Managing Performance Issues with a Neurodivergent Employee

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 change because they're autistic, or dyslexic, or have ADHD. If the job needs doing, it needs doing. Lowering the bar isn't kindness, it's patronising, and frankly it's not fair to the rest of the team either. What has to change, sometimes quite a lot, is how you get there. The route to the standard, not the standard itself.

The mistake I see most often

A manager notices someone's missing deadlines, or their written reports are messier than they should be, or they seem to zone out in meetings and miss instructions. The manager's read on this is "poor attitude" or "not trying hard enough." They start a fairly standard performance conversation; vague feedback, a general sense of disappointment, an expectation that the person will simply try harder.

Nine times out of ten, that conversation doesn't work, and it doesn't work for a specific reason: vague feedback is genuinely difficult for a lot of neurodivergent brains to translate into action. "Just be more organised" means nothing concrete to someone whose executive function struggles are the actual reason the disorganisation is happening in the first place. You haven't given them anything to do differently. You've just told them you're unhappy, which they probably already suspected.

What I'd actually do differently

Get specific, fast. Not "your reports need improving" but "I need the summary at the top, three bullet points maximum, sent by 4pm the day before the meeting." That's not babying anyone. That's just clear management, and honestly it tends to help everyone on the team, not just the person you're worried about.

Ask before you assume. If someone's missing things in meetings, the instinct is to assume they're not paying attention. Sometimes that's true. Often it's something else entirely, auditory processing differences that mean a live verbal instruction genuinely doesn't land the way a written one would, or a meeting culture that's fast and interruption-heavy in a way that makes it hard for some people to get a word in, let alone process what's being said. You won't know which it is until you ask, directly and without judgement, what's actually happening for them.

Separate the "can't" from the "won't". I've written before about how central this distinction is to any performance conversation, but with neurodivergent employees it needs even more care, because the presentation can look identical from the outside. Someone who's disorganised because they haven't been given a system that works for their brain looks exactly the same, on a Tuesday afternoon, as someone who genuinely isn't bothered. The only way to tell the difference is the conversation you have, not the assumption you make before it.

Where this gets legally serious, not just kind

If someone's performance issues are connected to a condition that meets the definition of disability under the Equality Act,  and a lot of neurodivergent conditions do, you're not just in "good practice" territory anymore. You have a duty to make reasonable adjustments. That means before you go anywhere near formal performance management, you need to have genuinely considered whether adjustments would help, and you need to be able to show that you did.

I've seen performance processes run against neurodivergent employees that were, on paper, procedurally spotless, clear letters, fair meetings, a right to appeal, and still legally exposed, because nobody had asked the basic question of whether the performance gap was actually about adjustments that hadn't been made. A perfectly followed process built on the wrong starting assumption doesn't protect you. It just means you did the wrong thing carefully.

The bit that's genuinely hard, and I won't pretend otherwise

Not every employee wants to disclose. Some don't have a diagnosis yet and don't know themselves what's going on. Some have been burned before by a manager who used a disclosed condition against them, however unintentionally, and are understandably cautious about doing it again. You can't force disclosure, and you shouldn't try to guess a diagnosis and act on your guess, that's a different kind of mistake, and a patronising one.

What you can do is build a habit of asking open questions early and often, for everyone, not just the person you suspect might be struggling. "What would make this easier for you? Is there a different way you'd rather receive feedback?" Ask it as standard practice and you remove the pressure on any one person to be the one who raises their hand and explains themselves. 

What I'd want a manager to actually remember

Underperformance and difference aren't the same thing, and confusing the two costs you twice; once in fairness to the individual, and once in the actual outcome, because a badly aimed performance conversation rarely fixes anything. Get specific. Ask before you assume. Check whether adjustments are the real answer before you reach for the formal process. And hold the same standard for everyone, because that's the part that was never supposed to change.