he was naturally inclined to think about new ideas. He loved the business. They took a guy who went to three years of law school and spent years as a lawyer and put him in charge of technology, because he was naturally inclined to do that, and he was so happy.

Russell Brunson:
I would love to interview that guy just specifically about... Going through law school, I would imagine would not be in his zone of genius probably, unless one of the other ones hit that. You what I mean? Law school is not necessarily that kind of thing. I wonder if he struggled that freedom from just from all the pressure, all the stress. You know what I mean?

Patrick Lencioni:
The answer is undoubtedly. Now, I don't know what his other letter was. We had a guy that took this. He was a doctor and his report said he didn't have any tenacity. Tenacity. He goes, "This must be wrong." We said, "Why?" He goes, "Well, I went through med school and I must have tenacity."
We're like, "Did you like it?" He goes, "No, I hated it. I would never do it again. It was a grind. Oh, it was crushing." People will force themselves to do things that they don't like either because of a goal, or worse yet because they have a wound or they have to prove themselves.

There are people that spend their life in careers that they hate. I talked to a guy recently, a CEO who spent 14 years in accounting, and he doesn't have any of the working genius or Myers Briggs for that. I said, "What was that about?" He goes, "Six months into the job they said, 'You're never going to make it here.'" He goes, "I was going to prove them wrong." 13 and a half years of misery later, he finally got out. That's tragic.

Russell Brunson:
Oh, yeah. That’s a long time.

Patrick Lencioni:
There's more people. When people take the Working Genius, they finally give themselves permission to say, "No. I'm allowed to pursue my genius rather than what my grandfather did or what I thought I had to do or something else."

Russell Brunson:
So interesting. Now, are there people that are weird? I know in DISC I'm weird, because I'm three of the things. Are people ever more than two or is it pretty consistent there's only two that they should be focusing on?

Patrick Lencioni:
It's a great question. After four years of this, we've found that it really is two. Now, certain people though have a really strong third, but what we find is they're good at it, but they don't love it. It really seems to us that there's two that people love.

Hey, some people, Russell, either because they have strong energy or a desire to achieve or childhood wounds that make them fear failure, whatever it is. Some people can get quite good at five of them, but usually when you get down to where does your joy and energy come from, they're like, "Oh, yeah. If I never did those again, I'd be okay."

Some people are pretty damn good at more than two, but it doesn't mean they want to be. I love this story. There's these professional athletes who retire when they're 28, and you're like, "Why?" Barry Sanders was a football player and he was the best running back ever, and he retired and they just didn't like it.

They were good at something that they didn't like, and so they got rewarded for it, as opposed to somebody else like Aaron Rodgers, who that guy is having so much fun. He's 40 and he just loves going to practice. Just because you're good at something doesn't mean you love it, but sometimes you get people who are actually quite talented in things that aren't a genius, so they can keep going. But it's really good to know what your geniuses are.

Russell Brunson:
Yeah. Interesting. Okay. I'm looking through the report. I got the things. Mine you said are innovation and galvanizing, so that's my working genius. The working competencies, I'm guessing that's number two and three. Or sorry, number three and four. These ones I'm competent at, but I'm not genius at. For me, it's discernment and wonder are my competency.

Patrick Lencioni:
You're working frustrations, which are the second most important after your genius. Having an ET job for you, that's enablement and tenacity. Those are the last two. That's implementation. This was my first job out of college, and because I forced myself to get good at it.

I took a job out of college, which was supposed to be at Bain & Company, the number one job in America. It was the highest paying job and supposed to be the best job out of college. It was my working frustrations. It was this. "We're going to tell you what to do. Just don't ask questions. Just do it and do it perfectly and finish."

Russell Brunson:
Interesting.

Patrick Lencioni:
I was like, "Why am I hating working here? This is supposed to be the best job in America." Well, it is if you're an ET, but for me, it was the worst job in America. If I told you you had a job, Russell, where you didn't ask questions, just when somebody asked you to do something, just say yes and then make sure you finish it, do it perfectly, and never miss a deadline.

