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.
