Sam Donaghey
Welcome to the Fast Slow Motion podcast where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life. I’m your host, Sam Donaghey, and joining me today is Fast Slow Motion’s Director of People, Michael Smith. And today we’ve got a very special guest on the show. Someone whose work has shaped how leaders around the world think about teams, trust, and organizational health. And someone who’s actually had a massive impact on how we operate here at Fast Slow Motion.

Few voices have shaped our culture more than today’s guest. So Michael, can you tell us who’s joining us, please?

Michael Smith
Thanks Sam, it’s exciting to introduce our guest today. This is someone whose ideas just haven’t changed how leaders think. They’ve had a massive impact my leadership journey and also how we do things at Fast Slow Motion. We are thrilled to have Patrick Lencioni with us today. He is the author of 13 books, sold over 9 million copies, been translated into 30 languages, and he’s also the founder of the Table Group. For us at Fast Slow Motion, Patrick’s work just isn’t theory, it is baked into our DNA.

We really leaned into his frameworks using those of humble, hungry, smart, those virtues in our hiring and onboarding process to actively tackling the five dysfunctions of the team to make sure we’re building and having real conversations, productive disagreements. And his latest book, The Six Types of Working Genius has been a game changer for us in understanding our uniqueness, how our uniqueness fits into a team, which helps everybody find their sweet spot and find fulfillment, which means better work for all of us.

As a consulting firm, Fast Slow Motion tries to pour into growing business and leaders. So we’re excited to share this information with our listeners because we think these models and frameworks can be tools to help companies grow beyond the books. We just want to get to know Pat. We want this conversation to understand maybe his personal passions, core beliefs, what truly lights him up. Pat, welcome to the Fast Slow Motion podcast.

Pat Lencioni
It’s a pleasure to be here, it really is. This is just going to be plain fun.

Michael Smith
Well, Pat, you’ve been one of the most influential voices in business consulting, but can you take us back to the beginning? What initially drew you to the world of organizational health and team dynamics?

Pat Lencioni
Well, you know, I haven’t talked about this in a while, but it was, I was a kid growing up in Bakersfield, California, and you are originally from Fresno, California, and the Central Valley is not very California at all. It’s like a little slice of Oklahoma in the middle of California. And, you know, my dad did not go to college, or my mom, but he’d come home from work every day, and he would complain about management. And I didn’t know what that was, but I was kind of bummed out that my dad was frustrated by something called management.

Michael Smith
this right.

Pat Lencioni
And I thought, I don’t like that. He goes to work, he works hard, he should come home and feel happy. And so as I got a little older and started learning about what that meant, I thought somebody should do something about that. Well, then I went to college and I studied economics and I didn’t know what I was gonna do with it. I really didn’t know why I picked that major. And then I went and I got my first job out of college at a management consulting firm. And I thought, I’m gonna finally figure out this whole management thing. Well, it was really more about like cost analysis and

strategy and tactics and stuff, it really didn’t address the human side of business and I was really interested in that. And while I was there, I took an interest in the clients we worked with and why they didn’t work well together and why they didn’t even use some of the work we were doing for them because they were dysfunctional. And I remember saying to the people there, why don’t we help them with that? And they said, they don’t pay us to do that. And I said, maybe in my life I need to do that.

And so over the course of the next few years, I got more and more involved in that. And I went to work with some technology companies where I got involved in what’s called organizational development or that kind of stuff. And then I started my own firm because too many companies were not succeeding. They were really smart about their business, but they really didn’t know how to behave. And that was getting in the way of them using their intelligence. And so I started the table group 28 years ago almost.

And we were just gonna be a little consulting firm that worked with companies probably in the Bay Area or in technology growth startups. And then I wrote a book and started giving talks, which we thought was strange. And then it started to grow and companies outside of the area and outside of that industry started using it. And before we knew what was going on, we were working with churches and military and schools and lots of companies in every different industry and ⁓ kind of grew from there. So that’s the story.

Michael Smith
So.

Big picture of what the table group does now. You do books, you have consultants. Tell us about that.

Pat Lencioni
So for years, we believe there are six critical questions every business needs to ask itself to be clear. And one of them is, why do you exist? And how do you behave? Those are the first two. Jim Collins would call those the core principles of the business that never should change. And then we add to those questions like, so what do you actually do? What business are you in? And what’s your strategic anchors?

What’s the most important priority right now and who needs to do what? It’s like all the way from the upper thing, like why do we exist all the way down to who needs to do what right now? Well, when we first started the company, it was to make organizations healthier because there was too much dysfunction. And we came up with these three core values, humble, hungry, smart. But three and a half years ago, we decided it was time to restart our company. And so we changed the reason why we exist to bring

to really promote truth and dignity in the world. Not just organizational health, but individual truth and dignity. And we added to our values of humble, hungry, smart, peacefully courageous. Because we saw the world was just kind of drifting and people were confused and there was a lot of things going on. And we said, you know, I think it’s time for us to go out and really promote goodness, not just in organizations, but in society and in families.

And to do that, we’re gonna have to have enough courage to promote things that some people might not agree with. Now, as it turns out, most people do and they like it it’s good, but it’s not necessarily for everyone. And we decided we need to be like that. So that’s what we do is those are the, that’s why we exist and how we behave. What we do is we come up with new thinking and ideas and products and marketing and messaging and services.

all around designed to help people be their full best selves, both as leaders in organizations and in their lives and in the departments they lead and in their churches and their families and all of that. we do so many different things, Mike, it’s really hard to, but I think that it goes back to promoting healthy human dignity in the human person.