Russell Brunson:
Yeah. I'd struggle with that a lot.

Patrick Lencioni:
Does that sound like a fun job to you? There are people that that job description would go, "Oh, that would be my dream job."

Russell Brunson:
For sure. I look at my team. The majority of my team probably fits that. I'm this insane starter who's throwing stuff in the air all day long, and then they're catching it, systemizing it, finishing it, getting it out the door. They're like, "Russell, stop creating all this chaos." I'm like, "This is what gives you a job, because all the chaos is out there."

Patrick Lencioni:
Well, what's funny. Matthew and Kristen on your team, or is it Kirsten? Matthew and Kirsten, they have enablement. When you go to them and you go, "Hey, I need this done," they're like, "Absolutely. We'll help you." As it turns out, tenacity is not their…

Russell Brunson:
Tenacity is finishing, right? It's the person who gets stuff done, right?

Patrick Lencioni:
Right. Those are not working frustrations for them, so they're pretty good at it, but you have other people in the organization I'm sure they rely on who are really good at taking the last step. That totally makes sense. When you galvanize them, they're like, "Yep. We're on board. We'll figure out a way to get this done."

Russell Brunson:
Interesting. Very cool.

Patrick Lencioni:
That's a wonderful thing. Kirsten is also a galvanizer, so you have two people that don't mind rallying the troops. What's interesting is Matthew and Michael on your team really don't want to push people to do things that they don't like. Galvanizing is in their working frustration. If you said, "Hey, you guys. Get out there. Convince people to do something that they don't really want to do, because it's the right thing." They're going to be like, "Please don't make me do that."

Russell Brunson:
Yeah. Sales is not going to be good for them. Closing deals. Interesting. That makes a lot of sense, actually.

Patrick Lencioni:
Looking at your team and going, the low-hanging fruit here, Russell, is crazy. Teams that were frustrated at each other will take this and they'll start laughing about the fact that, "I thought you were flaky. You're not flaky. You're just a WI. Or I thought you were anal. Oh, no. You're just an ET.

You actually get joy and energy from that." What used to be a judgment is now an understanding, and now they're solving the problem together and it turns tension into humor and insight. This works. It's crazy. It works just every time.

Russell Brunson:
So fascinating. Now, you said, when I was reading about this last night as well, you talked about the fact it's 20% personality, 80% productivity. What do you mean? I'm trying to figure out, is it one of the things is focused on personality more on productivity or just kind of that's… on a whole, that’s how it aligns like that?

Patrick Lencioni:
Yeah. That confuses me, too. My staff talks about it. They mean. The benefits of this are 20%. It's great to understand yourself, but the biggest benefit that happens is in an organization where people on a team understand one another and they get more done in less time, because people are shifting.

Like, "Hey, well, if you don't like doing that, I love doing that. Why don't I take that from you and you take this from me? Why don't we restructure how we're running marketing or sales, because really we're organized wrong based on our geniuses." The benefit of this. There's a lot of personal insights, but the collective insights of a team, we think, are what really makes this powerful.

Russell Brunson:
Makes total sense. Yeah.

Patrick Lencioni:
When my team said that, I was initially confused. I said, "No. Okay. I get it. That makes sense."

Russell Brunson:
That makes sense. Yeah. No. For sure. It's good for you, but even better using it with a team and helping everyone figure it out.

Patrick Lencioni:
Now, since you're the Understand.me, I love that. Here's what I want to say. The Myers Briggs, which is my other favorite one, although I like them all.

Russell Brunson:
They all have their pros, yeah…

Patrick Lencioni:
That's the noun. That's kind of our personality preference. What's your Myers Briggs type, Russell?

Russell Brunson:
Top of my head, I'm an INFP.

Patrick Lencioni:
Okay. My wife is an INFP, so I know what that is.

