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The first thing is to be kind, empathetic, and understanding when someone isn't as good at you as something. This happens to everyone, and no matter how smart someone is, there are things they are particularly bad at as well. Keeping in mind the things you struggle with, can help with empathy and humility, and help you figure out what tasks to try to delegate to others.

The smarter someone is, the more they will be used to working alongside people less intelligent, and still work together effectively, and not make others feel bad about it. Particularly smart people can find it shocking when someone else belittles or ridicules another for not understanding something, because they are used to always understanding more than everyone around them their whole lives, but usually keeping it to themselves to not make others angry or feel bad about it. They're not going to be angry or upset when other people struggle or don't understand as well as them, as it is the norm, and something they've almost never not experienced.

Lastly, in a leadership position, look to figure out where peoples strengths do lie, and give them that part of the project. If they have no strengths or abilities consistent with the job at hand, that might not be possible, but seems like a major failure of the hiring process in the first place, and shouldn't be possible- it isn't the fault of the person that was hired inappropriately.



To add onto this, it's important to understand that unconscious bias is a real thing. While it's more important as a leader to realize this, it can also help when it comes to collaborating with your teammates. There are multiple ways you can surface and realize these insights, my company has everyone do a PI test when they first hire on. But be cognizant of the fact that you can and will have bias will help you when dealing with these difficult situations.


A PI test is quite controversial. Personally, I consider it pseudoscience at best and trash from incompetent MBA managers at worst. At its core, the test tries to force complex human behaviors into predefined categories and doesn't care about nuances or reasons or any temporary influences behind these behaviors. That alone already disqualified this test as anything reliable or scientific.

And then when looking at who is publishing all the "science" behind the PI tests, I mostly found the company that is selling it. That literally made the entire thing worthless in my opinion. If we believe the salemen from big corpo, then sugar is good for your health, cigarette doesn't cause cancer, lead in gas is safe, etc.

And the fact that anyone with a brain can easily manipulate their own answer by not being honest with what they think is the final nail for me. Others said this doesn't happen, but I took a look at the test once and with some self suggestion effort, I could completely change how the test ranked me. So to me, whoever say they need to run this test to evaluate their candidate is an absolute incompetent buffoon to me.




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