Michael Smith
So is that how you would define success for your organization?

Pat Lencioni
⁓ Success is are we doing everything that God is calling us to do to address unaddressed areas that make people better people.

Michael Smith
that’s good.

Thanks. Okay. Beyond the professional success of your organization, what parts of this work just bring you joy and fulfillment?

Pat Lencioni
You know, that’s such a great question.

I love teaching. I love helping people discover ah-has. Watching somebody go, my gosh, I never thought of it that way.

is probably the moment I love. And that moment, I’ve never answered it this way, but that moment transcends consulting, because I love being in the room for years. That’s what I did. I’d work with CEOs and their teams. And I love when they said, my gosh, that’s totally what we need. And I love when I write my books and people will tell me, that was a real simple breakthrough for me. And I love it when I’m speaking to an audience and I like to do back and forth and people talk about the breakthroughs they have.

I love it when we do working genius or the five dysfunctions of a team and people make breakthroughs. So I always say like, I’d like to be a saint one day. I hope that God welcomes me into heaven and says I lived a saintly life. But if I were a patron saint of something, I think I would be the patron saint of the ignorant. People that are smart, but they just don’t know things. And I like to think that this boy from Bakersfield helps them see simple things that they probably already kind of understand, but have never looked at that.

So I really love the aha moments. think that’s what I love the most.

Michael Smith
Well, looking back over your career, have you seen the landscape of leadership and culture shift? Are there big changes that happen or some things just stay the same?

Pat Lencioni
Well, certainly human nature doesn’t change, know, we all have our challenges because we’re human and we’re not perfect, the sight of heaven. But I have seen it change because as culture changes, leadership changes. And I think what I’ve seen, it may be changing back right now. I hope so. I hope and pray that it is. But I think what I’ve seen is the acceptance of ego

grown.

I think maybe as media has changed, I think that we’ve actually allowed CEOs and leaders to be more self-interested and not recognize that as being as big a problem as it is. And I think that might be changing right now. But I think that when I started doing this 30 years ago, our business, almost 30 years ago, don’t think the high-tech boom and the… wasn’t quite as… It had just begun to start.

And then more and more companies about IPOs and wealth and power and being cool and famous. And so everybody would say like, who’s the best CEO in the world? And they were really trying to come up with the famous ones. And I think that the requirement of humility in leadership is coming back. But for years, humility was just not seen as a strength. And I think that’s because fame,

seem to become the currency of the day. And a lot of high tech, super wealthy people with big egos were seen as the standard bearers of leadership and they weren’t. And now when people say, what’s the best company in the world or who’s the best CEO? And I’m like, it’s probably a company you’ve never heard of or a CEO you wouldn’t recognize because he or she is doing their job in service of others. And…

they’re not interested in and they’re actually wary of becoming powerful and well known. And that is where their influence comes from. So I’m hoping that comes back. I think it’s starting to, but for the longest time, kids were coming out of school saying, I wanna be a CEO. And I would say, why? And they would go, I don’t know. And I was like, don’t be one. Because it’s all about fame and power and wealth.

Michael Smith
You’ve had a

unique view over lots of different types of organizations and kind of hit on this a little bit, but what is the next big challenge you think organizations are going to face in trying to build healthy organizations?

Pat Lencioni
It’s a great question. And the answer is really, I don’t know. ⁓ Certainly, right now, everybody’s talking about AI. And it would be foolish not to think that it’s going to change things, because it is. It would probably be unwise also to think that it destroys everything, which is that, yeah, there’s certain jobs that technology is going to do. And I’m scared about the way that that’s going about. I think we need to be very prudent about thinking about that. ⁓

I think the biggest challenge might

needing to find meaning in their work, which is great. And are people gonna be able to connect them to that? Because younger people today are just not like young people 30 years ago. When I got out of school 40 years ago, I thought work was like, hey, you do your job, you put your head down and you’re glad that they pay you. And cause like we came from the World War II generation who pretty much raised that way. Now young people are like, I wanna do something that…

matters, which I love, but some of the old work ethic kind of started to disappear. I think we might be re-entering a phase where people are going to have to balance that. I think, you know, St. Thomas Aquinas said, virtue lies in the middle. Work should not be slavish and in misery and drudgery, but it also isn’t supposed to be puppy dogs and rainbows. And I think we’re going to find that middle ground where it’s hard.

and it needs to be, but it’s also meaningful and there’s a purpose to it. So I think that swinging that pendulum back, think young people are gonna have to, and companies are gonna have to figure, find a balance between those two things.

Michael Smith
That’s good. So we build a lot of our internal culture and our vocabulary around your work. During our interview process, we lean into those humble, hungry, smart virtues as criteria for one of our interviews we call the culture interview. There’s one thing for a person to read your book and understand that framework. But how do you see that ⁓ those virtues help us not just find strong individuals, but help us

Pat Lencioni
that’s great.

Michael Smith
build productive teams from the start.

Pat Lencioni
You know, it’s, that book, The Ideal Team Player, which is where we introduced Humble Hungry Smart, which I said before was the founding values of our company. I had no idea what that book was, that that book would ever come about because we just thought those were the three values that we valued. I came up with those in working in my own department and then we would go to clients and they would hear, they’d go, what are your values? And I’d say, well, I’ll tell you, but, and they’d go, we want the, we’re gonna use those. And I said, no, no, you have to come up with your own. And that’s when we realized there was something universal about

humble, hungry, and smart, and that it really was the definition of teamwork. Like if you want somebody who’s a team player, they can’t be ego-driven, they have to be other-driven. They can’t be a slacker, they have to be like, yeah, I wanna take on more, not a workaholic, but take on more. And they can’t be clueless about how they interact with others.

so I wrote that book almost begrudgingly, somebody said, it’s a book, and I said, really? And that book has taken off, and so many organizations are using it in their hiring, which is wonderful.

