Neurodivergent Corporate Survival Guide: Part 1
I’ve learned too many lessons the hard way, and supported too many fellow neurodivergent people through their own challenges, not to share what I’ve learned with my broader community.
There are many other topics I want to cover in the future, such as communication and “managing up,” but I want to start with some lessons a lot of us miss because they rarely come easily: forgetting what you learned in school, choosing staying sane over being right, and allowing bad plans to fail.
Forget what you learned in school
Some ND’s (neurodivergent people) struggle immensely in the structured school environment. Others excel with flying colors. The one thing we all have in common is that we come out of school accustomed to a single major responsibility: deliver a high-quality work product, graded and rewarded on a predictable, individual basis.
If you’ve developed pride in your intellect and high-quality work product, you may be shocked to find the corporate workplace knocking you down a few pegs, insisting there’s something inferior about you and your work. This is the ableism we all face. Suddenly, we are being judged not on our intellectual output, but on a host of nebulous and seemingly inconsistent new demands.
How do you connect with your peers? How do you show deference to people with hierarchical authority? How do you phrase questions so they don’t insult the person you’re asking? How do you come across in emails? How do you dress? How do you socialize?
You are monitored on all of these fronts and many more. Neurotypical (and White-centric) conclusions about how well or poorly you are doing these things will play a significant, if not dominant, role in the way your performance is assessed and the amount of “talent” you are perceived to have. This is a hindrance to people from every historically excluded group, and especially those who are both neurodivergent and racialized.
You will only hurt yourself if you continue to insist on operating according to a simple conception of meritocracy that ignores the realities of the neurotypical White workplace.
Many of us remain oblivious to these demands, keeping our heads down and trying repeatedly to prove our competence through our work product. Others are hyper-sensitive to the rejection in the air, but can’t pinpoint its cause. Still others will become aware of the new demands, and choose to reject or ignore them on principle, recognizing them as unfair and irrelevant measures of one’s competence.
No matter which category you fall into, you will only hurt yourself if you continue to insist on operating according to a simple conception of meritocracy that ignores the realities of the neurotypical White workplace. You must first accept this strange world for what it is before you can build a strategic relationship with it that will protect you from its most harmful tendencies.
Choose staying sane over being right
Many of us are systems thinkers. We see patterns that no one else sees. We see the big picture and the details at the same time. We recognize short term behaviors that will produce negative long-term impacts.
We’re frustrated when processes don’t make sense, when decision-making structures are inefficient, when executives let their hubris cloud their reason. We want to fix broken systems, solve entrenched problems, and set ego and decorum aside when workplace norms produce injustices.
Say you see a departmental strategy careening toward disaster and you sound the alarm repeatedly to no avail, eventually throwing up your hands, content to watch smugly as you’re proven right in front of everyone. Guess what? You’ll never get the satisfaction. By the time the train crashes, enough obfuscation and political maneuvering will have transpired to ensure the guilty parties are never held accountable. In fact, fingers may be pointed at you! You’ll never get an “I told you so,” nor will your warnings be better heeded in the future.
You won’t be rewarded for being right. You will only gain a reputation as a “negative Nancy,” “naysayer,” “not a team player,” or a “squeaky wheel.”
I share this example because many of us who haven’t experienced it firsthand continue to hamper our own advancement and reputations by insisting on our rightness over our sanity. You won’t be rewarded for being right. You will only gain a reputation as a “negative Nancy,” “naysayer,” “not a team player,” or a “squeaky wheel.”
As Maya Angelou famously said, “People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.” When we ND’s are on a righteous mission, no matter how earnestly we hold the organization’s best interests in mind, we are more often than not perceived as antagonists. That is what people remember. So do yourself a favor and don’t learn this lesson the hard way. Choose your sanity over your righteousness. Which brings us to my next lesson learned…
Allow bad plans to fail
Our pride in our work can lead us to self-sacrifice rather than allow bad plans and decisions to simply fail. We sacrifice time, energy, and relationship capital to improve the outcomes of decisions that were made above our pay-grade. What we may see clearly as success in spite of poor leadership, higher ups will see as success because of good leadership. Can you see where refusing to let bad plans fail leads in the long term?
Our persnickety capacity for pattern recognition leads us to fill in gaps and take on work we have no business doing. When we see failure around the bend, often we will quietly step in ourselves to smooth over the process issues, missing fail safes, or inefficiencies. When a new policy simply does not work in practice, we quietly improve it to manifest the desired results.
Accept that many things will never be put together the right way until they have first failed and fallen apart.
The impact of this behavior is far more devastating than we may realize. First, it gives other people — the creators of the bad plans, processes, and policies — credit for succeeding where they have failed, not to mention giving them credit for our work.
Second, it makes our work invisible. We get to take that lovely neurodivergent pride in knowing the critical role we play every day in keeping this boat afloat, but guess what? No one knows you’re behind that success, and if you tell them you are, they won’t believe you.
Third, this behavior enables bad decision makers to keep making bad decisions (and get rewarded for them) while you pick up more and more invisible work to control the collateral damage. If this goes on long enough, you can become an unacknowledged, unrewarded workhorse, acting as an invisible single point of failure, stressing and burning yourself out to keep major work streams functioning while doing three times as much work as your peers.
Don’t learn this the hard way (like I did). Work on your relationship with imperfection and unpredictability. Accept that certain levels of discomfort are better than burn out. Accept that jerry-rigging work streams to avert small failures only enables massive failures down the line. Accept that many things will never be put together the right way until they have first failed and fallen apart.
Read Part 2 here!
(By the way, if you’re interested in a free intro session of neurodivergent coaching or joining my free monthly office hours with other neurodivergent professionals, sign up here!)
