Five Outdated Concepts About Neurodivergence in the Workplace that we Need to Talk About
There are so many outdated concepts that we need to talk about when it comes to neurodivergence in the workplace and it’s time that we started to dismantle those myths.
Firstly, this blog today is based on a YouTube video I put out. If you would prefer to watch instead of read, you can find the video here:
Neurodivergence makes up a substantial part of the population. Recent statistics about the prevalence of ADHD in countries with higher rates of diagnosis and treatment suggest that it could be as high as 10%. The World Health Organisation estimates the prevalence of Autism to be 1%, although acknowledges well-controlled studies that report a rate that is substantially higher.
The CDC acknowledges studies that suggest about 0.6% of children have Tourettes Syndrome, and that doesn’t go away. The European Dyslexia Association finds that Dyslexia can affect 9-12% of the population and the British Dyslexia Association finds that about 6% of the population have dyscalculia.
The Cleveland Clinic suggests that about 6% of children have dyspraxia, and again this doesn’t go away as people grow up. I could keep going but I think you get my point - neurodivergence affects a lot of us.
Now I do have to acknowledge at this point that neurodivergences regularly come with friends. I’ve spoken about this a lot in a previous post but there are large overlaps between different forms of neurodivergences, the highest being approximately 50% of autistic people having ADHD and a similar relationship between Tourettes and ADHD. So we can’t just add up these percentages and say 35% upwards of people have some form of neurodivergence.
But even if we just take the approximately 10% prevalence of ADHD and Dyslexia each, which have approximately a 25-40% overlap, we’re still looking at a good 15% of the population having some form of neurodivergence.
15% of the population is huge. That’s higher than the percentage of the population with blue eyes. That’s higher than the percentage of people with brown hair in the US. I know these are kind of ridiculous comparisons but I just want to make it clear how common it actually is to be neurodivergent.
But the way we speak about it doesn’t reflect this commonality. It’s like we are a strange, mythical minority, one that the rest of the population doesn’t really know about and doesn’t really understand. And this leads to a number of harmful misconceptions, but particularly misconceptions about us in the workplace.
Now I do need to acknowledge that it’s probably not the case that we make up 15% of the workplace. The ONS statistics found that only 22% of autistics are in any kind of paid work and had some of the lowest employment rates among disabled people.
The reasons why this employment rate is so low is complex, about a third of autistics have learning disabilities that could further impact their ability to work. What is telling though was a quote I pulled out a few weeks ago about autistic employment from the paper “It’s like it is designed to keep me stressed’—Working sustainably with ADHD or autism”. which said:
“Negative attitudes and lack of supportive relationships in the work environment was the greatest obstacle to employment for adults with ASD”
The paper was based on interviews with people who were actually autistic who stated that their biggest barrier was the stigma associated with autism in the workplace. Which is why today’s topic is so important. Because more autistics deserve to be in employment. They deserve to be able to earn enough money to improve their quality of life and enjoy their life like any other human being.
I searched “Happy Worker” for this and I think we can agree that he does look pretty happy!
I am one of the lucky ones to have been employed in a successful corporate career before moving onto entrepreneurship despite not knowing I had ADHD and probably autism the whole time and I coach these people as part of my coaching business. So today we’re going to talk about neurodivergence in the workplace and some of the myths that really need to change.
The first one I want to start with is the outdated concept that everyone’s neurodivergence presents the same. Most people only know one or two neurodivergent people, well actually they probably know more, but they think they know one or two. And because they know of very few and the majority of their opinion is influenced by what they see in the media, it becomes very easy for them to generalise to all people of a particular neurotype.
But while neurotypes often overlap, for example both ADHD and autism have difficulties with executive function challenges, there are also ways in which they are vastly different. While someone autistic might love their routine and get stressed when it’s broken, someone with ADHD loves variety and the opportunity to do something spontaneous. That’s pretty difficult to handle for us AuDHDers who oscillate between the two…
But even within neurotypes things aren’t always the same. Many ADHDers struggle with financial management and impulse buying (Koerts 2021) but this is a particular ADHD trait that doesn’t show up in me. I’ve always been a saver and find it painful to spend money I haven’t budgeted for so this is an aspect of ADHD I just don’t relate to. It doesn’t mean my ADHD doesn’t exist or isn’t valid, it’s just that my specific ADHD profile is one in which my financial impulsivity is lower, whereas other symptoms, such as restless thoughts, are much higher.
And as I alluded to earlier, neurodivergences often come together in varying combinations and so by trying to say: “This thing works for all people with ADHD” we’re ignoring the fact that someone’s dyslexic traits for example might counteract that information.
People LOVE sending me articles on neurodivergence that they read and usually both the people who send them to me and the articles themselves are well meaning. But fairly often, especially if it’s more of an introduction to neurodivergence style, these articles will over-simplify far too much and give one trick at the end that they can try.
One such article someone sent me recommended recording all instructions in video format because supposedly that’s easier for autistics. They didn’t even specify to just do this for autistics by the way, this was the recommendation for neurodivergence in general. Now I don’t know about you but my special brand of ADHD would hate that. Because I have to pay attention, harder to do if the person is speaking too slowly or going over things in a too basic level. I then have to hold the instruction in my working memory and if I forget it I have to navigate backwards in the video to find what I was looking for again, or I have to write it down as I go which could just be solved by giving me written instructions to work with instead.
This is how I feel about being forced to consume instructions in video form. Shattered glasses and all.
Everyone’s neurodivergence presents differently, so we need to get rid of the notion of universal tricks that will work with everyone.
Outdated concept number two is that we need the neurodivergents to adapt to become more neurotypical, we need to get them to behave like everyone else and everything will just be fine. Except, that’s not really how it works either.