The benefit of using that in hiring, to get to your question, is that when somebody has the desire and capacity for those values, those virtues, everything gets so much easier. Because even when they’re struggling with some competency, or when they make a mistake, or when there’s something that goes wrong, when you have those basic things, working with them is so much easier. And when they don’t have those things,

Michael Smith
Absolutely.

Pat Lencioni
It’s really, it’s possible to develop them, to instill in them, but it’s what a cheat code it is to say, if they’re humble, hungry and smart, managing them, motivating them, correcting them, developing them, it’s so easy because it’s really hard to overcome an inherent ego thing, problem. It’s really hard to overcome an inherent laziness kind of issue, like a minimalist, I just wanna do the bare minimum to get by. And it can be hard to overcome a person who doesn’t,

have a good understanding of how to deal with people, emotional intelligence. Now, all of those things can be overcome. And if you’ve got somebody on your team that doesn’t have one of those, love them through that and help them acquire them. But if they don’t have a desire to acquire them, they’re probably not gonna fit in a team oriented culture. And like your company is amazing because there’s people distributed all over the world and working together. If they don’t have a natural affinity toward humility, hunger and being

emotionally intelligent, it’s tough because they’re dealing with people on Zoom calls and phone calls and occasionally being together. They don’t have the benefit of being there every day. And so it’s a cheat code for people that are probably going to learn how to work well together. And that is a huge competitive advantage.

Michael Smith
That kind of leads into my next thing. We not only do it in the interview process, but we do it. We do a three month culture onboarding. Okay. And one of the months we lean into the IDl team player because we want people to embody those virtues in their work. So in your experience, ⁓ what takes it from just hidden knowledge of knowing these things to actually implementing them and actually living them out in daily interactions? How do they get there?

Pat Lencioni
Well, that’s a great question. ⁓ And I hope it doesn’t sound like I have, ⁓ as they say, pat answers, my name is Pat. So I think of things in real time. And certainly I’ve thought about these things, but I don’t have a scripted answer to these questions. But something just occurred to me. And I think it’s the first value of humility is the most important. Because, by the way, it’s the chief virtue. Because if pride is the root of all sin, the antidote to pride is humility. So it’s the chief virtue, I think, in many ways.

of those kind. And humility, what’s required of somebody who’s humble is vulnerability. So what makes these not just head things, but hands and feet and heart things, is a person’s willingness to say, I was wrong, or I need help, or I’m not good at that, or really sorry. And when a person can say those kinds of things, which is vulnerability-based humility,

then everything, then it becomes real. But if a person is not vulnerable, then they can’t really display humility. And then the other values become, because when you don’t have humility, and we go through this, a person who’s hungry, they wanna work hard, and they’re smart, and they’re really good at working with people, but they’re not humble, that is dangerous.

Because that’s what we call the skillful politician. Because essentially they’re not honestly vulnerable and humble, but they really are ambitious and they know how to have a good meeting and have good conversation. Those people destroy organizations because they know how to project a false humility, but it’s all about them.

Michael Smith
Yeah, you’re leading right into my next question because we spend another month in the five dysfunctions of the team in our culture onboarding and we call it the plays because that’s how we want the team to operate. What’s the play they want to call to move forward? And it starts with vulnerability based trust. And you just alluded to it, but I’d love to know your definition of vulnerability based trust.

Pat Lencioni
cool.

So cool.

Yet it is in a human relationship, if you don’t know that the other person is capable of saying, it’s on me, it’s my bad, that they’re capable of taking on what they need to own and therefore not projecting onto others things, but taking ownership for their part in something, whether it’s a mistake or an issue or a relationship thing.

If you don’t believe that they’re capable of that, you cannot have trust with them. Because you feel like the extent of your relationship, the depth of your relationship is limited by you saying things to them that protect them from having to acknowledge their own limitations. And this is true in any relationship. It’s like, yeah, we’re close. Do you trust them? Well, I do as long as I don’t have to require them to be vulnerable. And I’m glad you went to that.

because that vulnerability-based trust is just critical. It’s not about perfection. In fact, it’s the opposite of that. It’s knowing that I’m not gonna be perfect and that I can say so. And so, man, but let me just tell you, as you’re talking about all this, the way you’re using our stuff, it’s a crazy thing to write a book, and we do eat our own dog food, as people say here. But I think there’s other companies that are even practicing this in newer ways beyond us.

I mean, it’s a humbling thing to learn about the fact that you are so intentional and so committed to doing this and think that to a limited extent, I feel like I’m the cobbler whose kids don’t always have their shoes on. So it’s really edifying and gratifying to me to know how you’re using it and just slightly humbling in the truest sense of the word.

to think that maybe other people are actually even better at living it than we are.

Michael Smith
Yeah, I love the C S Lewis quote I guess I’m paraphrasing, but it says humility is not thinking less of yourself, but it’s thinking of yourself less. So want to tell people, want them to never discount what you bring to the team, but always remember you can’t bring everything to the team. And it’s, it’s okay to say, I don’t know, but it is okay to say, I do know, and I can help. And it’s okay to say I made a mistake.