Russell Brunson:
She's awesome, man. I love her. I understand her perfectly.

Patrick Lencioni:
She is. Thoughtful, deep, all these things. That's the noun. You are an INFP. IG is what you do.

Russell Brunson:
That's cool.

Patrick Lencioni:
That's the verb. We think both are important. I love that in Understand.me, you have all of them. Understand a person in every way, but we had not seen one that we're so close to the ground. But what do you like to do? When you come in the morning, if I give you a task and I say, "I have a task for you."

Which tasks are going to light you up and make you go, "This is the best?" Which tasks are going to make you go, "Oh, I want to go back home?" That's the verb. I think that the working genius is the verb, but the other ones have a place, like Myers Briggs and the others. Knowing that you're an INFP and an IG is interesting. My wife is an INFP, but she's a WI. G she hates. Rallying the kids. Rallying people to do things that they don't feel like doing is something she would never want to do.

Russell Brunson:
Yeah. So fascinating. So, I’m understanding about myself now, now that I'm super excited to go and actually influence my whole team. When you're working with a team, I'm assuming you have everyone go and take it. You explain things to them. But how do you start the practical implementation of this afterwards? That's the part I'm like, "How do you actually do that?" We start dividing tasks based on which of the letter. I'm curious how you guys actually implement this in a big organization.

Patrick Lencioni:
I just did it last night with a team. First of all, start it team by team. But we have companies that are going to be taking 10,000 people through this so that everybody knows their working genius. When they sit down to a meeting, they're like, "Okay. We need to get this done. Who'd be good at this?" They're like, "Oh, no, no, no. You would probably hate this." They're like, "Yeah. Thank you for recognizing it." I have the team map here in front of me.

Russell Brunson:
Oh, very cool.

Patrick Lencioni:
You just took this. I have the team map with all six geniuses, and it shows which of them are geniuses, which of them are frustrations, and the ones in between fall out. You just look at that, and naturally everybody starts to go, "Well, crap. Michael, you're an inventor like me. Oh, okay. We need to realize."

Right away, you'll start to apply this. Like I said, it's low hanging fruit and it's pretty dynamic. People are recognizing opportunities to change the way they're going about things. It doesn't have to be a formal org chart change or a title change. It's usually just like, "Well, when we work on these projects, why don't we make sure that the three of you are always there for that part?"

Here's the most important thing though, Russell. We need to start thinking about every discussion we have and every meeting we have in terms of what letters are at play. We sit down for a meeting and somebody goes, "Okay. We're going to have a meeting." People say, "What kind of meeting is this?? You go, "This is largely a WID meeting, because we're going to be brainstorming and evaluating which ideas are good."

That doesn't mean some people go, "Okay. I don't have those. I'm not going to go." You're a team. You got to all be there. But at least you know like, "Oh, okay. This is not my sweet spot. I got to be here to watch the sausage getting made, but you're not asking me to evaluate this for its reality or plan how we're going to accomplish it." You have another meeting where it's like, "No. We're doing the launch next week. This is a final prep to get this done." The WI guy comes and goes, "I want to brainstorm." We're like, "No, no, no."

Russell Brunson:
"I have some ideas." No more ideas.

Patrick Lencioni:
Right. Now you're allowed to say that. It's like, "Are you WI'ing us right now?" "Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You're right. I naturally do that." "No, we're really here. We're having a GT meeting. We're rallying people to finish things." I was in a meeting last night and I said to somebody, "Hey, I'm I'ing you right now. I'm not G'ing you.

"I'm giving you an idea for you to evaluate. I'm not rallying you to actually act on it." Sometimes you can go to a meeting. You're an IG. You can go to a meeting, Russell, and go, "You know what would be cool? This would be cool." ET is going to go, "Okay."

