When we attended Liz Wiseman‘s Multipliers Leadership Summit in San Francisco, Toby and I did a short video for Liz explaining how we do our native genius activity at Bluewire Media. It’s a process we follow with new team members once they’ve been with us for about 3 months.

Multipliers Success Story #1 Bluewire Media from Larry Wiseman on Vimeo.

Here is the transcript:

Adam Franklin: Hi. It’s Adam Franklin and Toby Jenkins, and we’re from Bluewire Media. We first read “Multipliers” a couple of years ago when Verne Harnish suggested we read it at the Growth Summit.

Toby Jenkins: Yeah. So we actually read it on a Bali surf trip Adam and I were doing in Bali together, and essentially Adam read the book and said, “Yeah, look it’s a great book. You should definitely read it.” So I picked it up and read through it. To be honest, the rest of that trip was spent sort of discussing “Multipliers” and how we would get into the organisation, into Bluewire Media.

Adam Franklin: And when we were back from that trip, one of the first things we did at our quarterly meeting was we decided that we would native genius activity, and the way Liz explains it in the book is to ask a series of questions really to try and identify the native genius of each individual member of the team. The questions involve asking: “What is it that this person does naturally? What is it that this person does without any effort, yet they get results that are head and shoulders above everybody else? Also, what does this person do freely, and what does this person do in their own time?”

So we actually used those questions and set up kind of like a hot seat environment where each member of the team was in the hot seat so to speak, and everybody else went around and was thinking about those five questions and actually answering those questions on behalf of the person in the hot seat. So whilst it was quite confronting, it was really good because everybody in the team got to hear what everybody else’s thoughts were on what
the native genius was they brought to the table. It’s been a tremendous experience for us, one of the most exhilarating and
fun things that we’ve done as a group, and there’s been a number of ways that we’ve actually implemented what we’ve learned from that activity.

Toby Jenkins: I guess an example of how we put those native geniuses into action is that there are different phases for any particular project, and
so working to each other’s strengths is a really important piece of the puzzle. Basically, we had one particular challenge where
we had a large project that had been languishing with another company that we were picking up. It been languishing for about
four months. Our challenge then, in that situation, was to try to get it completed in a week, and essentially what we did was
using those native geniuses and understanding in depth where people fitted into the project, we were able to just get
everyone in a room, pull the client into that environment as well, and really work to everyone’s strengths. It was something
that was just absolutely exhilarating. So energizing as well in terms of it was a serious challenge for us to get that done.
It’s great to watch the response in our team. But then to see the client response was mind blowing as well, and the customer
experience and they loved it.

Multipliers

You can connect with @Liz Wiseman on twitter or read the book Multipliers: How the best leaders make everyone smarter.