Pat Lencioni
Yes.

Right.

You know, I love that C.S. Lewis quote, because people always say, is humility? And I love that quote, because people think it’s false meekness. It’s like if you’re good at something, and you know people that do this, I don’t think I’m that good at it. I mean, there’s a few reasons why that’s not good. One, it’s not true, and humility is rooted in truth. Two, if you have a gift and God gave it to you, denying that is not good. And three, it makes people think, ⁓ you’re not comfortable.

saying what is true, you’re afraid to acknowledge that. If you have a great gift, you should say, I’m, ⁓ this is a gift. And the thing is when it’s a gift, you brag about the giver, not the person that receives it. And so when people can’t acknowledge what they’re good at, but doesn’t mean you have to talk about yourself all the time, or you have to constantly call people’s attention to it, you just don’t deny it. And so that idea of humility, that you’re not in denial of that. The other thing about humility,

Michael Smith
Absolutely.

Pat Lencioni
is being able, I love this quote, I don’t know who said this, humility is like standing next to a beautiful cathedral and being just as joyful about the beauty as if you had built it yourself. So because some people will look at somebody else’s beauty, their gifts and and think, why am I not better at that? And a truly humble person will look at somebody else who exceeds them in an area and go.

You are so much better than I am. That is so cool. How do you do that? Not in a way like, I wish I could do that. I’m not as good, but like, I’m so glad somebody’s even better than I am at that. I want to celebrate that. And that doesn’t diminish me. I feel like I can enjoy your superior gifts in a certain area and really celebrate that and be joyful. That’s humility.

You know.

Michael Smith
So

a business leader who’s going, man, I want to build my company on that type of trust. Where do they start?

Pat Lencioni
with themselves, you know? If you’re looking at your team and you’re like, I think I’m 70 % there on being trustworthy and humble and hungry and smart, let’s take those. But most of my team, they’re at about

Michael Smith
Yeah.

Pat Lencioni
would say they need to go first because they’re further away. It’s like work on your 30%. And every bit of…

attention you bring, that you say, wanna work on myself, just makes it so much easier for when you say to them, hey, I’d like you to work on your, they’re gonna look at you and go, well, you’re doing it. I want to work on myself. But when we start with others, I mean, it’s just like, I was talking to a counselor today, I do counseling. And we were talking about something that I’m struggling with in my environment.

And it’s so great when he goes, so what do you need to do to work on yourself to deal with that? And that is such a gift. And it’s actually a relief. At first it’s hard. It’s like, can’t I blame somebody else? When you finally accept the fact that your locus of control is you, and you need to own what you need to do, it gives you the freedom to love others with the right boundaries and freedom, and to let go of having to protect yourself.

It’s crazy. ⁓ work on, always start with what do I need to do here?

Michael Smith
Yeah, the, you know, I told you up at top that we’re a total remote company and you kind of work in a hybrid model, I believe, as a table group and

Are there challenges that these two environments, which are a lot more prevalent today than they’ve been in the last decade, to actually living this stuff out?

Pat Lencioni
Yes.

Yeah, I’m gonna just be really blunt. It’s not good. It’s not better, but it’s real. And we can’t make the perfect the enemy of the good. In a perfect world, and someday maybe they’ll have teleportation, people would be able to all work together and zoom out to where they need to literally zoom, not like zoom zoom, and then bop back. But we don’t have that.

And when you’re in an environment where you’re serving clients all over and you need to be with them

That’s the reality. And the truth is, a remote company that has culture and really does those things will often exceed the average company that’s co-located that doesn’t bother to do these things. So it is not a not-insurmountable obstacle.

And frankly, if you’re intentional about being healthy, you can do that remotely better than most companies because they don’t do it.

Michael Smith
that’s a great line. Intentional. You have to put time into it.

Pat Lencioni
Yes.

Right. But having said that, we used to be all in one place and it was just better.

I will tell you that the cost on our company of not being co-located has been very real. And it’s called for us to change the intentionality of how we do things. Because when you’re co-located,

Things happen in between things. In between meetings, conversations happen. You build trust in non-planned activities, like eating lunch together or talking across the desk from one another. And no matter how much technology we have, it just doesn’t work the same way. It’s like, the thing is, Michael, I have met you now and I’ve met Sam.

but it’s a two dimensional thing and there’s nothing quite like being together.

So it’s just different. And I think if we underestimate the challenge, if people go, well, we’re remote, but that’s okay. We’ll figure it out. You will probably have problems. But if you really understand the challenge and you do things like you have a three month onboarding process and you teach them real principles and you work on it, my gosh, you’re gonna be

better off than companies who rely on the fact that they’re just together all the time. One of the things I’ve realized, and I’m going to do a podcast about this and write about this, is I have seen in my own company, and I know this is true in others, really good people who love each other and are trustworthy and have common shared values and good intentions. I have seen how not being together can lead to politics where we

mistakenly attribute one another’s behaviors when we’re not together to maybe there’s some bad intention there. It’s crazy.

Michael Smith
Yeah, I tell this phrase,

yeah, I tell this phrase that says silence is a whole lot louder than conversation. So the

Pat Lencioni
Yes,

that’s a great quote. And the inferences we make as a result of that silence can be so dangerous. It’s our fall in nature. Like there’s a vacuum and too often we fill it with, maybe that means they’re thinking this. And then somebody else, call it climbing the ladder of inference.

Michael Smith
Absolutely.

Yes.

