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If there's one thing I'd want every manager to unlearn, it's the idea that autism looks a particular way. It doesn't. I've worked with autistic employees who are the most articulate, socially confident people in the room, and others who find a two-minute unscheduled conversation genuinely draining. The stereotype does nobody any favours, least of all the manager trying to work out what actually helps the specific person in front of them. The thing I'd say first, before anythi

The thing about ADHD that catches most managers out is how inconsistent it looks from the outside. Someone can turn in genuinely brilliant work one week, fast, creative, sharp under pressure and then struggle to send a routine email on time the next. That inconsistency reads, to a manager who doesn't understand what's driving it, as unreliability or a lack of effort. It's neither. It's how attention actually works for a lot of people with ADHD, and understanding that differen

There's a specific moment I've seen play out dozens of times. A manager mentions, almost as an aside, that someone on their team "isn't really pulling their weight." I ask how long that's been going on. The answer is almost never "since last week." It's usually months. Sometimes longer. And when I ask what's actually been said to the person directly, the answer is often nothing or something so softened it barely registered as feedback at all. I don't think managers avoid this

Most of the neurodiversity training I've seen aimed at line managers spends most of its time on definitions: what autism is, what ADHD is, what dyslexia is. Useful up to a point, but definitions don't actually help a manager on a Tuesday afternoon when someone on their team is clearly struggling and they're not sure what to do about it. So instead of another definitions list, here's what I'd actually want a line manager to walk away knowing. You will very likely never get a d

I don't think the employers who get employee relations wrong are careless or badly intentioned. Almost none of the messes I get called in to help untangle started with someone being deliberately unfair. They started with someone being busy, or uncomfortable, or genuinely unsure what the right move was, and making a small decision under pressure that quietly became a bigger problem three months later. Here are the ones I see over and over. Letting things slide because the mome

A disciplinary meeting is stressful for anyone. Nobody sits across the table from their manager, being asked to explain their conduct, and feels relaxed about it. But I've sat in enough of these to know the stress isn't evenly distributed, and for a lot of neurodivergent employees, the standard disciplinary format is genuinely working against a fair outcome before a single question's been asked. Let me explain what I mean, because I don't want this to sound like special plead

I want to start with something that might sound like a contradiction: I don't think neurodivergent employees should be managed differently when it comes to performance. And I also think most performance conversations with neurodivergent employees go wrong because managers don't adjust anything at all. Both of those things are true, and the gap between them is where most of the mistakes I see actually happen. Here's what I mean. The standard you hold someone to shouldn't chang

There's been a lot of noise about the Employment Rights Act 2025, and if you've skimmed a few headlines you could be forgiven for thinking the government has invented some brand new "statutory probation period" that you now need a manual for. It hasn't. That proposal was on the table during the bill's passage through Parliament and it got dropped before Royal Assent on 18th December 2025. So if you've been dreading a new set of rules specifically governing how probation has t

I've lost count of the number of times a client has called me in a mild panic because someone's turned up late for the fourth time that month, or missed a deadline that mattered, and their instinct is to march the person into an office and sack them on the spot. I get it. When something's frustrating you, the temptation is to deal with it fast and be done with it. But fast and fair rarely live in the same sentence, and skipping the process is how a straightforward performance

Most managers over-prepare the wrong part of a difficult conversation. They spend all their time working out exactly what they're going to say, word for word, and almost none preparing for what happens after they say it; the reaction, the pushback, the silence, the tears, the anger. That imbalance is exactly why so many of these conversations go sideways. The opening line was fine. Nobody had thought about the next five minutes. Get clear on the actual point before you get cl