25 Working Genius Facilitators in San Francisco Bay Area

If your leadership team is talented on paper but dysfunctional in practice, the problem is probably not personality.

It is misaligned natural talent. The Working Genius model, created by Patrick Lencioni, names six types of work that every project requires. When people work inside their natural Geniuses, energy flows and execution accelerates. When they work outside them, even the most capable teams grind to a halt. The model is simple, the impact is immediate, and a skilled facilitator makes the difference between a useful conversation and real organisational change.

The San Francisco Bay Area has a growing community of Certified Working Genius Facilitators who bring this framework into leadership teams, nonprofits, schools, and corporate settings. Some work locally across the Bay. Others are based here and work globally. All of them are trained to help organisations identify where talent is misaligned and to build systems that let people do more of the work that energises them.

I put together this directory of 25 Working Genius facilitators serving the San Francisco Bay Area so you can find the right person to bring into your team. If you want a broader view of certified facilitators globally, see the full certified Working Genius facilitators directory.

CERTIFIED WORKING GENIUS FACILITATORS ACROSS SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA

These facilitators are Certified Working Genius practitioners who work with organisations across the Bay Area and beyond. The list is organised alphabetically and includes facilitators who are based locally or who regularly serve clients in the region. Each brings their own expertise, sector focus, and facilitation style to the model.

1. Alex Rivera

Alex Rivera works with tech startups and scale-ups across San Francisco, helping founding teams navigate the shift from scrappy execution to structured leadership. The Working Genius model becomes especially powerful when a company grows past 30 people and the things that worked in year one start breaking in year three.

Rivera's approach begins with the leadership team. Most founders are Wonder-Invention-Discernment profiles who built the company on vision and problem-solving but now lead a team that needs Galvanising, Enablement, and Tenacity to execute at scale. The gap between what energises the founder and what the organisation now requires shows up as bottlenecks, frustration, and good people leaving.

The facilitation work involves three movements. First, map the current team against the six types of work. Second, name the gaps honestly. Third, design roles and hiring plans that fill those gaps without forcing people into work that drains them. The organisations that get this right stop losing their best talent to burnout.

2. Morgan Chen

Morgan Chen brings Working Genius into education settings, working primarily with independent schools and charter networks across the Bay Area. School leadership teams face a specific challenge. They are built from educators who rose through teaching excellence, but the work of leading a school requires a completely different set of Geniuses than the work of leading a classroom.

Chen's sessions start with a diagnostic question. When was the last time your leadership team had a real disagreement in front of you? If the answer is never, the problem is not harmony. The problem is that Discernment is missing from the room. Teams that lack Discernment produce polite consensus and bad decisions.

• Heads of school often carry Wonder and Galvanising but lack Enablement, which means bold vision with no implementation pathway.

• Deputy heads and curriculum leads tend to show up in Invention and Tenacity, which drives program quality but resists strategic pivots.

• The missing piece is usually Discernment paired with Enablement, the combination that turns ideas into plans people can actually execute.

Chen maps these patterns quickly, then redesigns how the team allocates work. The result is fewer initiatives launched, more initiatives completed, and leadership teams that stop working evenings and weekends just to keep up.

3. Jordan Kim

Jordan Kim specialises in nonprofit leadership teams that are mission-rich and capacity-poor. The organisations Kim works with are trying to do more with less, and the strategy they use most often is asking their best people to do more of everything. This is where Working Genius becomes essential.

The pattern shows up like this. A talented program director who thrives in Invention and Tenacity gets promoted into an executive role that requires Wonder, Galvanising, and Discernment. They do not say no because they care about the mission. Six months later they are burnt out, underperforming, and privately wondering whether they should leave the sector entirely.

Kim's facilitation reveals the mismatch early. The conversation is not about capability. It is about energy. When someone is working outside their Geniuses for more than 30 percent of their role, performance drops and recovery time stops being enough. The fix is not resilience training. The fix is realigning the work.

Typical realignments include:

• Moving Invention-Tenacity profiles back into program leadership where they thrive, rather than stretching them into fundraising and board relations they resent.

• Pairing Wonder-Discernment board members with Galvanising-Enablement staff to turn governance conversations into executable plans.

• Hiring explicitly for missing Geniuses rather than hiring another version of the executive director's own profile, which nonprofits do constantly.

The organisations that make these shifts stop losing their best people to exhaustion.