Pat Lencioni
And suddenly you’re like, well, I thought that. Well, I thought as a result of that, you thought that. And then I thought this. And so being together allows us to come down from the ladder of inference and really reconnect. And so when you’re remote, take advantage of the times when you are together to really build strong relationship. And when you’re on Zoom, give yourself the length of time you need to go to the second level. Just the other day, I was talking to one of my co-founders. She’s a dear friend. I’ve known her for 32 years.

I love her, you know, in the proper way. And we are very close. Even with us, since I’ve moved out here, some things have happened and we were having disagreements and frustrated with each other. And we finally got frustrated each other on a Zoom call. And it led to going, what’s really going on here? And then there was some tears. That doesn’t happen every day. It doesn’t happen every week. But she was like, she told me how she was feeling. And I finally understood that it was because we’re not together. And

She felt unseen, I felt unseen. Nobody wants to say that to each other in a call, but until we finally got below the surface, we weren’t able to repair the relationship and get back to that place of trust.

Michael Smith
had another month in our cultural onboarding, we take a week and dive into the Working Genius. We introduce it early to our hires and it has helped our teams understand themselves and how teams collaborate. Our leaders request someone’s Working Genius report as soon as they’re assigned to their team and get a new team report. just give us a big picture of the Working Genius, because we could spend hours talking about it.

Pat Lencioni
Okay.

is so great.

Michael Smith
us.

Pat Lencioni
And you whether there’s two people listening to this or 2000 or 200,000, I want everybody listening to this to really, really understand this. I am the worst sales person in the world. I would, we have a book called Getting Naked about how we work with our clients and we will talk somebody out of working with us if it’s not the right thing for them. So when I believe something is really good for them and I feel comfortable saying it, there’s a good indication that that’s really strong. Working genius we discovered by accident five years ago.

And I’ve it’s been the most exciting thing even more than the five dysfunctions of a team even more than the Advantage and the IDl team player and all that stuff We came to the conclusion because of my own frustration that there are six kinds of work that have to happen on any Project in any program and any kind of work in our homes in our churches in our schools when you’re at a job and Trying to get anything done. There are six kinds of work that have to be present

And only two of those six are any given person’s working genius, which means they get joy and energy from that work. They were designed, created by God to do those things and to get fed by that. And when they get to work using those geniuses, work isn’t work at all.

It’s play, it’s not burnout. And the crazy thing is my two working geniuses will be somebody else’s

working frustrations, they will be the very thing that drains them of joy and energy and leads to their burnout. As we say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

And if you don’t know what you’re working, which of those six is your working genius, you’re gonna go to work and wonder, why am I struggling with this? What is wrong with me? Am I lazy? Or you’re gonna wonder that about other people.

and you’re gonna self attack and you’re gonna judge and you’re gonna feel guilty or inspire guilt in others. And when people do the working genius, it takes 12 minutes to do this assessment and they look at the report, they suddenly go, no wonder I failed in that job in my career or no wonder I did really well on that project and that one I hate when I have to do it. No wonder on our team, I get frustrated when people ask me to do this and that person loves doing it.

No wonder my wife and I argue whenever this comes. We’ve had so many people have breakthroughs at work and at home because before they understood their working genius, they thought something was wrong with them because they thought I’m supposed to be good at everything and nobody is supposed to be good at everything. Sometimes we have to, hopefully for a very limited period of time, I mean like an hour or two or a day or a week, do something we don’t like, but if we’re in a job,

or even a role in our home and in our marriage that is draining our joy and energy, it is going to lead to so many problems in our relationships, in our self-esteem, in our joy. And when people figure out what their working geniuses are, it can change everything.

Michael Smith
Yeah.

So the six working geniuses are wonder, invention, discernment, galvanizing, enablement, and tenacity.

Pat Lencioni
And it goes

from the top to the, I mean like head in the clouds, wonder, down to tenacity, which is feet on the ground, getting stuff done. They’re all important.

Michael Smith
Yeah. It’s been a game

changer. And I’ll tell you, confession, I’m a WD. And you are an ID, which is discriminating ideator. Is that correct? Yeah. So I remember the day you described these two word definitions on the podcast. I was driving my car and I really had an emotional moment and I really think I said out loud, that’s me. That’s what I like to do. And it

Pat Lencioni
Yes, very nice. That’s awesome.

Michael Smith
also has helped me understand why I didn’t like certain aspects of my job or why it took joy away from me or I avoided them. And I wish I’d known this earlier in my career because I didn’t tell you, but I spent 30 years working in churches and I had to do a lot of galvanizing and enablement, which are my frustrations. And we could have a whole conversation of this, but here’s my question for you. How has identifying yourself as the ID, discriminating ideator,

Pat Lencioni
raised five.

⁓ wow.

Michael Smith
changed how you lead your organization.

Pat Lencioni
Okay, this is great. And for those people, and that made me really happy just now, thinking about you sitting in the car and saying, wow, that’s me. That’s what I love those moments, because it’s about the truth and it gives you dignity and you see yourself as this worthy child of God who was built to do certain things and doesn’t have to apologize for not being good at others.

So for me, this whole thing came about because for years, I would come to work and be frustrated. And I loved the people I worked with and I loved what we did. It was my firm and our firm and it was like family. And I’d come to work, I never had the Sunday blues, I loved going to work. And then many times, like a few hours into the day, I’d be like, ⁓ And I’d feel guilty, like why am I frustrated? And finally one day somebody said, why are you like that? And I said,

I don’t know, but I want to figure it out. And by the grace of God, I just remember sitting there going, what is it that frustrates me? And I identified it galvanizing as the thing. Every day I was coming to work, galvanizing is the genius of provoking people to do something different, to rallying the troops. Well, I’m the CEO of my company and I’m a public speaker and an author and a consultant. People, but you like doing that. It’s like, I like doing it once. I like sort of figuring it out.