Russell Brunson:
Everyone starts running as if it's the thing. It's the worst ever. In fact, I have to hide ideas a lot of times, because my team will get so excited. They start implementing. I'm like, "Stop. No. This is make-believe in my head right now. Please don't do anything until I tell you that this is a real thing." That's been a real pain point for me.

Patrick Lencioni:
We say, "I'm inventing. I'm not galvanizing." Because you don't always do them both at the same time. I'm inventing, which means I'm asking for your discernment, not your enablement. Don't go act on this. Let me tell you something, Russell. Like no other tool we've seen, people get this and remember it and start using the vocabulary.

It's like, "Is it all right if I do a little wondering right now? I'm just thinking, have we actually thought about this?" Where they couch it like that and people know, "Oh, yeah. You're a wonderer. Give it to us." Whereas if you do that without-

Russell Brunson:
Versus being annoyed by it, right?

Patrick Lencioni:
Exactly.

Russell Brunson:
Versus like, "Stop the ideas." Yeah. Interesting.

Patrick Lencioni:
Exactly.

Russell Brunson:
You almost want to give everyone hats that have a different color hat on so you can know what it is in the conversation. Like, "Okay. That's who you guys are. That's who you guys are." Then it makes it simpler.

Patrick Lencioni:
Well, four years into this, we came up with this.

Russell Brunson:
Oh, nice.

Patrick Lencioni:
Which we finally said, which sits on your desk, and the green ones are your letters that your geniuses, your competencies, and your frustrations. You can look at it and just go, "Oh, yeah. That totally makes sense." Some people go to meetings and you're brainstorming, and they go, "That'll never work. We don't have the budget for that. How long would that take?"

You're like, "No, no, no. It's a brainstorm meeting, dude. Calm down. We'll have plenty of time to evaluate the practicality of this later, but right now we just need to dream." If you know what you're doing, everybody can kind of adjust and not be annoyed and not be frustrated at themselves or at others.

Russell Brunson:
One of the other interesting things I struggle with sometimes is, again, because now that I know I'm an IG, I have tasks that I know need to get done, but then I know they would crush me. I would rather die than do them. Then I feel guilty giving them to people, because I'm like, "Ah, they're not going to want to do this, because I wouldn't want to do it."

I have this weird guilt thing or I'm apologizing. I was like, "Hey, I need to do this." But looking through this lens, I'm like, they're probably actually really, that's the thing that lights them up even though it makes no logical sense to me. You know what I mean?

Patrick Lencioni:
Absolutely.

Russell Brunson:
Very interesting.

Patrick Lencioni:
The other thing is, and when we do that with all the right intentions, because I'm the same way, we can kind of accidentally demean them. Like, "I know you probably don't want to do this, but I'm going to ask you." They're like, "Well, that's actually my favorite thing in the world."

Russell Brunson:
That's my job. I love it.

Patrick Lencioni:
Yeah. We want to celebrate that and go, "Hey, I love that you love that, and you know I'm not good at that. You're a rock star when it comes to implementation, and I'm so glad you're on the team. Now that I know I suck at implementation, I'm going to galvanize you for this and let you do what you do." It's raising everybody up and you shouldn't feel guilty, but I did that for years. I would feel like, "I don't want to ask them to do something I don't like." But they love it.

Russell Brunson:
So cool. Man. Yeah. I'm just in my head thinking through so many conversations I've been having over the last 10 years and meetings and stuff like that. Next question I have, this comes back, you touched upon it a little earlier, but it's the unique pairings. I understand the pairings versus just the individual letters. Walk me through that, because I think that's kind of next level to understanding the two strengths versus just the one with people, right?

Patrick Lencioni:
Yeah. At first we thought the individual letters were most important, but then early in the implementation of this we realized it's actually the pairing, because you're an I. You're invention, but your invention gets to galvanizing. Not only do you like to invent, but you like to get people excited.

If you're a WI, you're up in your head and thinking about it and you like to invent, but you're not necessarily going to push it out there. It's that combination. You're the evangelistic innovator. Well, the WI, my wife who has the same working genius, she's a WI. She's the creative dreamer.