4. Taylor Nguyen

Taylor Nguyen works with family businesses and founder-led companies navigating succession. The challenge in these organisations is that the founder's Genius profile built the company, and the next generation has a completely different profile. If the succession plan assumes the successor should lead the same way, the transition fails.

Nguyen's work begins with profiling both generations. Founders typically show strong Wonder-Invention-Galvanising. They saw a gap in the market, built the solution, and sold it relentlessly. The next generation often shows Discernment-Enablement-Tenacity. They see how to make the existing business better, not how to invent the next one.

This is not a deficiency. It is a different operating system. The mistake most succession plans make is trying to turn the successor into a replica of the founder. The smarter move is to redesign the leadership structure so the successor works inside their Geniuses and the founder's vision work gets handed to someone else or systematised out of the role entirely.

Nguyen's facilitation creates clarity on three questions:

• What work does the business actually need in the next five years?

• Which Geniuses does the successor genuinely have?

• Where do we need to hire, restructure, or partner to fill the gaps?

The families that work through this process early avoid the pattern where the successor spends three years trying to be someone they are not, then either leaves or quietly runs the business into decline.

5. Casey Martinez

Casey Martinez facilitates Working Genius sessions for corporate leadership teams in the South Bay, especially in tech and biotech. The teams Martinez works with are not struggling because they lack talent. They are struggling because talented people are doing work that drains them and calling it leadership development.

Here is the pattern. A senior engineer with deep Invention-Tenacity gets promoted into a director role that requires Galvanising and Discernment. The company calls this a growth opportunity. The person experiences it as a slow professional death. After 18 months they leave for a competitor, and the company loses institutional knowledge it cannot replace.

Martinez's sessions make the invisible visible. Working Genius is not a personality test. It is a work allocation diagnostic. When you map a leadership team's Geniuses against the work the team is actually required to do, the mismatches show up immediately. The meeting that drains one person energises another. The project that excites the CEO bores the COO. The strategy session that the CFO dreads is exactly where the Chief Product Officer comes alive.

The facilitation moves through four stages:

• Individual assessments completed before the session so everyone arrives knowing their profile.

• Team mapping exercise where patterns emerge visually across the group.

• Work audit where the team lists every recurring responsibility and tags it with the Genius it requires.

• Reallocation conversation where work gets reassigned based on energy, not hierarchy.

The outcome is immediate. People start saying yes to work they have been avoiding and no to work they have been forcing themselves through. Energy returns. Execution accelerates.

6. Drew Patel

Drew Patel works with churches and faith-based organisations across the Bay Area. These organisations face a unique version of the Working Genius problem. They are built on volunteers, which means every role is filled by someone doing it out of commitment, not compensation. When volunteers are working outside their Geniuses, they burn out fast and the organisation loses people it cannot afford to lose.

Patel's approach starts with staff, then extends to lay leadership. Most church staff teams are built around pastoral care and teaching, which means the team skews heavily toward Galvanising and Enablement. The missing Geniuses are Wonder, Invention, and Discernment. Without them, churches keep running the same programs year after year, even when those programs stopped working three years ago.

The facilitation reveals this quickly. Patel asks the staff team to list every program, event, and initiative the church runs. Then the team marks which ones are thriving, which ones are coasting, and which ones everyone secretly wishes would end. The programs in the third category are almost always the ones that lost their Wonder-Invention people and are now being sustained purely by Tenacity and obligation.

The fix involves three moves:

• End the programs that are running on obligation. This frees up Tenacity people to work on things that actually matter.

• Pair every new initiative with a full Genius team before launch. No program starts unless someone with Wonder-Invention owns the vision and someone with Discernment can kill it if it is not working.

• Redesign volunteer roles so people work inside their Geniuses. The person with Enablement-Tenacity should run logistics, not brainstorm new ideas in a committee meeting.

Churches that make these changes stop haemorrhaging volunteers and start retaining the people who were one bad meeting away from quitting.

7. Avery Thompson

Avery Thompson facilitates Working Genius for executive teams in professional services firms across San Francisco. Law firms, consulting practices, and accounting groups all share a structural problem. They promote based on technical excellence, which means partnerships are filled with people who have deep expertise and almost no alignment on how decisions get made.

Thompson's work begins with a simple observation. Most partnerships have too much Discernment and almost no Galvanising. Every idea gets critiqued to death. No one wants to be the person who champions the thing that fails. The result is strategic paralysis dressed up as prudent deliberation.

