AS and leadership

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Can people with AS be good leaders?

not like being super good at it like being the president, I meant any kind of leadership. Even the smallest act of leadership.

Good question. I guess if a person with AS earns a position of leadership then they will have the liberty to be brutally honest without repercussions, and to share their knowledge with people whose job is to listen. Perfect.

If the question is can they be leaders, of course they can. Thomas Jefferson was President! Bill Plaschke on ESPN HAS to have Aspergers. Lewis Black must have Aspergers, and he is on stage, leading the audience.

And many people with AS are good team leaders in Call of Duty

I hope so!

A really important aspect of leadership is trust. People will follow a completely horrible & unpleasant person if they trust that that person will make the right decisions for the organisation.

So, whether someone can lead an organisation with or without charisma will depend on how easy it is to tell if the right decisions are being made.

For example, it is extremely difficult to tell if a government is doing a good job or not. There are just so many variables, and it will all depend on who you listen to etc etc. So in politics, charisma beats competence almost every time. What is important is not making the correct decisions, but making people *think* you've made the correct decision.

Other organisations have much easier ways to measure success. Share price, profit & so on. While the company is making money, people won't care if you seem arrogant or weird.

I am a leader in my community and go on the radio, print news and have featured displays in stores. My honesty, my ethic, my disability inclusion advocacy and my way of being regardless of diagnoses has always been leadership. I've always been fascinated with Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and leadership speeches of all kinds and moral stories for example. At anytime all I have to do is pick up the phone and a new strategy and a new campaign is underway shortly after with media and radio and even T.V at times. In fact I devised the entire Humboldt Includes campaign for developmental disability sponsored employment.

In business I am a brutal strategist and benefit those whom I choose to work with whilst decline those I don't believe are best.

In politics it is little different then math. I do not subscribe to party but study intently all measures by which govern macro relevantly.

In civil rights leadership which is the innate function of the platform I lead like no one else has just to do it.

I also study disability laws when applicable to the outreach.

My leadership has resulted in the market penetration and awareness in a local area unlike any other in the United States and perhaps beyond of any other supportive employment product. For now 15,000+ candles and growing locally is to much to keep up with. Humboldt Includes is next and will be the leadership platform for inclusion in partnership with many local agencies.

I believe so. I've been in leadership positions before and I would like to think I did quite well.

When I've managed projects before, we usually have a clear objective, a good idea of how we are going to achieve that objective, and a deadline.

As a project manager, it's my job to say "this is what we're going to do", then I need to figure out who's best suited for what task, tell them to do it, and make sure it's getting done. It's actually quite simple because I just think about it as many things that I have to do, and instead of doing them myself, I tell someone else to do it.

Keeping tabs is fairly straight forward. If we don't have pre-scheduled status report times, I'll usually send an e-mail asking for a status report.

The difficulty comes in when a team member is lagging in their responsibilities, or isn't quite well suited for their job.

In that respect, you need to know how to deal with people to some extent. The last thing one should do when a subordinate is having difficulties, is to yell at them. It's much better to sit down with them, figure out the source of the problem, and work with them to find a way to overcome it, because it really isn't their problem, it's everyone's problem.

One of the key components to a being a good project manager is being able to build a structured management system. Everyone needs to know what's expected of them. The best way to convey that is explicit communication.

This is generally what happens when we've been tasked with a new project if I'm managing it.

1. I read over the project. I brainstorm on what needs to be done and figure out how I can divide it up.

2. I call a meeting. I'll usually ask what days work best for everyone and try to schedule it accordingly.

3. At the meeting, we go over the project. I go over my proposed breakdown. I tell everyone, if they have an ideas, to share them. Sometimes we figure out who does what at the meeting, sometimes this is done by e-mail. I usually conclude the meeting by re-iterating who is doing what so everyone is clear on it. I then tell them the date and time for the next meeting and ask if that works for everyone.

4. While everyone is doing their things, I'm doing a broader overview of the project. If I find something useful, I will relay that information to the team member who it is relevant to. Occasionally I will discover significant overlap between responsibilities, and I will contact those team members who's responsibilities overlap, and tell them to coordinate with each other on the matter. They usually resolve this on their own. I check back to make sure it's resolved. If it isn't, I will resolve it by saying "you're going to do this, and you're going to do this"

5. Occasionally I will think of some things that need to be addressed and contact the proper team member and ask them if they could look into it. I will contact them at a later date to make sure they looked into it.

6. If someone is lagging behind in their work, I will sit down with that person to identify the source of the problem and help them address it.

To be perfectly honest, due to my field, most people don't come into it with the best communication skills. However the communication on teams I lead tends to be very explicit so it actually works out very nicely for people with AS or other communication issues.

The key thing to remember is, being explicit.

However you also have to take into consideration the fact that people have feelings. If someone's work is satisfactory, you tell them "Good job". If they are having difficulties, or did something wrong, you should sit down with them, and work with them to find the problem, and a solution. Sometimes the workload is too big and my time estimate on it was wrong. That's my fault. Sometimes the person is having technical difficulties with something, and to overcome them requires we consult with other team members. Sometimes they are having personal problems, this can be tricky to deal with. If they really cannot get their work done, I don't yell at them. If I can't replace them, I simply redistribute the work and take on a significant amount of that myself sometimes.

So a person with AS can be a good leader. It is not such a blind shot in the dark all the time, and in fact, a proper team has a structure, and can be operated like a system.

