0:00:09 - Matt

Welcome to Podcast Awesome, where we chat about icons, design, tech, business, and I'm your host, Matt Johnson, and today we have Jory Raphael, Rob Madole and Lindsay Miller joining us. Last season, we dove into Patrick L'Ontzioni's concept of six types of working genius. Today we aim to delve even deeper as we talk with team members who reflect specific traits within the working genius framework. So if you've been curious about how to better understand your strengths at work, or you're just intrigued by the intersection of personality in the workplace, then this conversation should be of interest to you. So here's a quick refresher. The working genius frameworks helps people identify the six fundamental activities that are required for any type of work and provides a simple framework for how each gets done. 

Each genius makes up the acronym widget, widget, which gives a name and description for each kind of genius. W is wonder, I is invention, d is a discernment, g is galvanizing, e is enablement and T is tenacity. Today, when I chat with Lindsay, Rob and Jory, they together represent IT, d and E, and if you're counting, yes, that's four geniuses, because I count Jory's genius as a twofer. Congratulations, Jory. And here's our invention and tenacity. Okay, ready, let's get into it. 

0:02:19 - Rob

And I like how they break it down. They break it down into your competencies. Is that kind of the middle things that you're mediumish good at, the things that are your working genius, that are energizing that? That's the stuff you're good at, and then the stuff that frustrates you, because no one person is going to be perfect at one thing and then not capable at another. For example, galvanization is one of the weaknesses for me. I don't really like trying to talk people into doing stuff. It feels like I'm manipulating or I'm trying to, you know, bend somebody to my will. So that's not my favorite thing, but I understand it's necessary. That's how you got to build the team. 

0:03:02 - Matt

You know, if you can't talk, We'll leave the manipulation to Travis, yeah. 

0:03:06 - Rob

Yeah, he's, he is a gigantic G, if you know what I? 

0:03:10 - Matt

mean yeah, I know what you mean 100%. 

0:03:13 - Jory

I think it's interesting. You just said weakness, Rob, and I think it's actually the way that working the table group and working genius frame these different areas. It's actually not weakness, it's a frustration. 

That was helpful because you have the working genius, you have the working competency and then the working frustration, and that's really all it's saying is that you can thrive in any one of those things and any one of those areas. I can be galvanizing at times if I need to be, but it doesn't give me energy, it's draining. I can find that process sometimes frustrating, whereas the competency I'm like, oh huh, I guess. So I guess I don't mind doing that sort of stuff, but it's not necessarily something I would choose to do right out of the gate per se, right? I think the framing of that was helpful to me, more so than your typical kind of personality test, because this is really about things that energize you, or that you could spend all day doing this one type of task without you know, losing pace. 

0:04:19 - Matt

So yeah, sort of reminds me of the conversation Generally speaking, folks that are introverted versus extroverted, like the things that give you energy Versus beings totally sapped of energy. For instance, if I'm in a highly Social environment with a lot of people I have to recharge. It actually takes energy for me. So like when we go to the snuggles, I'm just like completely wiped. As much as I love it, I make myself like hang in there, but like when I get home it's a bit of a hangover, whereas some people that just completely energizes them and they're like ready to go. I think you're right, Jory, with the idea of whether it gives you energy or saps you. 

0:04:53 - Rob

It's a good way to frame it, I think maybe we should go around the table and everyone, yeah say what their work in Jesus. What's yours? 

0:05:00 - Matt

man. So mine is wonder and invention In that sweet spot of wonder. Most people are gonna be really frustrated. So like what the hell is he talking about? 

0:05:12 - Rob

Yeah, but it helps. It makes sense for someone who is Responsible for creating content. You're just coming up with stuff out of the blue and then that becomes the podcast episode or becomes a blog post or Becomes part of the marketing trail. 

0:05:25 - Jory

Well, that's what I'm fairly certain that Dave's One of his working geniuses is wonder it is where that's the top one. 