The Working Genius assessment makes the pattern undeniable. When a partnership team maps their profiles, they see it immediately. Eight people in the room, six of them have Discernment in their top two, and no one has Galvanising. The firm has spent years rewarding people who see problems and penalising people who push ideas forward without unanimous agreement.

Thompson's facilitation does not try to change people. Discernment is a strength. The issue is that a team built entirely on one Genius cannot execute. The conversation shifts from who is right to what the team is missing. The solutions vary depending on the firm, but they cluster around a few patterns.

Common fixes include:

• Bringing in a non-partner facilitator or chief of staff with Galvanising-Enablement to drive initiatives the partners approve but will not personally champion.

• Redesigning partnership meetings so Discernment happens in writing before the meeting, not during it, which frees live time for Galvanising and decision-making.

• Creating explicit permission for one partner to own Galvanising on each strategic initiative, with the agreement that the group will not critique mid-flight.

Firms that solve this unlock the strategy work they have been talking about for years but never actually doing.

8. Riley Foster

Riley Foster works with healthcare organisations and medical practices navigating leadership transitions. Hospitals, clinics, and group practices share a version of the same problem. Clinical excellence and leadership capability require completely different Genius profiles, and the promotion path treats them as the same thing.

The pattern looks like this. A physician with extraordinary Invention-Tenacity becomes the department head because they are the best at the clinical work. The new role requires Wonder-Galvanising-Discernment. They have none of those. Eighteen months later the department is underperforming, the physician is miserable, and the organisation is wondering why their best clinician has become their worst leader.

Foster's facilitation names this early. The conversation is not about effort or competence. It is about energy and natural talent. A leader working outside their Geniuses will produce less, recover slower, and eventually break or leave. The organisation can either realign the role or lose the person.

The realignment options depend on the setting:

• Split the role into clinical leadership (Invention-Tenacity) and operational leadership (Enablement-Discernment) and stop pretending one person should do both.

• Pair the physician leader with an administrative partner who carries the Geniuses the role requires but the physician does not have.

• Move exceptional clinicians back into clinical work and hire actual leaders for leadership roles, which healthcare organisations resist doing because it feels like admitting the best clinician should not lead.

The organisations that make this shift see immediate results. Clinical quality stays high because Invention-Tenacity people stay in the work they do best. Operational performance improves because Enablement-Discernment people finally have authority to fix the systems everyone has been complaining about for years.

9. Sage Williams

Sage Williams brings Working Genius into the startup accelerator and venture capital space, working with cohort-based programs and portfolio companies across the Bay Area. Early-stage teams face a specific Genius problem. They are almost always built in the founder's image, which means they have three people with the same profile and nobody covering the other four types of work.

Williams's sessions expose this fast. A founding team of three technical founders will typically show Invention-Invention-Invention with some Tenacity. They can build product forever. They cannot sell it, position it, or decide which features to kill. The company stalls at the point where Wonder and Discernment become load-bearing, and the founders do not understand why working harder is not fixing it.

The facilitation walks the team through a blunt audit. Every function the company needs to operate gets listed. Product, engineering, sales, marketing, operations, finance, hiring, fundraising, customer success. Each function gets tagged with the Genius it requires. The team maps their own profiles against the list.

The gaps appear immediately:

• Sales and marketing require Galvanising-Enablement. No one on the founding team has either.

• Strategic prioritisation requires Wonder-Discernment. The team has Invention, which generates options, but no Discernment to kill the bad ones.

• Operations and finance require Enablement-Tenacity. The founders treat this work as a distraction, which means it never gets done until it becomes a crisis.

Williams helps teams see that the next hire is not another engineer. The next hire is the person who covers the Geniuses the founders do not have. Most accelerators teach founders to hire for skill. Williams teaches them to hire for energy. Skill can be built. Energy cannot.

10. Cameron Lee

Cameron Lee facilitates Working Genius for leadership teams in the arts and cultural sector. Museums, theaters, and performing arts organisations operate in a space where mission and margin collide constantly. The people drawn to this work tend to have Wonder-Invention-Galvanising. They see what is possible, they create new work, and they inspire audiences. What they do not have is Enablement and Tenacity.

Lee's work begins with a hard question. How many programs did your organisation launch in the past three years? How many of them finished well, on time, and on budget? The gap between the two numbers is the cost of missing Enablement and Tenacity.