She'll sit in a room and dream up ideas and talk about them. She's not going to necessarily try to activate them through others. In fact, she hates doing that. That second letter really explains how that first letter plays out. I'm an I also, but I'm an ID. What that means is my genius, I'm called the discriminating ideator, which means I'm evaluating my invention and I'm more interested in the curation of my idea than I am in the promotion of that idea.

Russell Brunson:
Interesting. I'm assuming that in your team though, you then have people who are great at promotion, so that after you've curated it, you figured it out, you put it together, then you can hand it off and then get back to making the next idea, right?

Patrick Lencioni:
Yeah. Well, one of the things we realized, we only have one galvanizer on my team. That's a limitation in our organization, because what happens is we come up with great ideas. Everybody has discernment. They all evaluate it and they all give their opinion, but then it's like, "Okay. Who's going to get this going?" People are like, "Not me."

Russell Brunson:
Is that a problem with a lot of people is that they're surrounding themselves with people more like them, and so they're missing some of the things? Does that normally happen, you notice?

Patrick Lencioni:
It can often happen, and it's the opposite of what should be happening. If you share core value, the one thing you should hire people that are like you in your core values. There's two or three core values that you have, and you should go find people with those core values.

After that go for diversity of thinking and how they experience things and how they understand things, because then that's good. But when you don't hire people with the same core values, then the diversity breaks up that organization. But after that, you want people that are different than you, who fill in your gaps, not people that are the same as you, who leave you with blind spots.

By the way, I have a great story I want to share. This is one of my favorite stories is a guy was going in for a performance review and he had had a bad year, and so he was going to sit down with his boss and his boss's boss to get reviewed, and he knew it was going to go poorly. He didn't know if they were going to ask him to leave or whatever else.

He took the Working Genius the night before, and he went in and he gave it to his boss and said, "Can you look at this before we talk?" The other two people looked at it and were like, "Well, crap. You're in the wrong job, man. No wonder you had a terrible year."

Then the other guy goes, "Hey, we have that other job opening that would be perfect for you." The guy wrote to us and said, "I got promoted instead of fired, because they knew I was a good guy, but they didn't realize I was just doing the wrong job."

When you have the language for understanding what that means, man, so many people lose good people because they just don't understand what they're good at. If they're a cultural fit, never fire a cultural fit, man. Find a way to use them.

Russell Brunson:
That reminds me of Good to Great, Jim Collins' book.

Patrick Lencioni:
Oh, one of my favorite books.

Russell Brunson:
He talks about one of the five things. It's finding the right person, but then finding the right seat on the bus. I've had a lot of times, too, where I've had someone who you can tell they're amazing and they're in the culture, but it's like wrong fit, fit wrong. We move them three or four times.

All of a sudden it slides into something where it's like, "Oh, we found a seat on the bus for you and you're amazing at this." But it took too long to get there, because we didn't have a map of here's how you actually find the person from there. We're just like, "Try this. Try this. Hopefully something will work eventually."

Patrick Lencioni:
We have a three-step process for building teams, Russell, and it goes get the right people on the bus. Sometimes you have a person, they're in the right seat, but they don't belong on the bus. They don't fit the culture. First get the right people on the bus, then get them in the right seat, and that's working genius.

I can't believe you just said that. That's great. Then get the bus to perform, and that's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. That's exactly right. This is about, assuming they belong on the bus because they fit the core values, are they in the right seat? What a beautiful thing when you can get people in the right seat.

Sometimes your bus is so small you don't even have a seat for them and you're like, "Hey, I love you, man. But we only have three people here and we need somebody else. Let's find another bus for you where you can get a seat that makes sense for you." Then you're not rejecting them as a person saying, "You failed." It's just saying, "What we need you to do at this small company we don't really have a spot for. What we need you to do." The other thing about this, Russell, is that it takes 12 minutes to fill out this assessment.

