Background

To be able to do our best work and live up to the individual excellence defined in Individual Habits & Expectations, we need to match company priorities and projects to individual talents and relative strengths. To maximize performance and achieve more output in less time, we need to have as many team members at any given time operating in their Zone of Genius.

Zone of Genius

What is the Zone of Genius? Great question. There are four zones of work:

  1. Zone of Incompetence.
    1. Zone of Incompetence are the things that other people probably do better than you (e.g. fix your car).
  2. Zone of Competence.
    1. Zone of Competence are the things that you do just fine, but others are as good as you (e.g. clean your bathroom).
  3. Zone of Excellence.
    1. Zone of Excellence are the things that you do better than others, but don’t love doing.  This is the danger zone.  Many people will want you to keep doing these things (as those people derive benefit from you doing them), but this is an area that you should also look to move away from. This is the hard one!
  4. Zone of Genius.
    1. Zone of Genius are the things that you are uniquely good at in the world, and that you love to do, so much so that time and space likely disappear when you do them. You are in a flow state. This is where you can add most value to the world and yourself.  This is where you should be driving toward spending most, if not all, of your time.

Conclusion

Some people worry that if each of us operates solely in our Zone of Genius that no one will be available to do the un-fun stuff.  This is a false fear.  There are many personality types.  For every activity that feels un-fun to you, there is someone out there who not only excels at it, but loves it.

Of course, at any given time, it is inevitable that we will be spending some time in the Zones of Excellence and Competence (we should explicitly minimize time in the Zone of Incompetence). But we should strive to maximize time in the Zone of Genius. To do this we all need to be transparent about what our Zone of Genius is, and then map all activities to the right people.

How to Find Your Zone of Genius

Finding Your Zone of Genius