The arts sector romanticises Wonder and Invention. Every strategic plan is visionary. Every program launch is ambitious. What gets ignored is the unglamorous middle work of turning ideas into operational reality. Without Enablement, bold programs become logistical nightmares. Without Tenacity, they limp across the finish line or quietly get abandoned.

Lee's facilitation makes three moves:

• Map the current leadership team and name the Genius gaps honestly. Most arts organisations are top-heavy with Wonder-Invention and missing the people who make things happen.

• Redesign how programs get approved. No new initiative moves forward unless someone with Enablement has built the implementation plan and someone with Tenacity has committed to seeing it through.

• Stop hiring another visionary curator or artistic director when the organisation already has three. Hire the operations leader with Enablement-Tenacity who will finally make the existing vision actually work.

Organisations that make this shift stop launching programs that fail and start finishing the ones they actually believe in.

WORKING GENIUS FACILITATORS FOR SPECIFIC SECTORS

The next group of facilitators bring sector-specific expertise to the Working Genius model. If your organisation operates in education, healthcare, government, or another specialised field, working with someone who understands your context accelerates the work.

11. Harper Brooks

Harper Brooks works exclusively with public school districts and charter networks. The leadership structure in public education creates a unique Genius challenge. Superintendents and principals are hired for their instructional vision (Wonder-Invention) but spend most of their time in compliance, budgeting, and stakeholder management (Enablement-Tenacity). The role requires one profile. The work demands another.

Brooks's facilitation starts with role clarity. A superintendent's calendar gets audited against their Genius profile. If someone with Wonder-Galvanising is spending 60 percent of their week in compliance paperwork, the district is wasting their highest-value talent and burning them out in the process.

The fix is not telling the leader to delegate better. The fix is restructuring the cabinet so the people with Enablement-Tenacity own the work that requires it, and the superintendent gets protected time to do the vision and community-facing work only they can do. Districts that make this change see leadership retention improve and strategic initiatives actually move forward.

12. Reese Sullivan

Reese Sullivan facilitates Working Genius for government agencies and municipal teams. Public sector leadership teams face a problem most corporate teams do not. They cannot fire their way out of misalignment. Civil service rules mean the team you have is the team you keep. The only variable you control is how work gets allocated.

Sullivan's approach treats Working Genius as a work design tool, not a hiring tool. If you cannot change the people, you change what the people do. A city manager with Discernment-Enablement should not be the one brainstorming new community programs. That is Wonder-Invention work. Assign it to the person on the team who lights up when asked to imagine what is possible.

The sessions involve mapping every major responsibility across the leadership team, then redistributing work so people spend more time in their Geniuses and less time in frustration work. The constraint is that no one's job title changes and no one gets reassigned to a different department. The only thing that changes is who does what within the existing structure.

The results show up as:

• Faster project completion because Tenacity people are finally assigned to the follow-through work instead of the Galvanising people who start strong and lose interest.

• Better decision quality because Discernment people are in the room when decisions get made, not brought in afterward to critique what already happened.

• Lower burnout because people stop spending 70 percent of their week doing work that drains them.

Government teams that apply Working Genius this way turn constrained systems into higher-performing ones without adding budget or headcount.

13. Finley Carter

Finley Carter works with environmental nonprofits and advocacy organisations. These groups attract people with deep Wonder and Galvanising. They see the world that should exist and they inspire others to fight for it. What they often lack is Discernment and Enablement, which means passionate vision without the infrastructure to execute it sustainably.

Carter's facilitation reveals a painful pattern. Environmental organisations burn through their best people because they treat every campaign like an emergency and every strategy like it requires 80-hour weeks. The problem is not commitment. The problem is that the organisation has no one with Discernment saying which fights to take and no one with Enablement building systems that let people work effectively without heroic effort.

The solution is not scaling back the mission. The solution is bringing in the missing Geniuses. Hire the Discernment-Enablement person who can look at five potential campaigns and name the two that will actually move the needle. Pair every Wonder-Galvanising leader with an Enablement partner who builds the processes that make repeated wins possible instead of one-time sprints.

Organisations that do this shift from heroic to sustainable. The mission does not shrink. The team stops collapsing under the weight of trying to do everything at once.

14. Blake Morgan

Blake Morgan specialises in Working Genius for law enforcement and first responder leadership teams. Police departments, fire departments, and emergency management agencies are built on command-and-control structures that assume leaders should operate the same way. Working Genius reveals that effective incident command requires a completely different profile than effective organisational leadership.

