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Bain & Company Contemplating a move from Accenture Strategy to Strategy&, or Monitor Deloitte. Part of my consideration is the assumption that WLB is likely to be better than at McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, or Bain & Company. Could any of you fellow European fishies shed some light on the validity of this assumption? Sharing experiences would be highly appreciated.
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No. If your organization chose to hire this person, they should get the full privileges of staffing and development that their peers without regard for things like race, gender, appearance, or disability status. If the client has issue with this person, you as a kind and decent manager needs to raise this with your teams leadership to ensure the team member with aspergers is not made uncomfortable or hurt in any way.
Thanks! And what if the client didn't know about the diagnosis (or the person didn't want to be seen as "other"), but made vague complaints about "cultural fit" even if they liked the deliverables?
I don’t think it would be public information that the person had ASD. So I would not consider it when staffing someone, no.
If a person I had worked with had certain strengths and certain challenges that related to a specific type of project then I might take that into consideration when staffing them. But that applies to all people, all of which will do well on some projects (and are therefore more likely to get staffed) and worse on others.
Our industry is very client focussed, and we do need to add value to our clients. We cannot under deliver and then get angry at the client for not accepting a poor product delivered by a team which was poorly suited to the project. So we do need to consider the skill set of our teams before staffing. But I would not treat someone with ASD differently than anyone else. We are all good at some things and bad at others. The trick of being a good leader is matching your people to the roles that make them thrive.
It sounds like this person is a great colleague despite being having ASD. I think it is up to the other members of the team to take this opportunity to continue that success by supporting them.
Could you raise the issue in the way you have here, but without implying there is one specific person that it relates to? It might be obvious but worth a try. Ultimately, you clearly need to tell these people “some people are not in the same place on the spectrum as the the majority of people, and we need to be able to work with that.”
I am sympathetic to your asking about this (some people below will take this opportunity to flex their virtuous ways. Which is silly in any context but especially on an anonymous forum). Working with people with ASD (previously Aspergers in DSM, still in ICD) can be difficult as the many social signals we use to communicate with ‘neuro-typical’ people simply are not there. Indeed, I have met ASD people who were actually really mean. Ignoring people’s feelings, pointing out really personal things wrong with people, and then reacting inappropriately (as defined by a neurotypical person) to sensitive and emotional situations. However, it is up to those of us lucky enough to not have ASD to support those that do. This can be difficult if you do not know they have ASD. This is why normalising it and talking about it openly is actually really helpful. However, most places are not there yet.
Hopefully it won’t get you fired, but I think getting a professional coach of Occupational Psychologist involved might help as you navigating this based on the internet and fishbowl is unlikely to get great results.
In other words “would you hesitate to discriminate someone on the spectrum?”....
😓
Yes, that's exactly my question. I've witnessed several things and don't know how to get an honest answer unless I'm asking on an anonymous forum. Have you seen/experienced anything related to this?
What kind of “negative intent” would this person possibly have if they’re producing such great output? Sounds like the people in this situation maybe need to reflect on if they’re being overly judgmental.
Have you met many people with ASD? It can be hard to non-verbally communicate with them as the social cues (which we normally rely heavily on) do not work in the same way.
For example (simply example, sorry) if I went into a conversation with you and I clearly looked really sad and vulnerable then I might be forgiven for feeling you were mean if you were very critical about a piece of work I had done and that you thought you could have done it a lot better. That kind of ‘robust’ feedback may be acceptable to someone who can shake it off but is clearly not constructive for someone who is emotionally vulnerable. If someone with ASD struggles to tell the difference between those two situations it is clear how they might accidentally make a social mistake.
Now, if the emotional person in my example does not know the other person has ASD then they would simply think them really mean and would, not unreasonably, judge them negatively. I personally do not assume every mean person I have ever met might have ASD. This is both statistically very unlikely (and is therefore an unhelpful assumption) as well as a very negative and unfair way to view ASD. So it is not necessarily ‘overly judgmental’ to thing the person was simply mean to me (in the above example).
I would add that ASD varies hugely (partly why they removed Aspergers from the DSM: it has no real meaning that can be reliably defined) so we may be talking about very different experience with ASD people.
I studied psychology (and neuroscience) at university and ASD is really interesting. We understand little about it. Especially the cause. On the one hand some ASD people seem very ‘normal’ in that they have no physical disability and seem actually quite gifted. But then you see them interact with people and you see the yawning chasm between how non-ASD people communicate and how they do. We (speaking as non-ASD) do not realise how much communication is non verbal. To someone who mainly uses verbal communication it must be infuriating when the same words mean totally different things and get different reactions but you do not understand what has changed since you last said the same thing.