How much of your day do you spend operating in your zone of genius? And, by the same token, how much do you spend doing those $15 tasks that sap your time and energy? When everything depends on you, it can be tough to break away from those daily demands.
But when we’re working in our zone of genius, we’re thriving. We’re achieving our highest potential. When we’re not, that creates friction — which spills over into our zone of genius. We end up doing strategic thinking and planning on nights or weekends, when we’re exhausted — if it gets done at all. Our energy drains, we feel resentful of having to work those long hours, and we move closer to burnout.
Let’s dive into this concept in more depth. Then, we’ll explore how to identify your zone of genius — and how to spend much more time in it within your daily work.
What Is the Zone of Genius?
Gay Hendricks introduces the concept of the zone of genius in his book The Big Leap. Basically, throughout the day, we might work in four different areas:
- Our zone of incompetence. These are the tasks that don’t use our talents, that bore us, and that take more time than they should.
- Our zone of competence. These are the things that we’re decent at doing, but that don’t use our skills or truly interest us.
- Our zone of excellence. These are the activities that we’re really good at and enjoy doing. However, they’re not the main thing that drives us, and if we focus on them too much, we won’t feel fulfilled.
- Our zone of genius. These are the things we feel most passionate about doing, and the things that fully leverage our core skills.
What’s the difference between working in your zone of excellence vs. zone of genius? In your zone of genius, your skills and passions merge. When you’re operating in your zone of genius, you’re doing your highest-impact work. You’re bringing your most brilliant and creative ideas to the table. You’re fully immersed in what you’re doing. You’re in a state of “flow” that no longer truly feels like work. In your zone of excellence, you may feel good about what you’re doing, but you’re not as excited or energized by it.
As a leader, you need to expand the time you spend working in your zone of genius. In fact, you probably need to increase it dramatically. Most of us spend much of our day in our zone of competence or excellence. We even handle tasks that bring us into our zone of incompetence, simply because someone needs to do them. Meanwhile, we don’t carve out much space for the things that fall into our zone of genius.
But that’s the place where our ingenuity takes shape and where we create the most value for our business. When you inhabit your zone of genius, you’re coming up with creative solutions. You’re innovating in ways that move the company forward, and you’re pushing your own boundaries. Because you’re challenging yourself in ways that align with your strengths and passions, you’re fully immersed in what you’re doing.
Now, let’s discuss how to identify your zone of genius — and how to start spending more time in it every day.
Identifying Your Zone of Genius
Identifying your zone of genius begins with self-awareness. Let’s dive into an exercise for growing your self-knowledge. Then, we’ll discuss some different types of working genius — and how to avoid getting stuck in your zone of excellence.
Self-Reflection: What Drives You?
Think of a time when you were “in the zone.” What were you doing? Why did it energize and inspire you? Maybe a few examples come to mind. Journal about this to gain clarity on what brought you into this headspace.
Similarly, when was the last time you were excited to go to work? What were you looking forward to doing?
Next, we’ll look at a framework for understanding the different areas of working genius.
6 Types of Working Genius
Patrick Lencioni, acclaimed author and founder of the Table Group, articulates six different types of working genius. Does one or two of these speak to you?
- Wonder: Envisioning new possibilities and challenging the status quo.
- Invention: Designing creative solutions and approaches to problems.
- Discernment: Using keen judgment to evaluate ideas.
- Galvanizing: Rallying others to take action and keeping them motivated.
- Enablement: Empowering and supporting others to do their best work.
- Tenacity: Carrying out projects with strong commitment and follow-through.
At his website, you can take an assessment to discover your area of working genius. Then, you can focus on leveraging this strength in your daily work.
Distinguishing Genius from Excellence
People often get trapped in their zone of excellence. Here, the work you’re doing comes naturally. You’re good at it. You receive frequent praise for your efforts. But something is missing. When you’re in your zone of excellence vs. your zone of genius, it still feels like work — not play. You don’t have as much passion for what you’re doing.
For me, working in my zone of genius means focusing on shaping our messaging in ways that speak to our values. It means acting as the face of the company, building our credibility and presence in our industry. It also means growing relationships with key clients, fostering a strong culture, and coaching the team to success. If I focused mainly on sales, I’d be in my zone of excellence, but I’d be missing the chance to leverage my strategic thinking and leadership skills.
