If a team member tells us their workload is too high, if their performance changes noticeably, or if they ask for help, we generally know there is something we need to pay attention to.
The harder situation is the person who still appears to be doing well.
They are meeting deadlines. They turn up to meetings prepared. Their clients are happy. They are getting through their work and, quite often, they are the person everyone else relies on when something needs sorting out. From the outside, there doesn’t appear to be a problem.
Jess Jasch and I discussed this on a recent Find Grow Keep podcast episode about neurodivergent leadership, particularly autism and ADHD in the workplace. We didn’t really discuss a particular adjustment or management technique, but instead the gap that can exist between how well somebody appears to be coping and how much effort it is taking them to keep coping.
And I think that’s something worth considering whether you have neurodivergent people in your business that you know about or not.
We have quite a few assumptions about leadership.
A good leader is available. They’re responsive. They can move quickly between meetings. They’re comfortable talking things through on the spot. They can work in a busy office, deal with interruptions and somehow still find time to think strategically. If something unexpected lands in their calendar, they deal with that too.
Jess is autistic and has ADHD, and she talked about having to understand where she becomes depleted more quickly and which environments allow her to work at her best. Fluorescent lights, for example, can leave her with headaches. She also needs protected periods of focus rather than trying to be available to people all the time.
None of that means she can’t lead. It means the conditions that allow her to lead well might look different from the picture we have in our heads of what leadership is supposed to look like.
I’ve seen something similar with clients more than once, although not always in relation to neurodivergence. We can accidentally start measuring commitment through behaviours that aren’t particularly connected with performance. Who arrives first? Who stays late? Who is always available? Who answers immediately?
There are jobs where some of those things genuinely matter. But there are plenty where they have simply become part of what we expect people to do.
The interesting thing is that this is really a leadership question before it’s a neurodiversity question. Good leaders need to understand that different people will need different things from them, which is also why we spend so much time helping managers build practical leadership capability through our leadership development workshops.
The question is whether our expectations are actually helping people perform well, or whether they are simply the way we’ve always done things.
Jess and I spoke about masking, which in this context can mean suppressing or hiding natural behaviours in order to fit the expectations of a workplace or social environment. For Jess, the cost has sometimes been burnout. She described getting to the end of a working week and then spending the weekend recovering rather than actually enjoying her time away from work.
The people around her didn’t necessarily see any of that.
They saw Jess doing the job.
And that’s where I think businesses can easily get caught out.
We see that someone has completed the project, so we think the workload must have been manageable. We see them running a meeting confidently, so we assume that came easily. We see them taking on a lot of responsibility, so we decide they are capable of taking on a little bit more.
Sometimes they are, but sometimes what we’re seeing is the outcome without seeing all the work that person has had to do behind the scenes to produce it.
Jess talked about the assumption that because she is handling something, she can handle it. What other people can’t see are all the systems she’s created in order to do that, or how much energy those systems take. She also reflected on being diagnosed later in life, having done well academically and subsequently completing a master’s degree while writing a book. On paper, all of that looks like someone who is very capable. (And she is!) But capability doesn’t mean the effort involved is insignificant.
Someone can be good at their job and still need something to change. Someone can be meeting expectations and still be approaching burnout. And someone can appear calm while doing an enormous amount of work internally to remain that way.
I’ve written before about how leader wellbeing and performance are connected, and this is another example of why we need to be careful about judging wellbeing purely from what we can see. A person can continue producing good work for quite a long time before the cost becomes obvious to anybody else.
It’s very easy to assume that supporting neurodivergent employees means managers need to become experts in autism or ADHD.
Some understanding is obviously helpful. The more we understand about different experiences of work, the less likely we are to make assumptions based on stereotypes.
But I don’t think the starting point is trying to diagnose people or deciding what somebody needs based on a label.
Jess made the point that leaders aren’t automatically entitled to know whether somebody has a diagnosis. An employee may choose to share that information, or they may not. A useful workplace conversation can still happen either way.
The question she suggested is a very simple one:
I like that question because it puts the focus where it should be.
Not, “What’s wrong?”
Not, “Why can’t you work the way everyone else does?”
And not even necessarily, “What adjustment do you need?”
It starts with performance and gives the person some responsibility for thinking about what helps them do their best work.
For Jess, written information is helpful. She likes to discuss things, but if there are instructions, questions or agreed actions, having those written down gives her something she can refer back to. Depending on the day, processing information in the moment can be different, so that small change removes some unnecessary difficulty. Someone else may need something completely different.
