One of the recommendations throughout all leadership, management and career self-help books is to get to know yourself better. Really be open-minded to hearing feedback and paying attention to what you do best, what you enjoy most and what kind of impact you have on those around you as a means of measuring your effectiveness.
Along that same line, author and career coach Laura Garnett has provided a very positive, peppy and supportive book to help other people better understand their strengths and what they are most comfortable doing. The book is a strange mix of primary experience and observations with some very thoughtfully considered processes with probably a bit too much padding from secondary and tertiary sources. In some cases, it feels like she’s chosen the references to build or support her claims.
The strongest parts of the book are where she talks passionately about improving self awareness of one’s strengths and impact by creating a process to measure one’s own subjective experiences using performance tracker she has designed. You can download this with an e-mail sign-up http://www.lauragarnett.com/geniushabittracker
The author offers many groups of questions for self-reflection and for requesting feedback from colleagues to help build a stronger sense of confidence in one’s particular “Genius Zone” skillset.
As with many contemporary folks in the leadership and coaching field, she’s a strong believer in personality typing – but rather than using a system that exists and has been tested, she offers her own list of types which loosely resembles Meyers-Briggs, In these six groupings.
Process Creation—Making Everything Work Better
- Chaos-to-Order Problem-Solver
- Improvement Strategist
- Needle Finder
- Process Architect
- Good-to-Great Strategist
Visionary—Redefining the World
- Barrier-Breaking Visionary
- Opportunity Excavator
- Innovative Idea Strategist
- Possibility Architect
- Vision Strategist
- Strategic Visionary
- Visionary Change Maker
Strategist—Creating the Path
- Analytical Solution Strategist
- Efficiency Strategist
- People Strategist
- Possibility Strategist
- Results Strategist
- Training Results Strategist
- Solutions Excavator
Synthesizing—Bringing People and Ideas Together
- Collaboration Strategist
- Diagnostic Problem-Solver
- Discerning Ideator
- Synthesis Expert
Catalyzing—Igniting Opportunity
- Connection Catalyst
- Holistic Crisis Problem-Solver
- Social Advocate
- Team Maximizer
Builders—Ideas and Structures
- Creative Results Architect
- Deal Conductor
- Design Strategist
- Experience Producer
- Innovative Rebuilder
- Language and Idea Architect
- New Business Growth Strategist
This could be a much stronger book if she focused much more on how to map the results of the Performance Tracker to the personality/genius types that she’s describing.
The “Genius Habit” is an ambitious term and perhaps a bit confusing – to many. Even in the book, she describes providing clients with examples of their “Genius Zone” to share in job interviews but says “don’t use the term since people aren’t familiar with it.”
While she provides a ton of great examples from clients and her own experience – but she can be quite repetitive throughout the book. The book is written in first person – this makes it very accessible but dilutes the strength of her key offerings when combined with the fluff -- repeated references to her own experience and use of the full names of authors and books throughout. There’s also something about the editorial style – I noticed that there was inconsistency in references to other researchers – for example, there are six mentions of “Carol Dweck” for example but “Carl Jung” is mentioned once and all following references are just “Jung.”
The massive variety of case studies is super interesting but sometimes a bit distracting – it would be great to have greater distinction about why a specific case study is being called out and perhaps moving some case studies to an appendix. The author makes a cursory nod toward meditation, exercise and other things – almost as if leaving those things out would be remiss. I recommend leaving those things out and focusing more on the process of developing greater self-awareness with use of the performance tracker and identifying one’s Genius Zone via her typology (or even another established typology).
“The Genius Habit” is a strong introduction to the way that our author thinks about work and how to help people shape their careers – I look forward to a greater exploration and strengthening of her concepts and tools in her future works.
REVIEW: The Genius Habit: Break Free from Burnout, Reduce Career Anxiety and Double Your Productivity by Leveraging the Power of Being Who You Are at Work by Laura Garnett
RATING: 3-stars
© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.
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