Dear John,

Yes, you need others but the reverse is also true.

Your skill set means that you have a huge amount to give. You aren’t enough on your own, except in fairly narrowly-defined areas, but you would be a great addition to almost any team.

Now in general, I know you hate team work. That’s because your experience of team work is mostly a teacher putting you into a group to do a task you could have done fine on your own with people who didn’t want to do the work themselves. That’s not real team work – real team work is taking on a project that none of you can do effectively on your own.

D&D is a good example – an effective team has a diversity of different players, with a variety of different skills. Star Trek would be another example – the original series had a core team with different fairly extreme skills. Kirk had courage; Spock had intelligence (and perhaps autism, which they cover by his being half-Vulcan), McCoy had emotional intelligence and Scotty had practical skill. And then to illustrate the importance of a diverse team, they had Sulu, Chekov and Uhura, who added diversity in gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and a few extra skills such as linguistics.

Now we could dig into the question of whether having Spock (or later Data in TNG) on Star Trek was good or bad for autistic folk. It was great that we had a role model on TV that we could identify with. It was awful that to get a decent character who had some autistic traits they chose to make them only half-human, or in Data’s case only an imitation of human. When people describe my reactions or emotions as less than human, it is a severe insult. But this isn’t the place for that discussion.

But the point is that just as you need a good team around you, a good team needs people with your skills.

Now that’s not always easy. Insecure leaders can struggle with not being the smartest person in the room. And no-one likes it when the smartest person in the room lets everyone else know.

But a good team works when a variety of people have a variety of different skills and experiences, know each others’ skillsets and let each other do what they are best at. And there’s no reason why you can’t be part of that once you realise that other people have useful skills that you need. I know I have been in (and led) several highly effective teams.

The key for you to be a good team player is humility and getting to know the others on the team enough that you can trust them and you know how you can add value to each other’s work. The key to find a good team is to make sure that there are people there who you get on with and who can fill in for your weaknesses.

All the best,

Future John