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How to Discover “Native Genius” – Taking action on Multipliers

[This is a follow up on my previous article, the 4 Key leadership learnings from Multipliers.]

On Monday this week, Adam organised a “Native Genius” session for one of our Bluewire Media monthly meetings. It was a cracker!

In fact it is probably one of the best sessions we’ve ever conducted with our team.

Here’s what I wrote to Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown as feedback on the session:

I can’t tell you how energizing it was! It’s incredible to watch people around the table really identify what is the absolute best in their team mates. Then the reaction of the person in the “hot seat” – as they come to realise what others believe is their strongest quality, understand what it is that really drives them and realise how it translates not just to work, but across all aspects of their lives – was inspiring! The formal reviews we had scheduled for the next day were quite different as a result too.

If you wanted to watch the same unfold in your organisation, here’s how the session rolled out:

  • Get your group together (we did it with 6 of us – this was a good size and we had all been working together for quite a while which probably helped too)
  • Read through the description of “Native Genius” from the book:

A native genius is something that people do, not only exceptionally well, but absolutely naturally. They do it easily (without extra effort) and freely (without condition)…They get results that are head-and-shoulders above others but they do it without breaking a sweat.

  • Choose the person whose “Native Genius” you want to discover (let’s call it putting them in the “Hot Seat”)
  • Read through the 5 discovery questions (p48 ):

What do they do better than anything else they do? What do they do better than the people around them? What do they do without effort? What do they do without being asked? What do they do readily without being paid?

  • Get everyone’s input on that person’s Native Genius and write them down
  • Once everyone in the group (including the person in the “Hot Seat”) has had their say, summarise and then label their Native Genius!
  • Repeat this process, including the description and the questions, for each person in the group.

Good luck!

If you give this a try, I’d love to hear how your team responded and what you got from it.

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