Everybody has value

In this post I tell a war story that happened during my time in a medium-sized multi-national company where I had a leadership role.

Introduction

Working there I had a good developer in my team with some physical disabilities (vision related). Others hand the idea that they were frustrated in their day-to-day role, and indeed it looked like they were.

This developer felt not being used at their 100% capacity, and consequently, they felt undervalued. Not because anybody in the company was saying or even implying that, but they felt that way.

Dramatis personae

There are several people that were in this story, let me present them to you:

Axl: a developer with disabilities

Older developer, very intelligent and resourceful. A lot of skills and (above all) experience.

A person that was always ready to help you, and eager to collaborate with the team.

Their only problem? A pesky physical disability that made them have visual difficulties.

Let’s call them Axl (because they rock!)

Me, the head of technology

Me, an inexperienced leader, trying to juggle being an individual contributor (IC), and the leadership role I had at the time.

Working non-stop on a product that would be lauded by the client, I was on the verge of being burned out because of overworking.

I was worried by the Axl situation for a while but was not able to get enough free time to plan a solution for it.

The problem

Axl could not read the screen well, so they were struggling with a complex software configuration workflow. They were doing a long process by hand and making some (understandable) mistakes.

The solution

I have always disliked manual intervention, so I proposed automatizing this flow. This developer helped us a lot in the design and testing phases, and the delivery was a success.

Of course the issue was that the developer had no tasks to do. So, we were wondering what they can do.

After meeting with the product manager and the scrum master we decided to buy a new monitor for them, and give them a new role: QA Engineer.

I proposed them a path to become a QA Engineer, the cost? Just an evening investigating what are the skills, the tools, and the responsibilities that they should take.

He thanked me, and by that time, I was already on the path of leaving the company.

Epilogue

After a while I was invited to a Christmas party and I was greeted by Axl profusely. He had taken my advice of becoming a QA Engineer and was glad about that (I remember I smiled), and they had decided to use some other tools different than the ones that I had proposed (I remember I smiled even more). I did not smile because they took other decisions, but because taking other decisions was a clear sign that they had taken the QA Engineer path by heart.

Once it was the 3 a.m. I left the party with a smile in my face.

Conclusion

The companies need to be flexible when dealing with disabilities. Usually your employee just needs some adaptation, physically, or with a new role. Do that and I can guarantee that they can thrive.!