Russell Brunson:
It was really fast. I blocked out an hour. I'm like, "Okay. Here we go." I was like, "Oh, I'm done."

Patrick Lencioni:
Four years into looking at this, because Myers Briggs, I prefer to talk to somebody about Myers Briggs than have them take the assessment, because the assessment is 70% accurate, 75%. Which means you get one letter wrong, and one letter wrong of the four letters is really a big difference.

We found that this is, because we're asking people to tell us about what they enjoy and what feeds them, we find this to be remarkably accurate.

People fill out this 12 minute assessment, read it, look at these descriptions. They're like, "Shoot. This is me and I want to go share this with everybody I know, because I've been feeling terrible about the fact that I wasn't good at certain things, and I don't know if people know that I'm really good at these other things."

Russell Brunson:
Yeah. So cool.

Patrick Lencioni:
We love that it can be done quickly.

Russell Brunson:
Yeah. I'm rethinking so many things right now on just again, coming back to the seat on the bus.

The fact it's a shortcut to find the right seat is such, I don't know, it's a map. This is the map to get the person there as quick as we can.

Patrick Lencioni:
You know what else we found is that, we're launching a new program in the next few months, is that a team can fill this out and in an hour they can have somebody. We're going to have them click a button and they can go on and have somebody debrief it with them and go, "Here's your low hanging fruit."

Because when you have somebody else look at it and go, "Hey, you guys. Do you ever find that this is what happens?" People are like, "How did you know?" It's like, "Because it's right here." It really helps people take that first step, and then all the other things you said before.

How do we go about implementing this? I wish it were a plan thing. It's so easy though when you see it. Right away, you start realizing, "Oh, we need to rethink how we're allocating people, truly staffing projects, and we need to start talking about it differently, too."

Russell Brunson:
For those who are listening who are like, "This is awesome. I cannot wait to try." I guess two sides. One is the best place for them to take the assessment, and number two is where can they learn? Is there other places to learn more to go deep in this? I'd love to give people that resource as well.

Patrick Lencioni:
Yeah. If you go to WorkingGenius.com, and there's two Gs in the middle, because WorkingGenius.com. You'll get lots of free resources, understanding it, videos, and all that kind of stuff. You can also take the assessment there, and if a team takes it, they can get a team map. They can go in and do it on the same console and then print a team map and look at the ramifications.
In the report, you get your Working Genius pairings and all the information you need to get started, but there's tons of free resources on there, too. It costs $25 to take it. This is an enterprise tool, so a lot of people are like, "It should cost more than that, because it's changing."

We're like, "No." We've developed a student assessment this year, because people said, "I want my high school student to understand themselves better." We have one for teenagers now and we want this to be easy enough to take. It's a couple coffees at Starbucks and you can actually unlock your potential and your geniuses.

It cost $25. It takes 12 minutes. You can go to WorkingGenius.com. The other thing we did is we realized a lot of people wanted to be experts in this enough to be able to help other people with it. We have a certification program and 3,500 people have become certified.

You do a two-day course online, a live course with people, and you learn how to use this and you learn how to consult around it. We have resources around that, too. We're building a real ecosystem, because so many people are interested and we're just a small company, so we want to set the world on fire with it.

Russell Brunson:
So cool. This is my printout for those of you who can see the video. This is really cool, because this is very educational. It shows you, there's all the pairings, there's all the stuff. Just the report you get back afterwards will do most of it. Explain exactly who you are, what your strengths are, what your weaknesses, what your pairings are. It gives you so much just as part of taking the assessments. You don't just take it and given, "Here's the answer." It's like, "Here's how to interpret that and use it for yourself," which is awesome.

Patrick Lencioni:
Russell, when you take your whole team through it or whatever your team is going to be, feel free to give us a call and I'll have Matt, my son who does the data for this. He'll take you through a debrief of it.