I don’t like getting up every day and going, okay, everybody, let’s do it again. And here we go. Galvanizers love that. They get joy and energy out of provoking people to do something differently and reminding them and cheerleading them on and selling. They love to inspire action.

I thought, well, because I’m the CEO, I have to be the chief galvanizing officer. And…

What I didn’t know is nobody else in my organization loved galvanizing for 20 years. essentially we were coming to work and somebody was like, well, somebody has to do that. And I would be like, I guess it’s going to be me. And I was leaning into something that didn’t bring me joy and energy. Now, does that mean I should never do that? No, everybody has to do stuff they don’t like sometimes, but I was doing it all the time. And when I figured that out, I was able to look at the other people around me and go, other people like doing this.

I’m gonna give them responsibility for doing the things that they love. And one guy said, I want you to be a galvanizer here. And he goes, well, I haven’t been here long enough. And I said, no, no, it’s not because you’ve earned the right to do that. It’s because it’s a gift of yours.

And it allowed me to do a manageable level of it, but then spend way more of my time doing the things that I loved. And when you’re in an organization, a team, a family,

and people are aware of the things that feed them and aware of the things that drain them, suddenly everybody’s helping each other adjust what they do and how they do it. mean, productivity and morale go through the roof. And then when you have to do something you don’t love, you can go, hey you guys, I have to do that. And they’re like, hang in there, we know you hate that, but thanks for taking one for the team today. But nobody’s meant to take one for the team in their career. And so many people have lived that way.

Michael Smith
Yeah.

Pat Lencioni
We had a guy who was a pastor in a church, Mike, and Sam, and everybody else, who right after Working Genius came out, wrote to us and he said, I thought I was a fraud for 20 years. He said, I was a pastor in a church and I couldn’t write a sermon or a homily to save my life. He goes, other pastors could go for a walk in the woods and come up with a four part series and come up with a great talk. And I would sit there and I would grind on it and grind on it and grind on it.

He goes, did the working genius and he found out that he was actually a W, he was a DE or a WD like you. He didn’t have invention. And he goes, coming up with a new idea isn’t my thing. said, and I remember when I talked to him, was like, but you love counseling. He goes, oh, I love one-on-one counseling. When a person is sad or they need inspiration, I love sitting down in room and helping them figure it out and being there for them. I said, do you know that there’s pastors that love to write homilies and sermons and deliver them?

who really don’t like one-on-one counseling, and they feel like a fraud because they don’t like that. See, the problem is, people think that if I’m gonna be the CEO or a pastor or the principal of a school or a parent, I probably should love and be good at all aspects of what that job entails, and no one is. And when you walk around thinking, feeling shame, what you ought to be saying is, hey everybody, I suck at that.

I’m a pastor who sucks at sermons. So I need to ask people who are good at it to help me. But I love this other part of my job. I will, and suddenly it’s like announcing to the world that you’re human.

Michael Smith
Yeah, we have some teams that are underrepresented in some of these geniuses and I just encourage them to go borrow or get together and collectively go, hey, we’re not great at this, but we’re going to put it all together and pull it all together for what we need at this time. So that’s kind of how I lean into it as I teach them.

Pat Lencioni
And how fun

it is to actually, when you go borrow somebody else’s genius, you’re giving them the gift of using their genius and being recognized for it. Nobody goes, when people come to me and they say, my wife will do it now, I need your eye, I need your invention, or I need your discernment. I’m like, ⁓ yay. And now she can come to me and say, hey Pat, I need some tea from you, some tenacity. And I’ll go.

Michael Smith
Absolutely.

Pat Lencioni
And she knows she’s asking me to do something I don’t like and so then I can prepare myself and she goes, I’m not gonna ask you to do it a lot, but I just need it today for this. And then I can prepare for that. Before we had this language, I didn’t know why I would recoil when somebody asked me to do tea work.

Michael Smith
Yeah.

Well, there’s a phrase you used on one of your podcasts and I’m paraphrasing. I think you said something like, everybody can be successful if they’re self-aware of what they bring to the table. They’re self-aware of who they are. And that was an aha moment for me. I use that phrase over and over again inside our organization. But the aha moment for me was that’s how you can apply it, especially around the four conversations that happen in any meeting.

Because I don’t care what the meeting’s named, what you said about the four conversations, that’s the aha moment for me. Do you want to tell them about those four conversations that happen in any meeting?

Pat Lencioni
Now wait, is this the four, because there’s two, and you’re gonna have to remind me, because that’s my personality.

Michael Smith
Okay.

Pat Lencioni
came up with this, so there’s four kinds of meetings that people should have, but it’s not the four kind of conversations, so remind me what the four kind of conversations are.

Michael Smith
Yeah, it’s the ID of brainstorming. You’re deciding you’re launching and then the status review and obstacle clearing where most of the first part only takes about 45 % of a project. The back part takes most of the project and everybody shows up differently depending on their geniuses.

Pat Lencioni
So this came from, but it’s better now. years ago I wrote a book called Death by Meeting because what I realized is there were different kinds of meetings and people were trying to have them all at one time. And we called it meetings too. And they were trying to essentially do like the daily check-in, which was totally administrative and the tactical meeting where you’re solving problems and then the strategic problem solving and then the big picture review and all that stuff.

