This person was several levels above me in the hierarchy, and famously known to be short-tempered. Before my first meeting itself, I was given generic tips on how to handle, none of which however seemed effective.<p>I realized that the person was very smart and always interested in understanding everything in depth. The teams however would fail in explaining properly, which would lead him to frustration.<p>As he was trying to do this for a large number of domains, he was often behind in his understanding of the state of the art, would not know the jargon, acronyms, etc.<p>People on the other hand habitually skip defining terms they use, miss putting units on physical quantities, not label the axes of a graph, etc., all of which would instantly frustrate him.<p>The same thing would happen when he won't hear back crisp and/or correct answers for his questions.<p>Going slow with him, managing to get him understand what you had to say, he would now spot loose ends, hidden assumptions, fallacies in your arguments with ease. He would try to explain, but would be frustrated fast if the team won't get it.<p>With just around two-to-three meetings, I could see where his frustrations were coming from, and was then comfortably able to present to him. At some point, I started becoming known as the face of the project to put before him.<p>He was a nice person actually.
He would not mind accepting his mistakes, and the same applied to me. He once spotted a mistake in my analysis (the metric I was optimizing itself was not really correct) some twenty minutes into the one-hour meeting. I not only immediately accepted, but also announced that the rest of the meeting time is unneeded as I need to fix and come back later. The meeting however gracefully continued as he started focussing on other things in the presentation that were secondary but still valid.<p>To summarize, the true tip for working with him was to be good at explaining with simplicity and strive towards the truth. That was all.<p>----<p>In another experience, someone I worked with was again very smart, and would usually get his team to produce unquestionable results. However, he would favor people from his own cultural background more, give them undue trust, and in the process nearly humiliate people who were actually correct. In this case, I ended up changing the team.
This person at a later point heard back from the human resources team for complaints made against him, and believe that he improved after that.