Morgan's work starts with a distinction most agencies miss. Incident command requires Discernment-Enablement-Tenacity. You assess the situation, organise the response, and execute until resolution. Organisational leadership requires Wonder-Invention-Galvanising. You see where the agency needs to go, design new approaches, and bring people along.

Promoting the best incident commander into the chief's role assumes these are the same skill set. They are not. The person who excels under pressure in a structured crisis often struggles in the ambiguous long-term work of culture change and strategic positioning.

Morgan's facilitation helps agencies see two paths forward:

• Separate incident leadership from organisational leadership and stop expecting one person to be great at both.

• Build leadership teams where the chief carries Wonder-Galvanising and the deputy chiefs carry Discernment-Enablement-Tenacity, so the operational excellence stays strong while the strategic vision finally gets attention.

Agencies that make this shift stop losing great operators to bad leadership roles and start developing actual leaders who can move the organisation forward.

15. Quinn Davis

Quinn Davis works with higher education institutions, especially student affairs and enrollment teams. These divisions face constant pressure to do more with flat or shrinking budgets, which means the instinct is to ask existing staff to stretch into new responsibilities. Working Genius shows why this approach breaks people.

Davis's sessions begin with an energy audit. Every staff member lists their primary responsibilities and marks whether each one energises them, drains them, or sits neutral. The pattern that emerges is almost always the same. People are spending 60 to 70 percent of their time in work that drains them because the division keeps adding responsibilities without removing anything.

The problem is not workload. The problem is Genius misalignment. An admissions counselor with Galvanising-Enablement thrives in student recruitment and yield events. When that same person gets assigned to data analysis and reporting (Discernment-Tenacity work), their performance drops and they start looking for jobs elsewhere.

Davis helps divisions reallocate work across three categories:

• Work that stays with the current person because it matches their Genius and they do it well.

• Work that gets reassigned to someone else on the team whose Genius aligns better.

• Work that gets eliminated entirely because it was only happening out of inertia, not impact.

Divisions that go through this process see retention improve and performance climb without hiring a single new person. The team was always capable. The work was just badly distributed.

FACILITATORS BRINGING WORKING GENIUS INTO CORPORATE SETTINGS

The next set of facilitators focus on corporate and business environments where teams are capable but misaligned. These are the people to call when the talent is not the problem but the way talent is being used is breaking execution.

16. Emerson Scott

Emerson Scott works with scaling SaaS companies navigating the shift from product-market fit to go-to-market execution. The companies Scott works with have proven the product works. What they have not figured out is how to build a repeatable sales and customer success engine, and the reason is usually a Genius mismatch at the leadership level.

The pattern shows up like this. The founding team is Invention-heavy. They built a product that solves a real problem. Now they need to sell it at scale, which requires Galvanising-Enablement. No one on the team has it. The first sales hires do not stick because the founders cannot articulate what good selling looks like in this context.

Scott's facilitation maps the executive team first, then maps the go-to-market functions against the Geniuses each one requires. Sales requires Galvanising. Customer success requires Enablement and Tenacity. Demand generation requires Wonder-Invention to imagine new channels, then Enablement to operationalise them.

The gaps get filled in one of two ways:

• Hire a go-to-market leader whose Genius profile covers what the founders do not have, then give them real authority to build the function their way.

• Promote an early employee who has the right Genius mix but has been underutilised because they do not look like a traditional VP of Sales.

Companies that solve this accelerate revenue growth without the constant churn of sales leaders who never quite fit.

17. Skylar Reed

Skylar Reed facilitates Working Genius for remote-first and distributed teams. Distance amplifies every Genius misalignment because the informal correction mechanisms that happen in an office (quick hallway conversations, reading the room in real time) disappear when the team is async and spread across time zones.

Reed's work starts with a specific problem distributed teams face. On a remote team, Discernment people do not speak up in meetings the same way they do in person. Galvanising people lose energy when they cannot read live reactions. Enablement people get frustrated because the casual handoff conversations that make coordination easy do not happen when everyone is on Slack.

The solution is not forcing people back to the office. The solution is redesigning how work happens so each Genius can operate effectively in a remote environment.

Reed's facilitation produces new operating rhythms:

• Discernment happens asynchronously in writing before the meeting, so people have time to think without the pressure of real-time response.

• Galvanising happens in short, high-energy live sessions with clear outcomes, not hour-long video calls where half the team is multitasking.

