How to support neurodivergent career growth in your organisation

Guest post by Leanne Maskell is an ADHD Coach, the Founder of ADHD Works, and author of new book ADHD Works at Work

With the right environment, people with ADHD can advance in their career just like anybody else, thriving within organisations and helping them to be the best they can be. 

However, as success looks different to everybody, it’s important to ensure that the foundations of their working environments are set up for long-term career success: for them to not simply survive, but to thrive. 

What does neurodivergent mean, and how can it be supported in your organisation

People with ADHD are said to be 300% more likely to set up their own businesses, which means that without providing opportunities tailored for people with ADHD to progress their careers within their organisation, there’s a real risk of employers missing out on these exceptional strengths and skills. 

Here are three ways leaders can support neurodivergent career growth in their organisation:

1. Understand neurodivergent thinking 

Due to a 30% developmental delay in executive functioning skills, including planning, people with ADHD tend to connect the dots looking backwards, making sense of our decisions in retrospect. This may disadvantage us in the workplace, where we may be expected to have clear career journeys mapped out in a similar way to our colleagues. 

Our tendency to experience time as ‘now’ or ‘not now’ may exacerbate this, making it difficult for us to think ahead and envision our futures, and to advocate for ourselves in the same way as our colleagues. We may also find it challenging to imagine what potential career options we have without having tried them out first. 

Differences in the executive functioning skills of motivation also mean that people with ADHD are motivated differently from ‘most’ people, resulting in us planning our work differently to what may be expected of us. For example, I often ‘trust my gut’, and still do not have a formal business plan, which seems to be working pretty well for ADHD Works! 

However, in an organisation, especially one with lots of employees, we may not have this luxury. This being said, employees with ADHD may have lots of brilliant ideas and initiatives, which we may execute without a follow up plan in mind.

Without a ‘plan’ in mind, it can be hard to present this objectively important and impressive work as part of our future career advancement goals, for example. This means that we may not always make the most of the things we do, or think about them in a way that could bring us a personal benefit – but we should!

These executive functioning differences underpin many forms of neurodiversity, and do not fit neatly into traditional ‘boxes’, such as standardised Personal Development Plans.

With specialist training, employers can adjust their practices to ensure that neurodivergent people can thrive at work and make the most of their talents, benefitting everybody. This could include providing mentoring or shadowing schemes, enabling people to try out new areas of work, and helping people to focus on their strengths and skills from the work they have done, adapting development plans accordingly.  

1. Redefine ‘success’ 

It’s important to consider making reasonable adjustments in the context of a person’s future career, as well as the disadvantages they may be experiencing at a particular point in time. This involves thinking about how to adjust career paths to make them accessible and inclusive to a range of people. It’s also a great opportunity for employers to reevaluate what ‘success’ looks like, and what they value within their employees at an organisation-wide level. 

For example, adjusting targets related to billable hours may be an appropriate adjustment for those with ADHD in the legal industry, where we may be able to complete a lot more work than our colleagues in the same period of time, but spend far longer on certain ‘easier’ tasks (such as completing timesheets!). Organisations can adjust their thinking to focus on outputs and results, instead of micromanaging the details, providing opportunities for everybody to progress.  

Continually reassessing how success is measured is important for any organisation to do, to ensure they are working effectively. Setting SMART targets that are tangibly and clearly aligned with company goals enables everybody to engage in pursuit of a common purpose, as opposed to being held to arbitrary and disconnected objectives for the sake of it. 

Ensuring that ADHD employees understand the why behind their work enables them to activate their interest based nervous systems to perform to the best of their abilities and for roles to be adapted accordingly. For example, they may wish to develop certain skills or experience in a role, as opposed to following traditional careers paths of management.

Encouraging them to redefine what success looks like for themselves and to set goals in accordance with this is highly empowering, and likely to result in happier, loyal, and engaged employees. Criteria for progression and promotion can and should be adapted to meet these goals – not everybody wants to be the CEO!

1. Encourage neurodivergent-friendly ‘workings out’

The differences in self-awareness and problem solving that accompany ADHD mean we may struggle to explain how or why we have done our work, which can make it feel challenging to take responsibility for our successes. This can be confusing when trying to explain to another person how to do the same thing, as our brains may not break down our work into natural steps that can be easily followed by others. 

The neuronormative expectations of society generally require us to be able to ‘show our working out’, right from when we’re taking exams in school. Interviews, appraisals and promotion opportunities can implicitly set these same expectations, asking us to explain how we’ve handled certain tasks or situations. 

Creating regular opportunities for employees who think differently to share and record their ‘workings out’ in the ways that work for them can be extremely helpful for their own career advancement, in addition to others. For example, I met a woman who started writing down what she was doing as she was doing it, to help leave a repeatable path of how she actually does her job. This document has now been shared across the organisation and used by countless people, not just as a strategy for them to do the same in their own careers, but to help them understand how to do their own jobs!

The challenges with memory that accompany ADHD may mean we also struggle to remember our successes within the workplace and to fully take responsibility for them. Employers could support neurodivergent employees to record their ‘wins’ and ‘workings out’ in the ways that work for them, such as by recording voice notes or writing a guidebook for others. 

It’s helpful to have a reminder to do this, and somebody to help us identify how we are developing, such as by noting the skills that we have gained as a result of certain projects. ADHD coaching can be extremely helpful for this, as we help people to identify their wins and how these can be used going forwards.

Ultimately, employees who think differently require employers who think differently to enable them to reach their limitless potential within the workplace. In our fast-moving world, taking a flexible, supportive, and inclusive approach sees everybody win – it’s a no brainer! 

Leanne Maskell is an ADHD Coach, the Founder of ADHD Works, and author of new book ADHD Works at Work 

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