Russell Brunson:
That'd be awesome. I want to include this in Understand.me as well.

Patrick Lencioni:
Oh, we'd love that.

Russell Brunson:
Understand.me, we link to other assessments that are amazing. I'm going to talk to my team about getting this linked of it that way. When people pull up their Understand.me profile, they'll be able to see again, DISC, Enneagram, all the different things, and then now we'll be able to show that as well.

Like you said, the noun versus the verb. That's such a powerful thing, especially for the people that are using are obviously a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners and then a lot of coaches who are coaching people. I think this will help them on both sides to be able to really understand and know how to implement this with people and with teams.

Patrick Lencioni:
Hey, Russell. Here's an interesting story, because you're the Understand.me guy. I had a group of lawyers in my office a couple years ago, and I didn't know it, but the CEO of this company of lawyers, he was the guy who argued the Supreme Court case in one of the states that made it illegal technically to use assessments in the hiring process.

Now, there's other ways to do it. Because they're like, "Well, they could be biased." I didn't know that was this guy. I'm doing my assessment with him and his team. We're going around and at the end of the day he goes, "Yeah. I hate these things, because I had to argue a case."

He goes, "But this one, actually." He goes, "I think I'm thinking differently, because everybody here knows what type they are. It totally made sense. It makes me want to manage them all differently. This one." You can use it in hiring if you do it the right way in all of them.

But in some states they'll say, "Have you ever run up against that where people are like, 'How come we can't just give everybody a thing?'" They're like, "Well, legally they say it's biased." But really all we're trying to do is help people find the right job.

Russell Brunson:
Oh, yeah. For sure. So much better, because you know this, people's resumes are lying. People make these things. Whatever they think. "Hire me." The person comes in. These things, I love it, because it gives you such a good map. Definitely there's ways you have to get around it.

But even for me what's been most useful is after somebody comes in. Again, it's not working right or whatever, or even after we hire somebody. It's like, "Hey, I want you to get these things so I can understand how to work with you and where to put you and all that kind of stuff." The more data points we have, the better we can serve them as someone on our team. You know what I mean? Make sure that they're going to be happy and we can help them be successful in the role.

Patrick Lencioni:
By the way though, I think they should be used in hiring. I'm not for that, because I think what we're trying to do is avoid people talking themselves into jobs that they don't want or avoid companies hiring people that aren't going to work out. It doesn't serve anybody to not find a good match. I don't like the fact that people are like, "You can't use this in hiring." But you're going to avoid misery for people, but the legal system doesn't often see things that way.

Russell Brunson:
We'll have to change that eventually, but not today.

Patrick Lencioni:
There you go.

Russell Brunson:
That's so awesome. Well, man, I appreciate you being on this. This is really fascinating. I love assessments. Again, been a big fan of yours for 18, 19 years ago when I first read the first book I got ahold of, and so it's fun to finally have a chance to connect your face with you and your stories.

Taking this from all your stuff that you teach over the years, these frameworks and your stories and stuff, and turning into it a very tangible assessment. It's such a cool thing for, I think, people now to be able to figure these things out quicker. I love the other thing you said, the fact after you get this and you get the people on the right seats on a bus, then going back to the Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Read that book now. Here's how we make sure everyone can gel together and it's not pure chaos all the time.

Patrick Lencioni:
Right. When you know your Working Genius, by the way, because the first thing we do in Five Dysfunctions is we help people build trust through vulnerability. Well, when you know your Working Geniuses, people start saying, "Oh, yeah. I know I suck at that." People are like, "You do?" "Yeah. It says right here I suck at that."

Now they're more vulnerable and people can actually build trust without pretending like, "Oh, I have to pretend I'm great at everything." It really does dovetail well with people being vulnerable with each other, and that's a huge part of the Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

Russell Brunson:
Yeah. So cool. So fascinating. Like I like said, I studied stuff initially when we were first building the team and it's just fun. Now I'm going to go back deep again starting with assessments, but then going back on just re-geeking out on your frameworks and stuff as we kind of go back through this.

