Comment by jimduk

Question - I've managed (bottom-up, servant-leadership, small smart teams) a few very very smart people who may or not have had ADHD, or been partially on a spectrum or ... I truly appreciated the awesome work and have been open and honest and dealt with all sorts of emotional issues and variable progress on simple tasks and diving down rat-holes etc and seen some amazing overall results and had some great co-workers. The area I really struggle with is when people get temporarily obsessed with a topic that is so far removed from the project and its goals, that I can't cover them e.g. they want to completely redevelop an established, adjacent area of expertise (new to them) from scratch. Any advice on how to have this dialog up-front e.g. we have a software project and I'll back you a long way on these areas A B C for good exploratory work, but designing a new compiler or doing a full org redesign or building custom hardware is not something I can back you on so can we agree that at the outset and just trust me, or let's agree a protocol for how to deal with these situations?