jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #34 on 24 Jul 2020 and has tags Managing A Team: Other, Becoming A Manager: Diversity
Managing for Neurodiversity - Anjuan Simmons
This is a short and useful discussion from an experienced tech manager about managing team members who are expressing behaviours that might suggest neurodivergence:
They simply receive information about the world and process it in different ways. In fact, no two people see and respond to the world in the same way. We all need to make accommodations for these differences whether we’re talking about introversion, extraversion, autism, or dyslexia.
The thing I like about this article is it strongly counsels against any kind of armchair diagnosing - neither you nor I have the skills for that - and focuses on three common categories of behaviours, with concrete remediations for each.
As Simmons points out, being ready with these remediations in your managerial toolkit makes the work environment better for everyone. Honestly, with everything going on - the pandemic, extended work from home, racial injustices, and police backlash - who doesn’t have some occasional short attention span and distractibility? And which of us have no team members (or selves) that have gotten sucked into a rabbit-hole which has them hyper focussed on the wrong something?