Michael Smith
Mm-hmm. That’s right.

Pat Lencioni
This thing that you’re saying here, I really like, cause it gets back into the kind of a conversation it is. And you can’t have these conversations at the same time and expect people to be on the same page. And you know something else? Different people enjoy these conversations differently. And so it’s great to go, which one are we doing today?

Michael Smith
Absolutely.

Yeah, so we were.

think that’s the ID that you call out the conversation. We had one of our teams go away for a strategic meeting and no one on that team had wonder, but they were doing a brainstorming session. But they were able to use this and go, look, today is about brainstorming. And when someone jumped to the tenacity or getting things done, they go, well, wait a minute. That’s not where we are. We’re coming back.

Pat Lencioni
Ugh.

Michael Smith
Every genius is going to show up differently in those and they’re needed in different ways. And I love how you also say, and we could talk about this a lot in the macro version or the micro version of your genius, depending on what conversation.

Pat Lencioni
man, you’re real student of this. I want to say to all the people listening, and I don’t usually say this, I’m really bad at this in fact, because I don’t have galvanizing. Galvanizers do this a lot, but I want to say to everybody listening to this, write down workinggenius.com. It takes 12 minutes and it costs 25 bucks. And you will read the report, it’s very rich, you’ll figure out your two word descriptor that’s you. You’re going to go home to your spouse or your best friends or your colleagues and go,

Did you guys know this was me? And they’re gonna go, crap, of course that’s you. And did you know this one is the least that I am and it drives me crazy? And then I go, now that I know that, now I know why I make you mad when I have you do this. It will blow your mind about how you’re gonna apply it. And everybody we talk about says, I’m thinking about it now all the time and I want my friends, I wanna know what they are. And I wanna know that when we work together on something, how we best fit together.

It’s truly a game changer. And so I do want people write it down, go do it. It takes very little time. The report, when you read the report, you’ll right away start going, ⁓ okay, I know how I’m gonna use this.

Michael Smith
Yeah, let me encourage people to go back to your podcast. I listen to it regularly and just learn more, but go back and listen to the one about the four conversations because it is mind blowing about how you’re to show up in one of those conversations.

Pat Lencioni
Clearly I need to listen to it too. ⁓

Michael Smith
Okay, well.

What’s next for the table group? Because I know you just launched a new ideal team player assessment, but there’s probably other things on the horizon. How’s the launch been and the IDl team player assessment? What’s going on?

Pat Lencioni
Okay, I’ll just let you into the the strategy of our company. We’re going to launch the ideal team player assessment in November because we’re really focusing on working genius right now, because so many things are going on with that. We’re really trying to rally around that. And so that’s something I would have never said, but you might as well know. Our strategy is we’re pushing off the ITP assessment, ideal team player, which is the humble hungry smart.

till November. It’s out there if people wanna use it, but we’re gonna really launch it well later. We’re really focused on working genius. But what we’re working on longer term, the next big thing is something that came in the last year for me where I realized that there’s so many leaders, there’s so many people, parents, leaders, pastors, teachers, priests, everybody, this nagging suspicion that there’s something not quite right.

with them and that they need to get better and develop themselves, but they don’t know how to start. And so the problem is there’s so many people that are out there that are not like in excruciating pain and they’re not like life is a bowl of cherries. They’re like something’s not quite right. It could be at work, it could be at home, it’s usually both. And they’re like, what should I do? And there’s just not a good on-ramp for people to understand.

what that might be. And so we’re putting together a program that’s gonna help leaders and others quickly understand themselves and take a few simple steps to identify the low-hanging fruit in their life so they can begin the process of getting better. getting better might be just developing themselves. It might be addressing a wound. like, it could be a professional development thing. I need to develop this skill or…

Michael Smith
That’s great.

Pat Lencioni
I need to go back and look at something deeper. We are not qualified to help them do all of that, but what we can do is help them identify the first few steps.

on. That’s what I’m working on right now.

Michael Smith
That sounds great. Let us know. you were very open and honest that you took a sabbatical at the end of last year, coming into this year, sharing those thoughts publicly, thought was, courage and displayed great vulnerability. As you work with leaders, how important is it for them to be that vulnerable with their teams? To just let them in on life?

Pat Lencioni
Well, definitely we need to be vulnerable. There’s different levels of vulnerability in terms of

it has to be purely motivated and appropriate. And there is such a thing as TMI, too much information. But most leaders err on TLI, too little information. Because they buy into this notion that we should be.

Michael Smith
Yes.

Pat Lencioni
don’t let them see a sweat, the leader has to be strong. And yeah, people want their leaders to be strong, but they want them to be human. And you don’t trust a leader that’s superhuman, right? So for me, what happened was, and I shared this on a podcast because of the nature of what I do and because I had gone through it enough, and I thought, I think people could benefit from this. It wasn’t about getting attention for me or being like inappropriately needy.

It was about sharing something I thought people could benefit from. But so about a year ago,

I finally hit the wall in an area that I had been struggling with since I was a child, but I didn’t even know it. And a good friend of mine, Henry Cloud said, hey Pat, I was talking to him about it. He’s a psychologist and he said, you got some childhood issues Pat that you’ve probably never dealt with. I’m like, really? goes, yeah, here’s what you need to do. So I went and found some people that understood this stuff and realized, yeah.

