Building a Team who understand their cognitive strengths and weaknesses

Context

Two leaders in a team wanted to bring their own and the wider team’s cognitive differences actively into their daily tasks rather than deal with problems as they arose.

What we did

With the team’s explicit permission, we invited a cognitive psychologist to work alongside a Clean Language coach to measure people’s cognitive strengths and weaknesses. We also worked with the team to elicit working @ best, working @ worst, what activities made people feel safe/unsafe, like they belonged/were excluded and which activities helped them to be free to work at their best and when did they feel restricted. 

This way the team had two sources of data: their cognitive profiles and their Structures for Living. The two sources of data helped them to make a lot of sense to themselves and to one another. They could see why some of them hated long emails while others wanted much more detail than they were being provided. They could understand who wanted to be left to work alone and undisturbed, like a ‘coding mole’, and who wanted to be in constant consultation with others and to improvise with colleagues like a jazz musician.

What happened as a result

Each member of the team was asked to take responsibility for advocating for their neurodiversity preferences while at the same time considering what impact these requests would have on their colleagues. They developed a strong sense of themselves and what they needed to be at their best as well as empathy for those around them and how their systems could complement or clash with one another.