It's funny because it's one of my frustrations and I that actually surprised me after I took the test, because I think it's an interesting place. 

It's interesting for me to know that now about myself, that, yeah, and maybe it would be different if I were to take the test today, because I've only taken it once and that was literally years ago at this point. But what that tells me is that I need to be specific about the times where I engage in those wonder Conversations, because I know that any conversation that I'm having, as an example, with Dave or someone who has a maybe with you sometimes Matt, who has a genius of wonder is, if we're talking about something concrete To get done or work on XYZ and you're living up in the wonder where anything is possible, yeah, that that can be frustrating. So I have to be like okay, no, this conversation in particular, what we're doing right now, is all about the wonder. Anything's possible here. I have to like, take out my assumptions about we'll say this with Dave sometimes. Is this a wonder conversation right now, where are we on this chart? Because we just Set ourselves up for Expectations and we'll have more successful conversations when we do that. 

0:06:42 - Matt

Yeah, for sure, and I think that a lot of times we have an assumption and Natural proclivity or a way that we think about things and approach things. If we're not aware of those differences, we just think that everybody else is on the same wave, like thinking in the same way, like, well, no, no, now it's time to do this Where's their head at when you recognize oh no, that's that person's sweet spot and being able to check in, like you said, Jory, to see at what point or in the conversation Are we here? I think, if you're in a healthy team, recognizing where people's strengths are and saying, hey, we need to bring this person in, or hey, before we get to this stage, let's let the wonder person riff for a while, this is, let's see where this goes you know, the best one for that, I found, is that discernment genius. 

0:07:29 - Rob

Hmm, does that man? That is that gap between the ends of the acronym widget, the winter intervention. You don't need very much to get that going. It almost self-feels it. You know, it's just running little slow Plasmid engine that's always cranking stuff out. Then to get to the tenacity and the enablement you've got to have somebody say, okay, yeah, this is a good idea and we've tried to poke holes in it, and it passes muster and continue, otherwise whole thing breaks down. So, yeah, you're totally right. Without any of the, any one piece of that, it's this machinery that that's missing a gear and it doesn't work. 

0:08:08 - Matt

So, Lindsay, your sweet spot is discernment which is your naturally gifted at and derive energy and joy from using your intuition and instincts to evaluate and assess ideas or plans. Yeah, does that working genius? When you took the assessment, does that connect with your experience and when you feel like you get energy? 

0:08:35 - Lindsay

absolutely does it Came together, actually, in contrast with one of the working frustrations which I have and I specifically remember when Dave sent me the results, I was in the car Passing, that's just you know got the text on my phone, started looking at my phone and Reading. As a designer, it was a special kind of Feeling ashamed when I read, for working frustration, the sentence you are naturally gifted at and don't derive energy and joy from creating original and novel ideas and solutions, and I'm like I just feeds in to the imposter syndrome that I feel like a lot of times have this assess what it just called me out and it's like you're not good at your job and I'm like oh no, but I am eventually. 

0:09:26 - Matt

It's not true. It's not true. 

0:09:27 - Lindsay

I eventually came to the term, came to terms with the fact that that is the source of my own imposter syndrome. Like that, because that's what you're told a designer does. That's not what I do well, evidently from this test. So I felt a little bit called out but Came to realize that, with that discernment working genius, rather than Creating stuff out of it, then creating stuff out of the blue, looking at a blank page and creating something out of nothing, my specialty is faking that, in a way, by just collecting in aggregate all of the things that have been done and have succeeded before. It's saying what worked from all of these patterns that I'm recognizing, what didn't, what can I take from this set of patterns that exist from the web and apply that to my own work so that that's successful now too. 