We are different and that difference is not bad. In fact this difference has a lot of advantages which I’ve spoken about in previous posts. There’s such a push for diversity because of the benefit it brings to organisations and so if they truly want to embrace diversity they should be embracing our neurodiversity as well to get the real benefits.
A few weeks ago I pulled out this ADHD specific quote and I’m using it again because it’s so relevant:
“In relation to someone’s value within the workplace, an employee with ADHD may be the quintessential “diamond in the rough.” Accordingly, ADHD employees have a special propensity to outperform other employees when managed properly.”
Why would you try and squash them into behaving like others when they have potential to be amazing?
And there’s harm to trying to force us to be neurotypical at work. A few weeks ago I put out a post “Why you keep burning out” based on the latest research into how work burns out people who are ADHD or autistic. And it really doesn’t take much to change things.
When I first started talking about this on TikTok (ttn_coaching if you don’t already follow me) I actually got pushback on this issue and was asked: “Why should everyone have to change for you?” and implications that this was an entitled perspective when it’s just not like this at all. This is not a zero sum game where we need to take away from the neurotypicals so that neurodivergents can dominate. We can work in a way that works for all of us.
An example from my previous post “Make work more ADHD and Autism Friendly” is adding more structure and organisation to work without losing flexibility. This isn’t something that would hurt neurotypicals, everyone benefits from knowing what on earth is going on a little better. It’s funny how we tend to be the ones that struggle with black and white thinking but it’s the neurotypicals who default to an us or them mentality here.
For the third outdated concept I want to dispel the myth that people who are neurodivergent are too disorganised or socially inept or insert whatever challenge you want here to be leaders.
This one is baffling to me because, quite frankly, we are already there. Think of eccentric senior academics managing teams of researchers. Think of those bosses whose minds seem to be spinning at breakneck speeds. In fact, a BBC2 survey from 20 years ago to self-made millionaires found that 40% of them were dyslexic and you can bet they were all leading teams of people.
The line keeps going up, that’s how you know they’re making money!
The reason why we have these misconceptions that neurodivergent people can’t be leaders comes from the stereotyping, the fact that unless you’re part of this community, you probably don’t have a good idea of what neurodivergence is actually like because you’ve never really learnt.
And because of that, those leaders are masking. They’re suppressing their neurodivergent traits to great personal cost because if they reveal their neurodivergence then they may well be punished due to general societal ignorance. But they’re there and the amount of heads of departments, senior VPs, CEOs etc that have confided in me about their neurodivergence but are reluctant to share it publicly is so incredibly high.
Yes, it’s true that ADHDers can struggle with organisation. But just because it’s harder, doesn’t mean we can’t do it with the right help and support. We all do things every day that we find a struggle.
I do want to touch briefly on the socially inept part and introduce the concept of the double empathy problem. I don’t want to go into it in huge detail but the gist is that neurotypicals think people who are autistic have problems socialising because they have vastly different experiences of the world to autistics and so there is a struggle with communication. Autistics do not have this problem communicating with other autistics. It’s not the autistic person’s fault, it’s that both the autistic and the neurotypical are struggling to communicate.
The fourth outdated concept is that everyone with autism is a super maths nerd, everyone with ADHD can’t sit still, everyone with tourettes swears, insert other neurodivergent stereotype here.
I mean I can’t talk here, I have a maths degree and masters and I fidget around all day, preferring a standing desk and exercise breaks to staying in my seat all day. But just because the stereotype fits some people, doesn’t mean that it fits all.
There’s an overlap between autistics and dyscalculia, a neurodivergence that makes maths harder, not easier. So you could have a dyscalculic autistic person that is amazing at creative tasks but try and force them into analysing numbers in a spreadsheet and they just fall apart. They’re having a tough time, you’re losing out on getting them at their best. Nobody wins.
So many of us ADHDers were missed as kids because we didn’t fit the stereotype of hyperactive little boy and the speed of ideas might be where we shine instead. And only 10% of people with tourettes have coprolalia, ie the swearing thing and to be honest, in a lot of workplaces everyone swears anyway so it really doesn’t matter. We forgive involuntary sneezes, I’m sure that in the vast majority of cases we can forgive involuntary swearing as well, especially if everyone understands the context.
Unfortunately in a lot of peoples’ minds, hyperactive little boy still equals the definition of ADHD.
And finally, my last outdated concept about neurodivergence in the workplaces is that it’s on us to discover, organise, implement and fight for the support we need so that we can work at our best. This was highlighted in the paper I mentioned earlier about ADHD and autism in the workplace. We have to read up on regulations on our own, campaign for the support we need and implement strategies by ourselves without support.
Look, there are a lot of us out there, with diagnosis rates increasing. If you want to get the best out of your workers, you need to give them what they need to do the job. Otherwise they have to do all of this on top of their job which is going to make them less productive overall.
And that’s ultimately what this comes down to. Because I could campaign from a human point of view that we should be including neurodivergent people into the workplace more because it’s the right thing to do. But from all the time I’ve spent in both the corporate and business world, I know that one argument is far more important than others:
By not enabling your neurodivergent employees, you are leaving a substantial amount of money on the table. By supporting us, you will get exceptional value in return and if nothing else makes this worth it, let me tell you that this is.
References:
World Health Organisation Autism Prevalence
CDC Tourette’s Syndrome Prevalence
European Dyslexia Association Dyslexia Prevalence
British Dyslexia Association Dyscalculia Prevalence
The Cleveland Clinic Dyspraxia Prevalence
Financial judgment determination in adults with ADHD, (Koerts 2021)
If this resonates with you and feel you would be interested in talking to an adhd and autism-friendly coach, feel free to get in touch. If you’re looking for more blog posts, you can find them here.