> Some research shows that neurodivergent people can make teams up to 30% more productive when placed in the right environments.
This rings true for any kind of "difficult" team member. All people have intrinsic advantages, and many who are considered "difficult" to work with, either are in the wrong role, are expected to be doing something that's uncomfortable to them, are not strong with communication, deadlines, estimating, etc.
Your job as a team leader/manager is to figure out how to best utilize their talents, without letting the shortcomings get in the way of the project / rest of the team. Someone's really bad with deadlines? Don't give them deadlines! Assign them to more "async" work like writing tests, documentation, maintenance, etc.
For me, with a strong technical background but no experience managing a team, having found myself in that role for the first time, it helped to think of it as an optimization problem. Databases are great at handling many rows of columnar data. GPUs are great at heavily parallel work like matrices.
If I meet a guy with no legs and my first reaction is to highlight the strengths of great parking spaces and saving money on trousers, he might see that as me failing to acknowledge the reality of his situation.
Also possible they might actually laugh and counter with their own upside to being leg incomplete joke and welcome you for not looking away like so many others do.
Fact is, there's no way to keep a person from being offended if they want to be. No logic, no evidence.
And this is an attitude that is freakishly respected these days. Whole groups of people validating each other's offendedness. And even getting offended on behalf of people they never met.
And to belong to a class of people widely known to be in a permanent state of offendedness, and unassailably so, and generally respected as such, is a highly desirable and sought-after position.
and all i had in mind was something like: oh damn, you are really in a rough spot. i'd like to help you figure out what options you have left. there has to be something useful that you can contribute.
Funny, I made some collages of images from the Ukraine MoD about as soon as Russian attack last year and a lot of them were of the Ukraine delegation to the Invictus Games which were really remarkable.
This rings true for any kind of "difficult" team member. All people have intrinsic advantages, and many who are considered "difficult" to work with, either are in the wrong role, are expected to be doing something that's uncomfortable to them, are not strong with communication, deadlines, estimating, etc.
Your job as a team leader/manager is to figure out how to best utilize their talents, without letting the shortcomings get in the way of the project / rest of the team. Someone's really bad with deadlines? Don't give them deadlines! Assign them to more "async" work like writing tests, documentation, maintenance, etc.
For me, with a strong technical background but no experience managing a team, having found myself in that role for the first time, it helped to think of it as an optimization problem. Databases are great at handling many rows of columnar data. GPUs are great at heavily parallel work like matrices.
Every human is good at something. [NSFW] https://www.oglaf.com/gifted/