And just assembling this Frankenstein's monster, so to speak, of good ideas to get something like okay, let's act on this, because this has been proven to have succeeded many times over in many different situations. While at first I was very taken aback and offended and I'm like, oh no, this thing's calling me out, it was like, no, but that just means that pay more attention to what your strength is. I think that in the last podcast that you guys had when Working Geniuses, dave said something along those lines as you have people working their strengths, not their weaknesses, and that recognition that I just do this a different way, which honestly isn't even that different, because I think, looking through other designers here, a lot of people have that discernment, working genius as designers, so that's actually pretty common. 

0:10:59 - Jory

Yeah, listen, I'm only competent in it. 

0:11:01 - Lindsay

Well, one of your geniuses is invention, right? So that's that squares. That's classic designer. 

0:11:07 - Jory

Well. But so I want to be clear and this was helpful for me because I get the same thing. Like when I saw that Wonder was on one of my frustrations, I felt the same like what? Well, no, because I'm creative, I wonder too. 

But I think that maybe this is part the table group partly hedging their language a little bit to be more inclusive. But it says you aren't naturally gifted and or derive energy. So to me that says that it may not come naturally to you. That doesn't mean you can't do it right, you can't be good at it, it just means you may have to work at it a little bit harder and as a result of that it can sap some energy and not take more time or take a greater toll on you Just to push back on like the imposter syndrome. I would caution you of saying that's a confirmation of all my fears and instead say oh, maybe my fears, it's less about fear and more about. This is hard for me sometimes and that's OK. I think I said a little early but that that to me I put a lot of weight on those particular words so that I don't feel bad about. 

0:12:15 - Matt

Yeah, and for each role too, like what you would think would be a stereotypical set of skills somebody that's in a different headspace they bring something new and fresh to a certain field or role or job that they do that somebody who's maybe in the typical strength or whatever would take for granted, you know. So I think it's awesome when folks are in roles and maybe have a kind of sweet spot of skills that maybe aren't not stereotypical but common, because that says to me that they're such a cheesy phrase but sort of outside of the box of how they think about things we don't have a huge hierarchy here at Fun Awesome, but there are people that are responsible for leading the teams and setting directions, and David Travis are certainly at the top of that. 

0:13:06 - Rob

That's what their role is. What I think is the most fun. Some of the most fun meetings I can remember are when you have every single one of those geniuses represented. And if you just have a manager type that's good at discernment and maybe galvanizing and you're missing all the other geniuses and maybe you have just those geniuses at the top, you're going to have an unbalanced solution. So that's my favorite is when most energizing meetings is when you've got every single one of those widget, all the letters represented Music. 

0:13:48 - Jory

Wait, Rob, what are your genii? 

0:13:51 - Rob

My genii. It is invention and enablement. 

0:13:57 - Matt

Enablement was sort of at the top of the list. Which one do you think best describes where you derive? 

0:14:02 - Rob

energy. Yeah, I think enablement is pretty accurate. Yeah, and let's read the description here when it says you are good at and don't provide others with encouragement and assistance for projects and ideas. Throughout most of my career, when I got experienced enough, I was in a mentor role. I landed a company and either be paired with one or two or more people or I would be leading a team, done this for a long time and that is the most fun for me Music. There's a moment whenever you can share an idea. It could be something technical or something process related or anything that you're passionate and excited about. If I can share that with somebody else and get them excited, that's like huge dopamine rush for me. So being able to work with a team and help them through that gives me energy, always gives me energy. So it's total is what I want. 

0:14:59 - Lindsay

That's one of mine too, and definitely have noticed the same. It's like the most tedious tasks that you wouldn't choose to do on your own. Necessarily If you see them blocking somebody else, it is so easy and fulfilling to take those on. You just don't even care that it's not your typical favorite thing to do, it's just the fact that you're helping somebody else do their job well is really fulfilling. 