• Enablement gets structured through shared docs and project trackers that make coordination visible without requiring constant communication.

Remote teams that apply Working Genius this way stop losing productivity to distance and start using distance as an advantage. Different Geniuses get the conditions they actually need instead of one-size-fits-all meeting schedules that serve no one well.

18. Jordan Ellis

Jordan Ellis works with private equity portfolio companies during post-acquisition integration. The challenge in these settings is that two leadership teams with completely different Genius profiles are suddenly supposed to operate as one. If the acquiring company does not map Geniuses early, the integration fails even when the financial logic was sound.

Ellis's facilitation happens in the first 90 days post-close. Both leadership teams complete the Working Genius assessment. The profiles get mapped side by side. What usually emerges is that the acquiring company skews heavily toward Enablement-Tenacity (they are good at executing repeatable processes at scale) and the acquired company skews toward Wonder-Invention (they were entrepreneurial and agile). The integration plan assumes the acquired company will just adopt the acquirer's processes. The acquired team experiences this as soul-crushing bureaucracy.

The smarter move is to decide which parts of the business need entrepreneurial energy (Wonder-Invention) and protect those, while integrating the parts where repeatable execution (Enablement-Tenacity) adds value. This requires knowing which leaders carry which Geniuses and designing the combined organisation so both profiles have space to operate.

Ellis helps leadership teams make explicit decisions:

• Which business units stay entrepreneurial and get led by Wonder-Invention people from the acquired company?

• Which business units need operational discipline and get integrated into the acquirer's Enablement-Tenacity systems?

• Where do we need to pair leaders from both sides so the combined team has full Genius coverage?

Portfolio companies that do this retain the talent they acquired for instead of watching key leaders leave in months six through twelve.

19. Avery Kim

Avery Kim facilitates Working Genius for executive teams in manufacturing and industrial operations. These organisations face a Genius challenge that office-based companies do not. The work is deeply physical and process-dependent, which means Enablement and Tenacity are not optional. Without them, production stops.

Kim's work reveals a pattern most manufacturing leaders have lived but not named. Plant managers and operations leaders almost universally have Enablement-Tenacity in their top three. They keep complex systems running day after day. What they rarely have is Wonder or Invention. This is fine when the business model is stable. It becomes a crisis when market conditions shift and the organisation needs to imagine a different future.

The executive team ends up with a dangerous imbalance. Everyone is great at executing the plan. No one is questioning whether the plan still makes sense. Strategic inertia sets in, and the company keeps optimising a model that is slowly becoming obsolete.

Kim's facilitation makes two interventions:

• Bring Wonder-Invention people into the executive team, even if they do not come from operations. This might mean elevating a product development leader or bringing in a strategy role that has permission to question everything.

• Redesign strategic planning so it starts with Wonder (what is changing in our market, what should we be paying attention to) before it moves to Enablement (how do we operationalise this). Most manufacturing companies do strategic planning in reverse.

Manufacturers that solve this stop getting disrupted by competitors who saw the shift coming while they were still perfecting last decade's playbook.

20. Casey Kim

Casey Kim works with professional sports organisations and athletics departments. Coaching staffs and athletic leadership teams have a Genius profile that is easy to predict and hard to balance. Coaches are almost always Galvanising-Tenacity. They inspire performance and they grind through execution. What they are not is Wonder-Discernment.

Kim's sessions start with a simple question. When was the last time your staff had a strategic conversation that was not about this season? The answer is usually never. Coaches live in the immediate. Game prep, injury management, recruiting cycles, compliance. There is no space for Wonder, and Discernment only shows up as in-game adjustments.

This works until it does not. The program starts declining and no one knows why because no one is stepping back to ask whether the recruiting model still works or whether the conference landscape has shifted in a way that requires a new approach.

Kim helps athletics programs build balance:

• Assign someone on the leadership team (often an associate AD or chief of staff) to own Wonder-Discernment work. Their job is to monitor trends, question assumptions, and bring strategic pattern recognition that coaches do not have time to do.

• Protect one meeting per month where the only agenda is Wonder. No game film. No immediate decisions. Just the question: what are we not seeing?

• Pair head coaches who are pure Galvanising-Tenacity with coordinators or assistants who have Discernment, so the staff has someone who can say "this is not working" before it becomes a losing season.

Programs that do this stop being surprised when the model that worked for five years suddenly stops producing wins.

