Toejam, I hired my first employee for my business this summer. She is over age 50 with dyslexia and making a major career change, so I'm training her a lot from the ground up. It has been hard for me to realize that I am not the best trainer on a daily basis. (Not the best = even very bad some days) But she and I have been open and honest, and I'm committed to her success, and she knows this. I've asked her to tell me what helps her learn new things and how I can be a better trainer. I've also been clear about my expectations from her. We meet regularly to discuss her progress and how I can help her better or adjust my teaching style to help her. One thing we realized was that we miscalculated her strengths - meaning we thought she'd be good at one set of tasks, and she's actually quite good at a different set of tasks. Once we discovered that, we realigned her workload so that she could take over more of the things she has a talent for, and then she works faster, contributes more, and has more confidence. Tasks that we know are more difficult for her, we give her a longer lead time and try to keep those at a lower percentage of her overall workload.

What I have learned as a trainer is that I have to let my ego go and let my trainees really lead me in how best to teach them. I also learned that it's good to identify places where they need more training quickly and ongoingly, and provide that training. And don't make that a reflection of performance but a reflection of making sure they have all the skills and procedures trained to be successful. Of course there's a litmus I set for whether or not they can do the task or produce the work at a sufficient quality, but I have to let them guide a lot of the learning of the task so they can learn it successfully, and I have learned to prepare to teach tasks and techniques in different ways. I also give her plenty of practice time. Making time for practice assignments or job shadowing is super useful.

I also realized that rather than slow down our production, the fastest thing to do would be to partner her with a proofreader so she can work on content and not have to worry about whether things are spelled correctly. And I told her, this is to help speed up our productivity. You do great work in creating the outlines, finding the research, knowing exactly what the argument is, but if we wait for you to write it perfectly, it will take too long. So get the outline done, the main thoughts written, and our editor/proofreader will assist you so you can move on to the next thing. And it's working well.

I'm committed to a workplace where people with different learning styles and neurodivergence as well as NTs belong from the start, not just as an "accommodation" but it definitely takes some letting go of pride and ego, letting go of wanting to be right, and remembering the end goal is for all to be successful as a team, and not one person be right or wrong, etc.

I hope this helps.