Neurodiversity

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

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

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