0:15:20 - Matt

Going back to something you said earlier, Rob, it completely resonated with me that the leadership team at Fawn Awesome, that there is quite a spread of different working geniuses, which is awesome. So when I was putting ideas together for this talk, I went through and I was trying to decide okay, who should I talk to? Because hopefully our company is going to cover all of the widget acronym and I was like, oh wow, that's awesome that it's spread across the leadership team, which says to me that if folks are humble and they're working well together, man, we can get a lot done and do some awesome stuff, you know, whereas if you have folks that are maybe on one track, you'd have to be really careful to not get hung up on a certain way of doing business and get off track with what you're doing just because everybody's in the same headspace. 

0:16:08 - Rob

A poor idea that had the most excitement, because one or an invention was happening. If you don't have that discernment, then you can spend the next year working on something that is not any good. 

0:16:20 - Jory

Yeah, I'd be interested for Travis to take the test again, because I thought discernment would have been one of his top. 

0:16:28 - Matt

I will say with Travis, though, that he definitely has a way of I don't know how he does it, man, it's like magic, some kind of black magic Like he'll plant a seed of an idea and you can tell like he's excited and that you'll that he's going to back you up on an idea. You find yourself chasing after an idea and you know that he's going to be in your corner, but it's very subtle. 

0:16:52 - Jory

You know what I mean Travis is like our dad. You're like, oh, he's going to be so proud of me if I do this. 

0:17:00 - Lindsay

It's so true, though I haven't even been here that long, and I get that sense. 

0:17:04 - Matt

I'm like, yeah, I've got to make Travis proud. 

0:17:06 - Rob

Yeah, that's awesome. I accidentally called him dad one time. 

0:17:15 - Matt

Just as long as you didn't call him daddy. That would be a little weird. Now I'm curious if you guys can think of examples where you're firing in all eight cylinders, you're super stoked to be doing the work that you're doing and you're completely in your sweet spot. If you have examples of work that you've done where you really felt energized and were having a lot of fun and it just felt really natural. 

0:17:48 - Rob

Hold on. Yeah, I was going to say do we want to roll back around and get Jory's? 

0:17:51 - Matt

I don't know if we've got his, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's come back to that, thank you. 

0:17:55 - Jory

No, it's okay. You don't have to do mine, Jory, Jory, hey, it's okay, you're part of the conversation too. 

0:18:03 - Matt

You're important, yeah, unfortunately, Working. 

0:18:06 - Rob

Here's the edit. Hey, Jory, what are you working, geniuses? 

0:18:11 - Jory

Whenever I take personality tests, I would say my personality is always the one that spends too much time thinking about the questions that I'm given and trying to not game it. 

But I'm like I know what you're getting at with this one. I know what you're trying to find. If I answer this way, this is how you're going to ping me, and I have a hard time being objective about it and just answering them off the cuff. I overthink it, but that's not. That's neither here nor there. My working geniuses, genie, genie, what is it? Genie, it's genus. 

0:18:40 - Rob

Genus yes. 

0:18:42 - Matt

Correct, that is correct. Genus, genus. 

0:18:45 - Jory

What are your genus? I'm a solid it, invention and tenacity, mm-hmm, and that's a great combo man. 

I like it. It works well for me and brings me a lot of energy and enjoyment. You don't work with it in daily. So we've already said invention is good at and enjoy creating original and novel ideas and solutions and I do. 

I like I love being presented with a set of constraints or like goals for a particular design and then just figuring out how to make it work, like putting the puzzle pieces together, and I really enjoy puzzles. I enjoy creating the puzzles, maybe not putting them together, I don't know whatever. But then the other one is the tenacity which is, I think, pRobably the reason you wanted me on this podcast, matt, is that I am good at and enjoy pushing projects and tasks through to completion to ensure that the desired results are achieved. And I think that that holds very true in my other persona as an icon designer, where I have no pRoblem whatsoever designing thousands of icons and getting them done and checking off those lists and I really want to get things finished. I almost think they feel a little dopamine hits little checkboxes, like how good it feels to check something off on a list that you've done and when you're designing an icon set or filling out icons or changing them, you got to do that a lot in a row. 

