How to support neurodivergent team members, with Dr. Nancy Doyle

idea.I want to turn this on its head because we know from much research that diverse teams when they work well, so diverse in all senses, diverse teams can be great and can kind of help performance and be creative places.

How do neurodiverse perspectives, in your experience, enhance team performance or creativity and innovation? And there are a couple of examples.

I'm imagining a listener going, "Oh, this is just all feeling a bit miserable," and I wanna turn it on its head.

Like, there's some brilliant stuff when you've got neurodiverse team members.

Yeah.

The diversity at work research is, it really interesting 'cause it depends when you measure the productivity/performance of the team.

If you measure it soon after formation, diverse teams perform worse.

It's only when you do longitudinal medium to long-term measures that they perform better.

So I think that's actually a bit of hope right there, which is just remember, if it feels hard, give it a bit of time.

As people build that trust and rapport, the performance will increase, and then it overtakes.

And then the other thing to look at is the diversity on horizontal or on the vertical.

So diversity on the horizontal tends to perform better than diversity on vertical.

You got some nuances there around diverse teams and how they perform and don't perform.

I mean, it's no secret that most of the world's innovations come from neurodivergent thinkers.

So what are the conditions in which neurodivergent thinkers can thrive? That's what we should be thinking, and all, it does all come back to psychological safety there, and everyone forgets what psychological safety is.

I'm getting so grumpy about this.

You-

People have mistaken psychological safety for feeling able to just say whatever you want or being your authentic self at work.

Psychological safety is about being able to talk about problems, things that are going wrong, risks, mistakes.

That's psychological safety, is when you can talk about the problems safely, then you get the creativity because people aren't d- defensive or ashamed or hiding things.

And so once you've got that kind of created, you've created that safe space, creativity is what happens over and over again.

The neurodivergent thinker that comes to the standard problem that's been done in the same way by the same people over and over again is, "Why are we doing it like this?" It's, "Why...

Have we thought about doing it like that?" The other thing that, that I get out of working with neurodivergent colleagues is people have got their own strategies, their own ways of doing things that they've evolved over the years, and you just give it a little bit of time to, to talk about, how do you do that? And you go, "My goodness, what a good idea.

Why don't I do it like that?" And you can really learn from each other's strategies actually.

I've written down earlier, and it's something that I've been thinking a lot th- about the last couple of weeks.