When you step into your zone of genius, you’ll stop being the bottleneck to your own success — and you’ll start truly thriving. Let’s turn to how to make that shift now.
How to Spend More Time in Your Zone of Genius
The more time you carve out for your zone of genius, the easier it will be to ramp up the percentage of time you spend there in the future. In your zone of genius, you’ll be designing and implementing ideas that enhance your company’s success. And as your profits grow and your business scales, you can replace yourself in more and more tasks that fall into your zone of competence or excellence.
Here’s how to get started.
Audit Your Time
Download my Leadership Delegation Focus Matrix, a tool for eliminating those $15/hour tasks and exiting the daily grind.
Using this tool, audit your time to find out what’s keeping you from focusing on your zone of genius. For each task that falls into the left two quadrants of the matrix, ask yourself these questions:
- “Is it growing the business?”
- “Does it truly require my unique skill set?”
If you answered “no” to both questions, strive to offload the task. Begin with the ones in the bottom left quadrant. Once you’ve emptied out that one, move to the top left and offload those. It does take time; don’t feel like you’re doing something wrong if you’re not focused on your zone of genius the very first week after doing this. Over time, the bucket of daily tasks that fall outside of your zone of genius will get smaller as you take the following steps.
Create a “Zone of Genius” Map
Map out the types of activities that fit into your area of genius. When you’re using this strength, what are you doing? Try creating a mind map to illustrate the different strengths and passions you draw upon each day, showing how they’re linked. You can do this by hand or use an online tool. This can serve as a quick visual reference that helps you prioritize.
Center Your “Genius Zone” Activities in Your Schedule
Block out time for your zone of genius activities. Choose the times when you’ll give your best energy to those tasks. Then, plan everything else around them.
Hire an Executive Assistant
This is my number-one tip for how to fully step into your zone of genius. An executive assistant will protect your time and handle the tedious tasks that were derailing your focus from what matters most. They’ll also help you plan your schedule around your zone-of-genius activities.
That’s why hiring an executive assistant is such a game-changer. If the EA lets you reclaim 50% of your time, you’re not just going to double your business volume. You’re probably going to do substantially more, because you’re operating in your zone of genius for much more of your day.
Executive assistants don’t just answer calls and handle data entry. In many cases, they take on high-level ops support roles, overseeing daily operations while you focus on strategic planning and important meetings. A skilled EA will increase their responsibilities over time, as they grow familiar with how you and your company operate.
“Great executive assistants are force multipliers, not task rabbits,” writes Chad Willardson, president and founder of Pacific Capital and ELEVATED, in Forbes. He continues, “An executive assistant’s first task is to build a protective moat around their executive’s genius zone—that margin of your most high-impact duties—by deflecting the constant stream of low-priority emails, scheduling requests and routine administrative responsibilities that break concentration and fracture momentum.”
Plus, a good EA anticipates needs in advance. They proactively detect and solve problems before they become major issues. And since they have an excellent mind for systems and processes, they can help fine-tune how your business operates. In all of these ways, an executive assistant can support you in fully stepping into your zone of genius.
Guide Your Employees to Work in Their Zone of Genius
You can also help each of your employees to gradually narrow their focus to their zone of genius. Use the Leadership Delegation Focus Matrix with them, pinpointing which activities use their highest strengths.
Ask these questions to start defining their zone of genius:
- Which of their daily activities have the greatest impact on the business?
- What unique skills do they possess (whether they’re currently using them or not)?
- What tasks are they handling that truly require their uniqueness?
You can also share your own observations and ask them to take an evaluation of their strengths, discussing the results together.
Over time, try to refine their range of responsibilities to focus on these areas, hiring support staff to help with the others. For example, my executive assistant, Xie, is highly adept in developing our marketing strategy and spearheading the design of marketing collateral. So, we hired an employee to create marketing templates and other materials, who reports to her.
Now you understand how to identify your zone of genius and step into it more fully. When operating in your zone of genius, your work will become something that fuels you and brings you joy. You’ll look forward to diving back in at the beginning of the week. And your life will be richer and more rewarding as a result.
To discuss how to get started with finding an executive assistant or VA, set up a discovery call. I’ll be glad to share how we pinpoint the right executive assistant for a small business every time, what skills they can offer, and what the process looks like. Our clients’ 90% retention rate speaks for itself — we know how to find an executive assistant whose personality complements your own, and whose experience and skills match your business’s needs exactly.