What he listed above like team leadership nope I am not good at. I have HFA though not A.S. I assign people to projects to manage them and later others will entirely decide who assigns whom as long as a script type of thing is designed for quality control and liability self-inspections. I have very little ability regardless of diagnoses of much beyond the big picture such as organizing paperwork or people. I like to study emotions and causations specific to words and depiction. It's a good thing a board of directors is to be formed.

I like to sit back and enjoy the ride - but if I feel the need to do so, I'll take initiative and lead on occasion. But being a leader is a drain. I've had to play group leader and I didn't like the fact me and another girl in one of my classes was doing 90% of the work and I had to hold someone's hand as well.

I'm an INTJ if that matters.

I almost never move to take leadership of anything, but when the need is there, I fill it pretty naturally and easily. Though I don't desire a leadership role, I've always done pretty well at it and don't find it difficult. So, yes, they can. I'd imagine this is more of an individual thing than an NT/AS thing; some NTs can be good leaders, some cannot; some Aspies can be good leaders, some cannot.

I've been in the really weird position of being told that I'm in a leadership position without my ever having noticed.

It seems like all I did was try my hardest to do the right thing, and then people around me noticed and began viewing me as a leader even though I've never had the intention to lead anyone in any way.

But it turned out that I needed to pay attention to that even though I was inclined to dismiss it as just weirdness. Because when people viewed me as a leader, they took my actions to heart more than they did with other people. I didn't know this until someone pointed it out to me. What happened was I had gotten angry at a guy and yelled at him online, many years ago. And someone else wrote to me and was really upset. He told me that since I was a leader, it was like my words to this guy had more force than they normally would. And he told me that everyone was really upset about it because they normally trusted me to be a leader or something.

It took me a while to realize that no matter what I considered myself, if other people saw me as a leader, they would react much more badly if I did something wrong like that. And even like... a couple years ago some things happened that got me so terrified that I basically ended up sticking my head up my butt a bit. And a friend just told me recently how I needed to be careful not to do things like that again, because if I screwed up due to the way that extreme anxiety warps reality like that, then other people would be affected too and not just me because of that weird thing about being considered a leader again.

So it seems like regardless of whether I ever asked to be considered a leader (which believe me I didn't), I still have to be careful how I behave because it will affect whoever sees me as a leader. Which still feels like something being done to me, rather than something I'm doing, but it seems like I'd better take these people's advice because most of them are a lot older than me and know more about things like this than I do. So I'm trying to be more careful how I think and behave because apparently it affects more than just me. (It's weird how sometimes things affecting others makes me see more reason to behave than how they affect me.)

I don't really understand why anyone would set out to be a leader for its own sake. I mean... I really care about the things I do that have made people see me as a leader. But at the same time, I would far rather just be seen as an equal than be put above other people in their minds. I'm just a person and if what I do affects people so much... well... my fallibility scares me if it has that much potential to do harm.

You would be amazed how often informal leadership happens just like this. Formal leadership requires being elected or appointed or hired. But with informal leadership, people choose who they will follow based on who has a take-charge attitude or who makes decisions they trust. (Paterfamilias has a post upthread about that trust.) If you have a history of making decisions with outcomes that people admire, they will follow you and they will not ask your permission to follow you. The decision to post certain things in a blog, to give interviews, to say (or type) certain things to people in power are all decisions. And people watch the outcomes of decisions carefully to see who they should follow. This is how many people wake up one day in a leadership role without ever intending to get there. With informal leadership, you don't choose who to lead. Followers choose who they will follow.

I don't know about leading but I sure can influence people. They either want to be more like me or the exact opposite of me.

I had a boss who was an Aspie and he was great.

I was usually the formal or informal group leader for most of my group projects in college. My high grades were well known, and it was obvious the professors respected my comments in class. We all wanted the same thing, a good grade, and I suspect most people simply figured listening to the smartest kid in class was a good idea. I think it helped that I didn't have an ego about it either. I simply stated my opinions and logically why it should be this way, and people listen. Of course, whenever the conversation turned to socializing, I just sort of quietly pretended to listen.

In a task-focused environment, I can do well in a team situation because I have no pride or ego to speak of, and I'm good at focusing on the task. It's also good to take on the most disliked task (like proofing/editing the final draft of the report). I actually enjoy working on tasks as a group. I find listening to other people's views on a problem or situation can enhance my own understanding and prompt me to think in ways I haven't thought before.

Could I be a leader in the working world? That would depend on the organization and the group. I don't handle interpersonal conflicts very well (why should I have to babysit grown adults), and I tend to get stressed when I have to interact with a lot of different people. I also don't see the importance or function of the extracurricular stuff (like golfing, lunches, etc.), but I gather that the higher one goes in an organization, the more important that becomes. I think I could be a good right-hand man to a more social leader, sort of being the strategist and technician behind the scenes, exercising authority when the leader is away (Like Cheney was to George W. Bush). Other than that, first tier, task focused management is the most I could handle emotionally.

I have found that no matter where I worked in my life I was soon given leadership positions. In some ways, I think this might be easier for an Aspie as usually leaders have to maintain a little distance from the people they manage, it is a different relationship than between co-workers.
I have found that I am able to analyze information fairly quickly and make decisions using that knowledge; often they have been good decisions and that was recognized. The analytical abilities also helped in being able to recognize people's strengths and assigning the right people to the right role.
Where I have also had issues is when I have someone working for me who is really not suited to the position and they struggle with fulfilling their assignment on a project. Dealing with these types of issues takes far more energy than the other aspects.

I was an assistant chief for a municipal EMS department for over 25 years. I led thousands of crews and oversaw thousands of emergencies.