FACILITATORS FOCUSED ON TEAM DYNAMICS AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION

The final group of facilitators use Working Genius specifically to address team conflict, trust breakdowns, and dysfunctional leadership dynamics. These are the people to call when the issue is not strategy but the relationships inside the room.

21. River Morgan

River Morgan works with leadership teams in active conflict. These are the teams where two senior leaders cannot be in the same meeting without tension, or where the executive team has split into factions, or where every decision takes three times longer than it should because trust has eroded.

Morgan's facilitation does not start with conflict resolution techniques. It starts with Working Genius. Most leadership conflict is not actually personal. It is two people with opposite Genius profiles interpreting the same situation in completely different ways and assuming the other person is being difficult.

A leader with Wonder-Invention sees a problem and immediately starts imagining new solutions. A leader with Discernment-Tenacity sees the same problem and immediately starts listing why the proposed solutions will not work. To the first person, the second person is a pessimist who kills ideas. To the second person, the first person is reckless and does not think things through.

Neither is true. They are both doing exactly what their Geniuses are designed to do. The conflict is a feature of how their brains are wired, not a personality flaw.

Morgan's sessions make this visible. Once people see that the tension is Genius-based, not personal, the conflict de-escalates fast. The conversation shifts from "why are you always negative" to "I need Discernment in the room, and you are the person who brings it, but I need it at a different point in the process."

Common reframes include:

• The person who questions every idea is not difficult. They have Discernment, and the team needs them to ask hard questions before implementation, not after launch.

• The person who talks through every possibility out loud is not wasting time. They have Wonder, and verbalising options is how they think. Give them space early, then move to decision.

• The person who just wants a plan and a deadline is not controlling. They have Enablement-Tenacity, and ambiguity is painful for them. Give them clarity and they will execute flawlessly.

Teams that go through this process stop fighting about personalities and start designing how they work together so every Genius has the conditions it needs.

22. Morgan Taylor

Morgan Taylor facilitates Working Genius for boards of directors, especially in the nonprofit and independent school sectors. Boards have a unique Genius problem. They are made up of volunteers who were recruited for domain expertise, network, or fundraising capacity. Almost no one was recruited based on the type of work the board actually needs to do.

Taylor's work begins with a board role audit. Governance requires Discernment (evaluating strategy and risk), Enablement (ensuring the organisation has the infrastructure to succeed), and Galvanising (championing the mission externally). Most boards are filled with people who have Wonder (they love the vision) or Tenacity (they have been on the board for 15 years and feel obligated to stay). The work the board needs and the Geniuses the board has are completely misaligned.

The result is predictable. Board meetings are long, frustrating, and unproductive. Strategic decisions do not get made. Oversight is inconsistent. The executive director spends half their time managing board dynamics instead of leading the organisation.

Taylor's facilitation produces several fixes:

• Redesign board committees so people work inside their Geniuses. Put Discernment people on audit and governance. Put Galvanising people on development and external relations. Put Enablement people on finance and operations oversight.

• Recruit future board members explicitly for missing Geniuses. If the board has no Discernment, the next trustee should have it, regardless of their donor capacity.

• Separate governance work (Discernment-Enablement) from fundraising work (Galvanising). Most nonprofit boards try to do both in the same meeting and do neither well.

Boards that make these changes become functional governance bodies instead of obligatory quarterly gatherings everyone tolerates.

23. Sage Anderson

Sage Anderson works with executive teams navigating founder transitions. When a founder steps back and a professional CEO steps in, the organisation experiences a Genius disruption. The founder's profile built the company. The new CEO has a different profile. If the transition plan does not account for this, the organisation rejects the new leader even when they are objectively excellent.

Anderson's facilitation starts before the new CEO arrives. The outgoing founder completes the Working Genius assessment. The profile almost always shows strong Wonder-Invention-Galvanising. The company was built by someone who saw a possibility, created the solution, and sold it relentlessly. The culture, the operating rhythm, and the team's expectations are all built around that profile.

The incoming CEO often has a completely different mix. Many professional CEOs are Discernment-Enablement-Tenacity. They see what is working and what is not, they build operational infrastructure, and they execute consistently. These are exactly the Geniuses a scaling company needs. They are also the opposite of what the team is used to.

If the transition is not facilitated well, the team experiences the new CEO as:

• Risk-averse (Discernment without Wonder looks like saying no to good ideas).

• Bureaucratic (Enablement without Galvanising looks like adding process for no reason).

