If you have a direct report who identifies as neurodivergent, you may wonder how best to be their manager. Often, when we manage others, we imagine how we would react to the things we plan to ask, or the feedback we plan to give, and the work environment we aim to create. That strategy is not always effective in general, and it is likely to fail spectacularly when engaging with neurodivergent colleagues.
Here are a few things to consider when supervising a neurodivergent employee.
Engage with curiosity
Start by being curious. Meet with your supervisee and get their permission to ask questions so that you know best how to enable them to succeed. Trust your employee to know what works for them: they are the expert on themselves. Find out what has worked for them in the past and what has not. Take notes and work with them to formulate a plan.
In addition, you should let your supervisee know that you are quite likely to make some mistakes. Encourage them to talk to you when you have approached a situation in the wrong way or have asked them to do something in a way that goes beyond their capacity. When you believe that you can make mistakes and learn from them, then you will work more effectively than if you are concerned that every action you take has to be the right one the first time.
High standards and high support
In his wonderful book 10 to 25, my former colleague David Yeager talks a lot about the power of mixing high standards and high support to create a great environment for adolescents and young adults. This advice holds for almost anyone who works for you. It can be a valuable framework for supervising your neurodivergent employees.
You might be tempted to hold your neurodivergent supervisees to a different set of standards than other employees. That is a mistake. The job you have hired someone to do is important for the success of the organization. Putting someone in a role and then not expecting excellence hurts the organization.
More importantly, it harms the employee. Everyone deserves the opportunity to shine and to ultimately advance in their careers. When you relax standards, you limit the degree to which your supervisee can advance. In addition, other people on your team will know you are setting different standards for different employees, which will create resentments among team members.
Expect excellence, but allow flexibility for the way your direct report gets their work done. Maybe they need to be off-camera during Zoom calls because the visual stimulus is distracting, or they need an AI notetaker during meetings. Often, your employee will know what works best for them. Your job as a manager is to help your employees use their strengths to do their work and provide support and strategies for closing their skill gaps or figuring out work-arounds.
Create an environment in which all of your team members can succeed by expecting greatness and giving them the tools they need to achieve it.
It’s not just the law, it’s also a good idea
In the United States, employers are required to provide reasonable accommodations to employees as a legal requirement under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). That strategy of being curious about how to help your neurodivergent employee enables you to find out what requirements they need and to determine what is reasonable to allow in order for the organization to succeed.
This isn’t just a legal requirement, though, it is the right way to engage with all of your employees. A good supervisor should be aware of what their employees need to work effectively. While you can’t always give everyone what they want, the more that you can help to provide a hospitable work environment, the more that employees will bring their full selves to work. A workplace is a community, and you should strive to be a great neighbor to the people who work for you.