Hopefully everyone else does as well. Anyway, it's been awesome, man. Anything else you want to tell our people before we send them to go take the assessment?

Patrick Lencioni:
No. I'm looking at that thing behind you, those two gears. What is that? That's the model right there.

Russell Brunson:
That's the ClickFunnels logo. That's our ClickFunnels logo.

Patrick Lencioni:
You're kidding. I didn't see that. That's wild, because that's what the logo is for this. Maybe this was meant to be.

Russell Brunson:
It's all gears. They're all different gears. This is the gears to build your funnel. This is the gears to build your team. They all can kind of tie in together to make something amazing.

Patrick Lencioni:
There you go. That's great. Hey, Russell. Thanks for having me on. It's been a blast talking to you.

Russell Brunson:
Yeah. Great having you. Great getting you to know you. Everyone, it's time to go take the assessment. Again, it's at WorkingGenius.com. Double Gs in the middle, right?

Patrick Lencioni:
Yep.

Russell Brunson:
Go take the test and take the assessment and then get your teams involved. Get all the people in your teams, obviously. You probably know this. Most of our entrepreneurs who follow us, they're running teams of either solo entrepreneurs up to about 10 employees. It's kind of our sweet spot with most of our teams.

This is such a perfect thing. Bigger scale, it's insane, because there's a lot more. But for most of our audience this is such a perfect thing to be able to figure out how to work really, really well inside of the teams they have to be able to figure those things out, and then that's how you start growing to get the bigger teams and growing the companies from there.

Patrick Lencioni:
Yeah. Truly for a small organization, having this kind of breakthrough can make your productivity and your morale change quickly and drastically. Suddenly you're like, "We have three people. One plus one plus one can equal seven if we're using them in the right geniuses." Where sometimes one plus one plus one is two, because we're not fully tapping into people. For a small organization, this can unlock a lot quickly.

Russell Brunson:
Yeah. I had a guy in my office yesterday actually talking about this. He's a huge fan, by the way. He was like, "I wish I could be the one doing the interview." It was kind of fun. Their business was doing, I think, at the time $1.5 million a year and they didn't change the funnels, the marketing, the advertising, anything.

They just changed the company culture stuff and moved people around like you're talking about here. They more than doubled their sales the next year and they were like, "Doesn't make sense, because we didn't change our marketing, our advertising, yet we doubled our revenues."

It's these internal team dynamics. It's hard for a marketing guy like me who I'm obsessed with marketing. How does this work to increase the bottom line? It's these tangibles that then makes your team happier. They're better on customer support. They're better on sales. All the other pieces.

It changes that where people, they're happier, they're more productive, and it just rises everything else in the company without having to increase your advertising dollars or your conversion rates or all the things I typically geek out on. It doesn't make logical sense to the marketer in me, but the proof is there. It's worth doing.

Patrick Lencioni:
You know what it is, Russell? I say the health of an organization, the functionality, the way people work together is the multiplier of their intelligence. You can have the best marketing plan in the world, but how much are you going to actually tap into that if people are dysfunctional?

When you make them functional, then the beauty of your intellect and the beauty of your plan and the beauty of your marketing program, you actually get all of that. It's like a football team that has a great offense, but the people don't like to work together.

But if you actually get them to work together, then the offense, you're going to use every bit of it. It's not that the marketing plan doesn't matter. It's just if people are dysfunctional behaviorally, you're only going to tap into a fraction of its benefit.

Russell Brunson:
Yeah. Awesome, man. I love it. So good. So great to connect with you and appreciate you and you guys putting together assessment. Everyone go take the assessment for you and for your teams, and hopefully have a chance to hang out and talk to you again soon someday. Thank you, Patrick. I appreciate you.

Patrick Lencioni:
God bless.