Notes from a neurodivergent leader

Three years ago I was diagnosed by the NHS as autistic. This Neurodiversity Celebration Week I want to share my story and also my thoughts about being neurodivergent at work and leading a neurodiverse team.

My diagnosis journey

My whole life I’ve known I’m different. I’d get told off by my parents for shouting when I thought I was speaking normally. I’d get detention every week for taking too long to get changed after PE. I couldn’t make close friends until I worked out the “formula” for friendship. I once got pulled aside for cheating at school because I got 100% on a biology test - I’d merely memorised all the possible questions. I’m unnaturally obsessed with the history of human geography.

But it was only as I started to make more friends who were openly autistic or neurodivergent in other ways that I started to realise this was a term that maybe could describe me.

I’d thought to myself “I’m not disabled” because I could do anything if I put my mind to it - if I put enough effort in. This led me initially down the road of thinking I didn’t want to pursue diagnosis - it felt like it would be a lot of effort for no benefit.

But a conversation one day with two very wise autistic colleagues changed my mind. They showed me the enormous relief they’d experienced and the transformative effect on their lives of having a clinician confirm what they knew to be true. I self-referred to LADS (yes I’m in some of their promotional videos) and within a couple of years I had my very own NHS autism diagnosis.

I was so wrong about a diagnosis not making much of a difference. At my diagnosis appointment, my clinician asked me how I was feeling and I said I still don’t feel “disabled”. She explained to me that based on her assessment of my answers in the earlier appointments, I’d been compensating for my disability - working extra hard to overcome things like communication challenges in meetings and expending way more energy than my neurotypical colleagues. She laughed and noted that when I described having a REPL open during meetings to help with any numbers I didn’t understand, this was me having invented an assistive technology!

Well, since my diagnosis I’ve realised I was hiding from so many things about myself - expending energy to force myself not to experience things like being occasionally nonverbal, like having meltdowns, like not being able to easily read huge paragraphs of text. I can still “mask” and hide from all those things in a professional setting, but now I’m able to give myself permission to explore them in a non-work setting, and to forgive myself for the extra effort it takes to mask through them at work.

Being disabled literally means you don’t fit into the world the way it was designed. Forever I’d been contorting myself to fit into the boxes. Now, with my diagnosis, I realise sometimes I also have the option to reshape the boxes.

Diversity is strength

Neurodiversity describes a number of different neurotypes, including autism, ADHD, OCD, dyslexia and dyspraxia among many others. People with the most common (or non-disabled) neurotype are known as neurotypical people.

Having a range of neurotypical and neurodivergent people on your team can be a massive strength, as is the case with inclusion of any disability. Because we don’t fit into the world the same way, we have the opportunity to perceive it from different perspectives.

For example, with me in the room:

I see systems in a multidimensional way - I tend to be much better at holding the “zoomed out” contextual view and the “zoomed in” detail view in my head simultaneously than many of my neurotypical colleagues.
My memory is eidetic (purely visual) which means I can remember an astonishing amount of stuff if I have seen it (and barely remember anything I haven’t seen).
When someone speaks in a roundabout or disingenuous or weasely way, my brain cannot process the words: I am much more likely to speak up and say “could you please explain that a different way?”
I demand accessibility. Some forms of communication straight-up don’t work for me without straining my brain really hard. For example, I cannot understand presentations that are read from a script without any visual aid. Demanding that I am included creates a more accessible workplace, or product, for everyone.

These are all about me specifically. Every neurodivergent person, indeed every other autistic person, will bring something completely different to your team. And the more difference you have, the more surface area your team covers.

I love being open at work about being autistic, especially in a leadership and consultancy context, because it helps other members of the team to feel less alone, and to realise there are other neurodivergent people out there whose work is celebrated.

How to (and how not to) support your team

If you have neurodivergent people on your team (and you probably do), here’s some tips I’ve picked up over the years that might help you to include them and ensure they have a great time at work.

What works for you might not work for everyone

I’ve seen managers look at staff and observe them exhibiting a behaviour that they immediately see as “bad for their health” or “unproductive”.