That’s why I don’t think there is much value in creating a checklist of things that “ADHD employees need” or “autistic employees need”. Autism and ADHD both present differently across people. And, people generally work differently whether they are neurodivergent or not.
The role of the manager isn’t to know the answer before the conversation starts.
It’s to be willing to have the conversation.
Some of the examples we talked about were so simple that it would be easy to dismiss them.
One was the message: “Can we talk?”
I can completely understand why a manager sends that message. They’re probably between meetings, they’ve just remembered something they need to discuss, and they’re trying to find ten minutes in someone’s diary.
But think about what happens at the other end.
For some people, “Can we talk?” is simply a diary question. For somebody else, it may immediately create uncertainty. Have I done something wrong? Is there a problem? Is my job at risk? What is this about?
Jess suggested adding a little bit of context. It might be as simple as explaining the topic or saying that there’s nothing to worry about. That gives the person a chance to prepare themselves mentally for the conversation rather than spending the next hour wondering what it means.
It’s a tiny management behaviour, but this is where I think conversations about neurodiversity can make us better leaders more broadly.
Many people would prefer to know what a meeting is about before they attend it. Many people benefit from having important instructions written down. Many people work better when they have uninterrupted time to concentrate. Many people find constant context switching exhausting.
We sometimes describe these things as accommodations because we’re discussing them in relation to a particular person. But often, when we step back, they’re simply sensible ways of managing people.
Communication also plays a much bigger part in performance than we sometimes realise. I’ve written previously about how team performance can be telling us something about leadership, workload and clarity rather than simply the individual employee. Before assuming somebody has a performance problem, it’s worth asking whether the way work is being communicated or organised is creating unnecessary friction.
That doesn’t mean every employee gets to design a job entirely around their preferences. Businesses still need customers served, meetings attended and work completed.
There will always be things we have to do because that’s part of the role.
The difference is asking whether every way of working that we’ve inherited is genuinely necessary.
Supporting people doesn’t mean lowering expectations. Sometimes it means removing unnecessary barriers to doing good work.
This can be an uncomfortable part of the conversation for business owners.
If one person works from home more frequently, somebody else may ask why they can’t.
If someone has different hours, does that create unfairness?
If one employee receives written instructions and another doesn’t need them, are we treating people differently?
I can understand why leaders worry about this. Once you have 15, 25 or 40 people in a business, decisions can create precedents and managers need enough consistency that the workplace doesn’t become impossible to manage.
But we sometimes confuse consistency with sameness. Good management has always involved giving people what they need to perform within the requirements of the role. We already do this in hundreds of small ways. One person needs more coaching. Another needs more autonomy. One employee is ready for a larger project. Another needs time to consolidate the skills they’ve just learned. That’s not lowering expectations, it’s managing people.
Jess gave the example of some leaders with ADHD finding that they were more effective when they worked fewer, more focused hours rather than filling five long days simply because that was the traditional pattern. Her point wasn’t that everybody should immediately move to a four-day week. It was that we should distinguish between the optics of work and the work itself.
That idea also connects with something I explored recently in what strong business performance really looks like behind the numbers. A business can look healthy on paper while the systems, leadership and ways of working underneath it are becoming harder to sustain. The same thing can happen at an individual level. Output tells us something, but it doesn’t always tell us how sustainable that output is.
So perhaps the useful test is:
What outcome are we actually trying to achieve here?
And does this particular requirement help us achieve it?
One of the things that can make these conversations difficult is that employees need to feel safe enough to ask.
It’s all very well saying, “Tell us what you need,” but people are watching what happens around them.
If the business says flexible work is available but senior leaders openly criticise people who aren’t in the office, employees notice.
If somebody asks for an adjustment and the response makes them feel like they’re being difficult, other people notice that too.
Jess made an interesting point about leaders having a degree of positional power that they can use positively. She talked about sitting in what she calls her “ADHD chair”, which gives her enough space to sit in a way that works for her. A leader openly using something that helps them work can quietly signal to everyone else that they don’t have to hide every difference.
It doesn’t have to be a chair, it might be a leader blocking out focus time in their calendar and protecting it.
It could be saying, “I’m going to take this afternoon at home because I need uninterrupted time to think.”
It might simply be a manager openly saying, “Could you send that to me in writing? I’ll process it better that way.”
