The Conversation Nobody Wants to Have

Hi Leaders,

Grown men came into my office shaking.

One employee on my team was bipolar. When she was on her medication, she was sharp and capable, one of the best in the building. When she was not, people who outranked her walked in rattled because she had threatened them.

Nobody hands you a protocol for that.

Most leadership training on neurodiversity stops at the comfortable part. Build the environment. Recognize that brains process differently. Create psychological safety. All of that is right. None of it prepares you for the day the situation is already on fire and the person you are trying to support is the reason why.

That is where real leadership lives. And most training never goes there.

Most neurodiversity in the workplace looks nothing like what I just described. Most of it is quiet. The employee who needs more processing time. The one who shuts down in a large meeting not out of disengagement but because their nervous system is already at capacity just being in the room. The one whose best thinking happens independently and never gets surfaced in the meeting structure you built without realizing who it excluded.

That is the majority of what you are managing. But the extreme exists, and if you are trained only on the comfortable version of this, you will get caught unprepared when it shows up.

We can’t skip the chapter where you have to be the villain in someone else’s story.

When I had grown men coming into my office shaking, I had to react. I was not a mental health specialist. Nobody handed me a protocol. What I had was a decision only I could make, and a team of people walking on pins and needles every single day whose safety was my responsibility too.

Listen to the full story and episode here

Accommodation has limits. Your accountability does not.

Not every situation announces itself the way mine did. Most don’t. Most look like someone going quiet in meetings, or missing a deadlines, or needing something adjusted that never gets said out loud. Quiet does not mean unimportant. It means the same principle applies, just without an audience.

There is a version of the inclusion conversation that treats leader responsibility as the only variable. That version is incomplete, and it is not honest.

The better question: what does the leader owe the neurodivergent employee, and what does that employee owe the organization in return?

Leaders owe a thoughtful environment. Advance communication. Reasonable accommodation. That is not optional. It is the job.

But the individual also carries responsibility. When an unmanaged condition creates an unsafe environment for colleagues, the obligation to one person does not cancel the obligation to everyone else in the room. Whether that shows up as a loud crisis or a pattern nobody has named out loud, holding both truths at once is what leadership actually looks like. The discomfort of that is not a reason to avoid the conversation. It is the reason to have it.

Now for the situations that are not a crisis, which is most of what you are actually managing day to day...I have a theory of where the biggest fault line in our teams’ foundations comes from:

Your meeting calendar.

The prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for decision-making and focus, degrades under sustained cognitive load with no recovery time. Stack meetings wall to wall and you are not generating productivity. You are systematically depleting the exact cognitive resources your team needs to do the actual work. For neurodivergent employees that depletion is faster and deeper. No brain escapes it entirely.

A calendar with zero white space isn’t a badge of honor. It’s a cry for help, wearing a blazer. You are not running a productive team. You are running a tired one that is very busy talking about work instead of doing it.

I have not taken meetings on Mondays or Fridays in years. Tuesday through Thursday is where I work. The rest is thinking time, the space to stop working in the business and start thinking about where it is going. When I model it, my team learns they are allowed to have a brain too.

Instead of complaining about the workforce that showed up, are you willing to look honestly at the environment you built for them?

I wrote a piece years ago defending millennials when everyone else blamed them. My point was simple. We over-scheduled that generation from the time they could talk. We had them in dance, soccer, piano, football, you name it…we signed them up for it, we gave them no white space, and then acted surprised when sustained focus did not come naturally. We are doing the same thing to Gen Z now. At some point the question has to shift from why is this generation different to what environment are we building, and is it designed for how people actually perform?

Three Things You Can Do This Week

Audit your meeting calendar. Count every meeting your team sits in this week. How many produce decisions? How many just produce conversations about decisions? I am a champion of the fifteen-minute standup. Most meetings do not need to be an hour. Many do not need to exist at all.

Send the agenda before the meeting. Not as a courtesy. As a structural accommodation that costs nothing. When people know what is coming, they can prepare. For neurodivergent employees, advance context is the difference between contributing and spending the meeting just trying to keep up.

Model rest out loud. Block time on your calendar and say it in a meeting. Tell your team you are offline and trust them to handle it. A leader who brags about never sleeping is not impressing anyone. They are just the office’s saddest flex. That signal travels fast and it is expensive.

How the ALLY Framework applies here.

Ask. What does my meeting structure say about who I designed this environment for? Am I building for the loudest, fastest processors, or for everyone?

Listen. Before your next one-on-one, ask one question you do not usually ask: is there anything about how we work together that makes your job harder than it needs to be? Then be quiet.

Learn. The employee who underdelivers in group settings but produces strong independent work is not inconsistent. They are showing you something about conditions. Pay attention before you label it a performance problem.

You Take Action. Pick one structural change this week. Send the agenda early. Block one afternoon from meetings. Say out loud that you are logging off, and mean it. Small structural shifts compound. That is also neuroscience.

The Bottom Line

According to the City & Guilds Neurodiversity Index, seventy-six percent of employees choose not to fully disclose their neurodivergence at work. That number is not about stigma in the abstract. It is a calculation people run before they trust you with anything real.

A JPMorgan Chase report on its Autism at Work program found that participating professionals made fewer errors and were 90 to 140 percent more productive than their neurotypical peers. The return on building a better environment is real.

But you cannot unlock that return from people who are spending their energy managing how they appear to you instead of solving your business problems.

The hard part is not the information. It is deciding that the people on your team who move through the world differently deserve a leader willing to understand them. Not manage them. Not tolerate them. Understand them.

Nothing changes if nothing changes.

→ Listen to the newest Not Like Me episode here

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The rest of this article is for paid subscribers, including the exact phrases that tell a neurodivergent employee it is safe to bring you their real performance, and the manager habits that quietly do the opposite.