0:20:21 - Matt

Well, case in point, we've got tens of thousands of icons. So well done what we do. Yeah, did you know that? It's amazing. That is tenacity in action, right there. 

0:20:32 - Jory

NOAA is creating pRobably more of them than I am at this point. But yeah, I don't know, Rob, you tell me when we were working together. I like getting those checklists done, like getting things finished. 

0:20:43 - Rob

Yeah, great to work with somebody who has the T working genius, especially if you're more on the side of I just want to get things done, because Jory will always try for that. We can go off on a tangent and enjoy it. We go okay, what do we actually need to do here? He's going into list making mode because he does want to get to that. Check it out. You can get a lot of stuff done. You're always focusing on finishing or shipping or checking the thing off. That's a great personality quality, especially to pair it with some of the other ones that are maybe more wonder and invention. I know invention is one of Jory's, but to have that tenacity, because otherwise nothing will get done if you don't actually check it off, it's fantastic. 

0:21:30 - Jory

I don't know if this is in the book, but when we did some workshops with the Taylor group there was an analogy they used around all these working geniuses. They likened it to flying a plane, which was really interesting. But the idea of how each of these kind of go from that high level, the wonder where anything is possible, where you are deciding if you even want to take a trip, or where anything's impossible. We could go anywhere right now. We can envision what our life would be like if we went to Hawaii or you went to Alaska or whatever. Then each step in the process you're at a different level of the trip. By the time you are coming in for landing the person who's gifted in wonder, maybe you'd be like, oh hey, maybe we could go over to, maybe we could take a side trip here, and you're like, no, no, that's not where we are in the process. We're landing right now, we're going through the checklist of the flaps down, et cetera, et cetera. 

That was always helpful for me, thinking about where you are in a particular project and process and when decisions need to be made. I think it's helpful for kind of focusing teams and projects. We'll have projects at Fun Awesome where we are like this is a WI project. That is what this is. We are throwing things against the wall. We're coming up with ideas. We're not making any decisions right now. We're living in the possibility of the unknown. That could be fun, if you know that it could be frustrating for folks because they're just like no, I just want to get the work done. And then, on the flip side, we have had projects where it's literally know, you're finishing the sharp, light style of Fun, awesome, and you could just get to get those thousands of icons done. That's the work right now. 

0:23:23 - Matt

One of the things that came up in the conversation with Dave and I think it's a key part of the book too is that you can have all these skills represented in a team, but if you don't have mutual trust, it kind of doesn't matter. You know what I mean. Like you just have people talking past each other. But if you're really working hard to create a healthy culture, folks are mature and they know how to listen to each other you can really make this work. But if you don't have first things first, good luck. 

0:23:53 - Lindsay

Even if you're not using it to explicitly make decisions on what work people are assigned or what they get to do. It's just nice to have that kind of foundation that not everybody works the same way that you do. Like just to right out the gate, have that understanding with everybody so that if you see somebody not working in the exact same way that you would expect to be working in their situation, you just have that understanding that they're just doing this differently because they have different working genes or competencies than I do and that's just how they want to get work done or what their best at and that's part of what builds trust on the team is, I think, setting that groundwork to understand that everybody works a little bit differently. It just makes the interpersonal relationships a little bit stronger that way. 

0:24:38 - Rob

Yeah, helps with empathy. 

0:24:39 - Matt

That's right. Split work wise. Is there anything recently, or a great project or a horrible project that stands out, where it went well or didn't go well, and maybe how these things kind of interplayed Last split? 

0:24:55 - Rob

one of our engineers was working on, and it's an effort that Font Awesome has been pursuing for a while now. But we want privacy, we want to respect our customers and for our customers overseas, gpr is the thing for them. We have to deal with it. Well, one of the pieces of this is having a cookie consent notice. I mean, we've all seen these. You go to a site, it pops up hey, can I write a cookie to your browser? Then you click the button and you don't even think I'd ever again. Well, we need one of those. It's legally something that we have to have to be GDPR compliant. 