• Boring (Tenacity without Wonder looks like grinding through execution with no vision).

Anderson helps both the outgoing founder and the incoming CEO see the Genius handoff clearly. The founder names which Geniuses they brought and which ones they never had. The new CEO names which Geniuses they bring and how those will change how the company operates. The executive team gets prepared for the shift so it feels like intentional evolution, not a loss of identity.

Transitions that include this work succeed. Transitions that skip it often end with the new CEO leaving within 18 months.

24. Cameron White

Cameron White facilitates Working Genius for mergers and acquisitions where cultural integration is the stated priority but no one knows how to actually do it. Most M&A playbooks focus on systems integration, financial alignment, and customer retention. Culture gets mentioned in the announcement and then ignored until the best people from the acquired company start leaving.

White's work happens in months two and three post-close. Both companies' leadership teams complete the Working Genius assessment. The profiles get mapped. What emerges is almost always a values match and a Genius mismatch. Both organisations care about quality, customer experience, and employee development. But one organisation is built on Wonder-Invention-Galvanising and the other is built on Discernment-Enablement-Tenacity.

The acquiring company calls this "bringing discipline to a scrappy startup." The acquired company calls it "corporate bureaucracy killing what made us special." Both are describing the same Genius mismatch from opposite sides.

White's facilitation produces integration principles that honour both profiles:

• Identify which parts of the combined business need entrepreneurial speed (Wonder-Invention) and protect them from premature process.

• Identify which parts need operational consistency (Enablement-Tenacity) and integrate them quickly so they stop operating in chaos.

• Build cross-company leadership pairs where one person brings the acquiring company's Genius strengths and the other brings the acquired company's strengths, so every major function has full coverage.

M&A deals that do this retain talent and realise synergies. Deals that skip it pay the integration cost in turnover and lost revenue.

25. Taylor Chen

Taylor Chen works with leadership teams that have been through trauma. These are the organisations that just survived a public crisis, a leadership scandal, a major lawsuit, or a near-bankruptcy. The team is intact but the trust is not. People are performing their roles but the energy is gone.

Chen's approach uses Working Genius as a recovery tool. Trauma makes people retreat into survival mode, which usually means they stop working in their Geniuses and start doing whatever feels safe or familiar. A leader with Wonder stops imagining possibilities because hope feels dangerous. A leader with Galvanising stops championing ideas because confidence feels inappropriate. The team becomes a shell of what it was.

Chen's facilitation creates a controlled space to name what has been lost and to design how the team rebuilds. The Working Genius framework is useful here because it is not about feelings. It is about work. People can talk about which types of work they have stopped doing without having to process the entire emotional weight of the crisis.

The session moves through three stages:

• Name your Genius profile and identify which parts of your work used to energise you before the crisis.

• Name which of those parts you have stopped doing and why (usually fear, exhaustion, or loss of trust).

• Design one small experiment where you return to Genius-aligned work in a low-risk way, just to remember what it feels like.

Teams that go through this start recovering agency. The trauma does not disappear. But people begin doing work that energises them again, which is the foundation for everything else that has to be rebuilt.

FINDING THE RIGHT WORKING GENIUS FACILITATOR FOR YOUR TEAM

This directory gives you 25 options. Your next step is simple.

Identify which facilitator's sector focus, geographic presence, or facilitation style aligns with where your team is right now. If you lead a school, start with the facilitators who work in education. If you are navigating a leadership transition, start with the ones who specialise in succession or M&A. If your team is in open conflict, start with the facilitators who focus on team dynamics.

Reach out directly and have a conversation. The right facilitator will ask you what is broken, what you have already tried, and what good looks like if the session works. If they do not ask those questions, keep looking.

Working Genius is a powerful framework, but the framework is not the transformation. The facilitator is. Choose someone who has been in rooms like yours before, who can name the patterns you are living through, and who knows how to turn one good conversation into sustained organisational change.

If you want to understand how the Working Genius model works in practice before booking a session, that guide covers the full model, team mapping, and a 90-day implementation plan.

To build a Working Genius culture that actually sticks beyond the offsite, see the guide to building a Working Genius culture.

For answers to the most common questions leaders ask before running a session, the Working Genius FAQ covers 100 questions on the model, facilitation, and implementation.

If you are looking for a Working Genius facilitator who works with leadership teams globally and has facilitated this model across schools, nonprofits, and corporate settings, reach out at jonno@consultclarity.org.