July 27, 2026
New composition. New project. And a deadline that doesn't move just because you don't know each other yet.
Most teams solve this by simply starting. You divide the work across whoever's available and whatever the job title says, and you get to know each other along the way. That works, too. It just takes weeks, and those weeks fall exactly in the period where you can least afford to lose them.
What I see in practice is that getting to know each other during execution is the hardest moment to do it. You find out how someone works at the point where something is already being asked of them, and every miss costs you time.
Three things come back again and again with teams that have to figure each other out while already working.
Work lands with the wrong person. You divide tasks by availability and area of expertise, because that's all the information you have. Only weeks later does it turn out someone is stuck on work that drains them. Then you have to redistribute, with the deadline now considerably closer.
Decisions go too fast or stay open. Nobody knows yet who naturally probes and who naturally pushes. So either something gets decided too quickly without anyone holding the idea up to the light, or a decision stays open indefinitely because nobody dares to close it.
Frustration gets read as character. This is the worst one. Someone who delivers slowly or keeps asking questions picks up a label within two weeks. He's a perfectionist, she's chaotic, he holds everything up. That judgement is hard to undo and gets in the way for the rest of the project, even when there was nothing behind it.
What those three have in common: it isn't unwillingness and it isn't incompetence. It's that nobody knows yet what kind of work generates energy for whom, and that's exactly the information you need most at the start.
Working Genius makes visible which kind of work gives someone energy and which kind drains them. Not who someone is, but how someone works. For a team that doesn't know each other yet, that's precisely the information that normally takes months to gather.
Three steps, concretely.
Get to know your team members' profiles. Everyone takes the assessment. You then know, for each team member, which two geniuses give energy, which two are neutral, and which two drain them.
Use that in how you divide the work. This is the step that pays off most and gets skipped most often. You lay the profiles alongside the work that needs doing. Who gets energy from figuring it out, who from testing it, who from finishing it? That's a different question from who has time.
Take the time as a team to get to know each other this way. Not just you as team leader with the profiles on paper, but the team going through together how everyone is wired. That's the moment the shared language appears, and the moment people start daring to say where they get energy and where they don't.
This is the objection I hear most, and it's a fair one. There's urgency, things need to ship, and freeing up two half-days is a serious ask.
But if you don't do it up front, it costs you far more time along the way. That time is less visible, but it adds up. Not only in productivity, but in how much people enjoy the work. Slow down to speed up is the principle here.
So the question isn't whether you invest time in getting to know each other. That question is already answered. The question is whether you do it up front, where it pays off most.
At Sea Ranger Service, a new group of Sea Rangers starts every year. The new cohort is selected during an intensive bootcamp. After that, they get straight to work. Waiting for trust to grow on its own isn't a good option. That's why Sea Ranger Service runs a Working Genius programme before a team starts. "This programme speeds up getting to know each other properly, and because of that it reduces friction in the new team," says Sanne Boekhoff (Head of People).
It's no guarantee that the team will be at full speed straight away, and it doesn't replace the ordinary work of going through things together. It also isn't a way of putting people in boxes: nobody is pinned to two geniuses, and a Working Frustration is not a licence to leave tasks undone.
What it does do is shorten the discovery phase, by giving you handles for a meaningful conversation about work and by building trust quickly. You don't start blind, and you no longer have to infer each other's way of working from whatever goes wrong.
Curious whether this fits the team you're building right now? I'll ask a few questions, you'll ask a few, and we'll know soon enough together whether it leads anywhere.
Source: conversation with Annabelle Groenendijk about newly formed teams (July 2026); Patrick Lencioni, The 6 Types of Working Genius (The Table Group, 2022).
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