Those behaviours matter because culture is built from what people see being normalised, not just what is written in a policy.
This is very similar to the way psychological safety develops. Employees notice what happens when somebody speaks up, asks for something or admits that they are finding something difficult. If the response is curious and respectful, people learn that it is safe to have those conversations. If the response is dismissive, they learn something else entirely.
For small and medium sized businesses, that’s actually encouraging. You don’t necessarily need a sophisticated neurodiversity program to begin making work more accessible.
Sometimes you need managers who are willing to listen, understand what is getting in the way, and model a slightly more human way of working.
There has been a noticeable shift in how neurodivergence is discussed in workplaces.
Historically, conversations were often centred on what somebody might find difficult. More recently, there has been much more discussion about strengths.
Jess was careful about this, and I think rightly so. She talked about the language of neurodivergence being a “superpower”. There may be aspects of autism or ADHD that someone experiences as strengths, but describing the entire experience as a superpower can gloss over the fact that it may also be disabling and require genuine accommodations.
Again, I think this brings us back to the individual. Some people may communicate very directly, which can make conversations faster and clearer. Some may be able to focus very deeply on an area they find interesting. Others may make connections or approach problems from perspectives that people around them haven’t considered. But none of those things should become another stereotype.
The useful question isn’t, “What are the strengths of neurodivergent people?”
It’s, “What are the strengths of this person, and are we creating an environment where they can actually use them?”
That’s a much more useful conversation for any manager to have.
When I think back to the podcast discussion with Jess, I keep coming back to the capable person.
The one who always gets it done.
They’re often the easiest employee to overlook because there doesn’t seem to be anything to fix. And they’re often the easiest employee to load up with more work because they’ve proven they can handle it.
I don’t think the answer is to start assuming that every capable person is secretly overwhelmed. That wouldn’t be particularly helpful either.
But I do think managers could become more curious about how people are achieving their results.
Instead of only asking:
Are they delivering?
We might also ask:
Is the way they’re delivering sustainable?
That is a slightly different conversation.
It might reveal that somebody is fine and genuinely enjoys the pace they’re working at. It might reveal that they’re using strategies that work extremely well and don’t need anything from you. Or it may uncover something you would never have known by looking at their output alone.
This is also where good HR services for small business can be useful before performance has already fallen away. Good HR support isn’t only about stepping in when somebody is underperforming. It can also help businesses look at workload, leadership, communication and the way work is designed so managers have better conversations much earlier.
For businesses that are growing and need more ongoing help with those bigger people questions, Fractional HR support can also give leaders access to senior HR guidance without needing to hire a full-time HR manager.
And perhaps that’s the part I’ve found most useful in thinking about neurodivergent leadership. It isn’t really about creating a special type of workplace for a particular group of employees.
Sometimes you know something isn’t quite working, but you’re not sure whether the issue is workload, management capability, communication, performance or something else.
Book a free discovery call to talk through what’s happening in your business and get a clearer sense of what kind of HR support may be useful.
It’s about becoming better at noticing that people can arrive at the same result in very different ways.
If we’re willing to understand those differences rather than immediately trying to make everybody work in the same way, we have a much better chance of creating workplaces where people can perform well without paying a cost that nobody else can see.
Start by asking the employee what helps them work effectively rather than assuming you know what they need. Useful changes might include written instructions, clearer meeting context, fewer interruptions, protected focus time or flexibility in the working environment. The appropriate approach will depend on the individual and the requirements of their role.
An employee may choose to disclose a diagnosis, but managers shouldn’t assume they are entitled to that personal information. You can still have useful conversations about someone’s working preferences, communication needs and what helps them succeed without requiring a diagnosis to begin the conversation.
Masking can involve hiding, suppressing or changing natural behaviours in order to fit expected workplace or social norms. It may not be obvious to colleagues, which is one reason an employee can appear to be coping well while experiencing significant exhaustion outside work.
Not necessarily. The aim isn’t to lower expectations. It’s to consider whether the way work is organised allows the person to meet reasonable expectations effectively. Two employees may need different approaches or support while still being accountable for appropriate outcomes in their roles.
You may not know from performance alone. Regular one-on-ones can help you understand workload, energy, priorities and whether the current way of working feels sustainable. Rather than waiting until performance declines, ask how the person is finding their workload and whether there are unnecessary barriers making their job harder than it needs to be.