So we started working on this thing and it was going just fine. But part way through, dave found out what we were working on and he pushed back on us and he said do we really need this cookie consent for everybody, or is it just for people that are in the GDPR regions? And that caused the whole split to pretty much be thrown off. We ended up not completing it, hit the pause button and we're going to recycle it and work on it again. But what was missing from that pitch was the wonder and invention part. So by skipping that part and not having that represented. We were about to do something that wasn't going to be as good as it could have been. 

0:26:20 - Matt

That's a great example too, because it's not always this linear thing Like you're saying. You skipped a step and you could say well, because we're tenacious, we're going to get this thing done, but we have to go back and take a look at this with fresh eyes. So it's not always assembly line. You start here, then you go here, and then you go here and you finish it. You might have to go back to the drawing board if somebody wasn't involved in the conversation early on. I think that's a really good example. 

0:26:47 - Rob

So, if you have tenacity and discernment, do you have tenacity? 

0:26:56 - Jory

Is there one recently that we've actually shipped that would be easier to talk about. We recently shipped a Figma plugin. I think all of the things that we ultimately end up shipping but that had to go through a process where we had to live in the world of wonder about what would a Figma plugin of Fun Awesome even be? How would we implement it? How are we going to deal with the authentication and login requirements? How do we actually deliver the icons to folks? And then getting down into that invention like what does this thing look like? Then let's actually make it and let's finish it and ship it. So we did that recently and it went well and is live and folks can use it now. 

0:27:39 - Rob

Yeah, that is a particularly good example and it goes back to something Matt was talking about how we go through the stages of wonder, invention, discernment, your galvanizing, your enabling, and then the tenacity you actually can think stuff. That one was pRoblematic and it almost caused the whole thing to blow up and not complete, because what we ended up doing is we got to tenacity, we actually had something working, and then went all the way back to the beginning To wonder an invention, because we didn't have the token and the authentication piece right. So not only was that when we did all the steps, but we actually did it multiple times. 

0:28:19 - Jory

The piece we're leaving out about this process was that we've talked about before how we work in these six-week splits, but then we've also talked about how, twice a year, the full team gets together for a week to do a snuggle together, where we all get in person, and this batch of work happened to split evenly across. There was a snuggle that ended up right in the beginning of it or in the middle of it, so a bunch of work had been done remotely, asynchronously, on the plug-in. We'd been doing the discussions, we'd been doing the sketches, we started building it out, we got it to this place and then we happened to meet up in person for the snuggle. We paused the split work, we all got together and, as tends to happen when you're in person and folks are sitting around in a bunch of couches is you start to wonder and you start to have ideas, and ideas get thrown off the wall and literally it was like they started going, tracing down the path. 

What if we did it this way and did some exploration and went down and was like oh great, yes, no, let's do it. No, no, no, we can't, let's go back. Oh, do we have to cancel this? No, wait, hold on. Let's go back, I will say, even though we ended up ultimately with something very similar to what we had planned on at the start, I think we were able to back up the initial discernment with some proof and some further thinking, within the constraints of the project and our timeline and stuff, because I think, ultimately, how we want to do the login and authentication process for the Figma plug-in is not how we are currently doing that, but we were able to make it work within our current constraints and get something out the door. That was you know, I hate to say it, but quote unquote good enough and knowing that we're going to want to cycle back at some point and kind of work on it again. 

0:30:09 - Matt

All right. So there's some examples of how working genius might look in the real world. And if you're curious about the working genius concept, I've added information in the show notes about Patrick Lenzioni. And no, we don't get any kind of benefit or kickback for sharing that information. We just want to make sure you have helpful tools for your work. A special thanks to Lindsay, Rob and Jory for coming on the show. This here podcast was edited and produced by yours truly Matt Johnson. The Podcast Awesome theme song was composed by Ronnie Martin and audio editing was done by Chris and at Lemon Productions.