For example, once I was supporting a manager who had a team member who was regularly logging into work at 10pm. The manager wanted immediately to say this was unhealthy and they were not expected to work evenings or weekends, but in conversation it transpired that the colleague found that they couldn’t concentrate at work many days during the normal work day, and they were adjusting their schedule to times when their brain was cooperating. They weren’t working extra hours in the evening, they were working in the evening instead of during the day.

I myself remember being told off by a manager earlier in my career for having “too many distractions” at work, like conversations with colleagues (these days, phone notifications). But when the manager tried taking my distractions away, my productivity dropped - turns out a lot of my best thinking is only possible when my brain is otherwise distracted by something else.

Instead of guessing what works for your neurodivergent colleagues based on what works for you, engage them in conversation and try to find something that works both for the team member and for the company.

Varying communication

One of the best ways you can include neurodivergent people is to vary your styles of communication - try to communicate important messages in as many ways as possible.

For example:

Make sure that when you introduce new information in a meeting or briefing, you give people the chance to respond immediately but you also give people the chance to go away and process the information before responding
Consider written and visual forms of important communications
When speaking, use visual aids to help people who have trouble following speech by itself
Don’t be pedantic about spelling and grammar if something is clearly understandable - often this excludes people who find translating between audio and written words challenging, and more often than not the “rules” of grammar aren’t rules anyway… English is defined by usage!

Reasonable adjustments

Not all neurodivergent people like to think of themselves as having a disability, but accessibility is for everyone.

In the UK, the Equality Act requires employers to make reasonable adjustments to accommodate diversity in the workplace. If your team member asks you for support to make their workplace better, you have a duty to them and to the law to see that every reasonable change is made. (Yes, this might mean rethinking your policies about working from home and so forth.)

Remember that someone doesn’t have to have a diagnosis to ask for adjustments.

Although it’s been wildly slashed recently, there is still an Access to Work programme in the UK - this can help with the costs of making adjustments for staff beyond what is considered reasonable in law, including things like hiring a coach or buying specialist assistive technology.

Don’t “out” people

You might think someone on your team is neurodivergent. It’s not your place to ask them if they are. You can make overtures to your whole team about your inclusion policies but if you single people out with these questions they can be seen as intrusive, personal and even illegal.

Similarly, if someone shares their neurodivergent status with you, assume it’s been given in confidence and ask for consent every time you feel it necessary to share it (e.g. with your own line manager or coach).

Using the right language

Try to avoid using ableist language. So much common parlance derives from terms for disability and it’s important to think of alternatives to these words. People will sometimes use a term like “dyslexic” or “OCD” to describe a perceived deficiency instead of understanding that these are real disabilities that affect your colleagues.

Sometimes people will say something like “everyone’s on the spectrum somewhere”. This is a complete misunderstanding of what a spectrum is (they’ve confused it with a continuum). This article from NeuroClastic is a great explainer of what spectrum actually means.

Another good thing to get your head round is the holistic model of disability - understanding that neither the medical model (“disabled people have something wrong with them”) nor the social model (“it’s society that doesn’t fit around disabled people”) are actually adequate to describe the full range of disability experiences.

To my neurodivergent colleagues

OK, this has turned into a long one, but I wanted to give a shout out to everyone reading this who is neurodivergent, or suspects that they might be.

You are amazing. Being disabled doesn’t make you less than anyone else, but it might make work harder for you.

Remember to forgive yourself when work is hard - it is not your fault. And remember that we are only partway through the transformation of society into one where we are truly accepted and included, but every setback is followed eventually by bigger leaps forward.

Remember that you can always ask for reasonable adjustments whether you have a diagnosis or not. If you can’t work out what adjustments might be possible, you might consider hiring a neurodiversity coach for one session to help you with this.

And remember that self-diagnosis is valid too. Getting a clinical diagnosis was great for me, but there are many good reasons you might choose not to - like travel to countries where autism is still considered an illness, or not wanting the burden of the long and complex diagnosis process.

Feel free to reach out if anything in this blog post resonated and you want to talk about it further.

Fish Percolator is a technical leadership consultancy based in Yorkshire.

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