I’ve been managing my life successfully, but not successfully, to deal with some issues that happened to me when I was really young that aren’t particularly interesting or not going to make the cover of a People magazine

But real stuff that happened that I actually, to cope with it, I tried to become a perfectionist and an achiever.

And when we look at people and go, they’re naturally a high achiever or a perfectionist, oftentimes there’s something underneath there that they’re running from and they’re doing it out of fear, not out of joy. And since I was a very young child, I felt like I had to please everyone in life, parents, teachers, coaches, bosses, that my identity was tied up in success in their eyes. That’s just not healthy.

it looks healthy to me outside because it looks like, you’re successful and things are going well for you. And in my life, I got rewarded for it externally, but it wasn’t sustainable. And I finally just said, I gotta go, I gotta go figure out what’s going on. And I started that process about five years ago. And then a year ago, it was like, okay, now I’m fully staring this in the face and I gotta go deep. So I took time off.

And by the grace of God surrounded, I actually went, did, I’m gonna do full-time personal development, which was a lot of prayer, spiritual directions, counseling, YouTube videos, reading, silence. And it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. was, and saying that is so trite. It was lonely, it was hard, it was super painful, and it was really beautiful and helpful and necessary. And I’m so thankful for it.

And I’m not done, we all are constantly developing in our lives, but I got to a point where I had to go deep. Not everybody needs to do it that way. But so I took five months of pure just, I never thought I would do that. I was the person who, you never have to do this. And I think what happened was my youngest son went away to college, so I didn’t have kids at home. And I finally probably said I could probably do this now without it.

depriving one of my kids. Because like so many people listening, I wanted to be the perfect father, the perfect husband, the perfect manager, the perfect CEO, the perfect leader, the perfect consultant, whatever else. And that pursuit is just unhealthy. I needed to look at why I needed to be perfect. And it’s been amazing and so freeing and liberating. And I’m learning to do things out of joy and love, not out of fear and worry.

Michael Smith
Yeah.

That kind of leads into, I just have two more questions.

at the end of your career and you look back and you say, what do I want to be known for? How do I want to be remembered? What do want them to say?

Pat Lencioni
he was just, he loved God and he loved others and he was imperfect but always tried and learned to grow and accept that he didn’t have to be perfect. And it’s, and you I want my wife to say that, most importantly, and I want my children to say that, and I want my friends to say that.

Michael Smith
That’s great.

Pat Lencioni
And I want enough people that I’m meant to communicate this stuff to, to learn from that. But it’s not about pleasing strangers. Even if I want to serve strangers and you’re like, I just got to meet you guys. And I didn’t know that I, my stuff had impacted you. Praise God for that. And I’m really happy for that. But my identity can’t be in like, ⁓ Mike Smith likes me. It’s, hey, I got to serve Mike Smith and I get to celebrate that.

You know? So I don’t know if that makes sense, but I think a lot of people in life, celebrities, athletes, CEOs, anybody famous, I think in an honest moment, they’re like, why do I care what strangers think of me?

Michael Smith
Thank you. Sure.

Yeah, I look at it, Pat, and I go, I want to be faithful to what I think God’s called me to be and that I lived out my life with integrity at that moment, in those moments.

Pat Lencioni
Yes.

And when I failed, I didn’t let it define me. I got up and I said, I know I’m not perfect, but I’m gonna keep trying. Yeah, I love it.

Michael Smith
Yeah. Well,

look, we always like to close with this. Is there a quote or a phrase that’s meant a lot to you in your life or your leadership journey?

Pat Lencioni
you know, there’s been a number and I’m not really good at netting them out. I wanna be that person that has that one. And you know, there’s a Bible verse that I love which is, know, come to me, my yoke is easy, my burden is light. If you’re labor and oppressed, come to me and I will give you rest. I love that. And then I love the quote, comparison is the thief of joy, which was actually Teddy Roosevelt who said that I think. Comparison is the thief of joy and I love that. Cause when we compare ourselves to others. But just this morning, I do this daily,

prayer and meditation. And just this morning, today is the feast day of Saint Augustine. A lot of people know who Augustine is. And he, just today I read this. There are two loves, the love of God and the love of the world. If the love of the world takes possession of you, there is no way for the love of God to enter into you. And I just think it’s like, that to me is the great thing. It’s like, if worldly success and worldly things ⁓ possess us,

It’s so easy to lose sight of the fact that what we really want, the peace that we want in life, that’s what everybody wants, comes from knowing that God is like, you’re fine. If that job doesn’t go the right way, you’re okay. And if somebody’s upset at you, that’s okay. And if you have a challenge in life, sometimes a big one, that’s okay. That peace of knowing that you’re okay is worth everything and it only comes from there.

Michael Smith
you for being with us. Is there anything you want to say in closing or something I should have asked you?

Pat Lencioni
Now this has been, these are great questions. And I mean this when I say I am so impressed and heartened by what you guys have done. And I know that your clients have benefited from it and your families have benefited from it and you get more done as a result of that. And I’m just so glad. I didn’t know until an hour ago.

hour ago I did not understand what you guys were doing with this. So that’s wonderful, what a gift.

So thanks for sharing that with me.

Sam Donaghey
an absolutely incredible conversation. If you’d like to learn more about Pat’s work, you can head over to thetablegroup.com or workinggenius.com. To catch all of our past episodes, visit fastslowmotion.com slash podcast, or you can subscribe to your

platform.

if you’ve got a question or a topic that you’d like us to explore, can drop us a note at fastslowmotion.com slash podcastfeedback, and we’ll see you next time on the Fast Slow Motion Podcast.