Why Some Teams Feel Heavy to Lead
One of the most common things I hear from business owners is this:
“I feel like I’m carrying the whole thing.”
And here’s what I’ve learned after working with hundreds of small businesses: the problem is rarely effort.
Your team is probably working hard. But effort without the right genius in the right place creates friction—and friction almost always rolls uphill to the leader.
So let’s look at your team a little differently.
The 6 Geniuses and Who’s Around Your Table
You may remember from our last article that every person operates with two Working Geniuses—the work that energizes them most.
Here’s a quick look at all six:
Wonder — The genius of curiosity. These people ask the big questions and sense when something needs to change.
Invention — The genius of creativity. These people generate original ideas and solutions.
Discernment — The genius of instinct. These people can intuitively evaluate whether an idea will actually work.
Galvanizing — The genius of momentum. These people inspire and rally others to take action.
Enablement — The genius of support. These people are naturally responsive and love helping others succeed.
Tenacity — The genius of grit. These people push through and get things across the finish line.
Now think about your team.
Where do you see these geniuses showing up? And just as importantly, where are they missing?
What You Might Be Misreading
Here’s where it gets interesting.
That team member who seems disengaged in brainstorming meetings? They might be a Tenacity genius—brilliant at execution but genuinely drained by open-ended ideation.
The person who keeps asking, “But will this actually work?”
That’s not negativity. That’s Discernment doing its job.
And the one who helps everyone around them but never drives anything forward? That’s Enablement, not weakness.
When you start seeing your team through the lens of genius, what looked like disengagement starts to look like misalignment. What looked like resistance starts to look like a different kind of strength.
The Team That Complements You
The goal isn’t to build a team full of people who think like you.
It’s to build a team that covers what you can’t.
The leaders who feel like they’re carrying everything are often surrounded by people with real genius—just not the genius that’s missing.
And over time, that misalignment creates weight.
A few questions worth sitting with:
Which geniuses show up most on your team?
Which are missing or constantly being asked of the wrong person?
Are you filling gaps that someone else’s genius could cover?
Next week, we’ll look at how work actually moves through a team—and what happens when a key stage in that cycle goes uncovered.