my employee thinks I’m intolerant of neurodiversity

A reader writes:

A couple of weeks ago, I gave my employee, Rita, negative feedback on her behavior. It wasn’t what she was saying; it was how she was saying it. She was speaking rapidly and in a panicked but unwarranted manner. She was high-strung and scattered, and I felt interrogated. She accepted my feedback professionally, apologized, and showed subsequent improvement.

Two days ago, a coworker texted me a link to a blog about people with disabilities and asked, “This you?”

Rita has a regular column on a blog about her disability, ADHD. I knew she had an ADA accommodation, but that’s all. She wrote her latest column about our interaction. She accurately described everything, and she used this exchange as part of her argument that managers should be required to take training to better understand and manage neurodivergent staff.

Rita explained my criticisms of her were all about behaviors she couldn’t help, and the workplace is still based on neurotypical norms and expectations. (I am neurotypical, and she knows that.) She mentioned that she never disclosed her ADHD diagnosis at work as she has struggled with skepticism and disbelief before and “you can’t control what happens afterwards.” Plus she doesn’t want to be seen as a label. She talked about striking the balance between accommodating people with disabilities and not singling anyone out. If someone is acting in an unexpected manner, managers should never assume such behaviors are controllable or intentional. According to Rita, I didn’t truly understand what I was asking her to do. Despite taking medicine, she takes extra steps to control her mannerisms now.

I get the impression from her blog post that she’s nervous around me and she is apprehensive about contributing in discussions. Although she expressed sympathy for my role, she mentioned I probably had no idea how hurtful it was for her to hear that feedback and how difficult controlling herself is. She likened it to being asked never to touch your face at work.

I don’t know Rita that well. She is a top performer. I don’t feel comfortable bringing up the blog post because she intentionally didn’t disclose her ADHD. I wonder if she’s right. I have biases like everyone else, and I truly don’t know what her life is like. Was I wrong?

It’s hard to say without knowing exactly what happened and what feedback you gave about it.

Rita definitely is not wrong that workplace expectations are based on neurotypical norms and expectations. I don’t think it inherently follows from that that managers can never give feedback about something because it might stem from neurodivergence, or that every behavior stemming from neurodivergence is necessarily one that workplaces should accommodate. But it’s certainly true that, in general, we could all do a better job of thinking more expansively about what behaviors are truly problematic or disruptive versus what just doesn’t neatly align with what we were taught professional behavior looks like. It’s also true that most managers get little to no training on neurodivergence (or disabilities in general) and most are out there winging it.

Making this more difficult, Rita has good reasons for choosing not to divulge her diagnosis at work; there’s still a lot of stigma toward ADHD and other mental health diagnoses, and disclosing can end up harming people, even if they have generally supportive managers. (For example, it can mean that everything they do ends up seen through an ADHD lens — and so even minor mistakes that everyone makes will be seen as part of A Concerning Pattern for them, whereas for someone else it would get dismissed as a fluke or an off day.)

But it’s also not reasonable to decide that managers should never give feedback on anything because it might be linked to neurodivergence. At some point, the employee has a role in speaking up, too.

The best solution would be a broadening of what we understand “professional” behavior to look like — but we live in the world we live in, and that’s not something any of us has the power to change on our own. Would it be better for individual managers to stop and think, “Could there be more going on here than I understand, and are there ways for that to inform my approach when I raise this?” Yes, absolutely — and that’s the case for all sorts of factors, not just possible neurodivergence. But it’s not realistic to expect things will never be raised at all if they are (a) very outside a particular office’s norms in ways that are disruptive or alarming to others, or (b) out of character for a particular person.

I agree you shouldn’t bring up the blog post with Rita. She clearly didn’t intend for you to see it or to disclose anything to you. But you can use it to inform your own thinking! Would you have handled things differently with her if you’d accounted for a factor like ADHD in play? Would you have needed to raise it regardless but might have tailored your approach differently? And if so, could that become more of your default approach for everyone, since there could always be context you don’t have? Or does it not change anything about how you handled that situation? I don’t know what these answers should be since I don’t know exactly what happened — but they’re useful questions to think over, and you now have the advantage of some insight that can challenge your thinking. You might not land anywhere differently in the end, but it’s still useful to think all that through.

The post my employee thinks I’m intolerant of neurodiversity appeared first on Ask a Manager.