But doesn’t everyone struggle with that?

I get asked some difficult questions when I deliver neurodiversity training.

“But doesn’t everyone struggle with that?” “If they can’t do that part of the job, should they really be doing it?” “What if one person’s adjustment affects the whole team?” “What do I do when someone says, ‘I can’t do that because I have ADHD’?” “What if their colleagues think they’re rude?”

They’re not always comfortable questions, and I’ll admit that sometimes I find them difficult to answer. Partly because there isn’t always a simple answer, but also because behind them I sometimes hear assumptions about disability, competence and what people should be able to do.

But I don’t want managers to stop asking them.

In fact, I think we need to talk about them more. Managers are trying to balance the needs of an individual, the impact on a team and the requirements of a job. They’re also often frightened of getting it wrong – of discriminating, saying the wrong thing or asking something they’re not allowed to ask. So sometimes they say nothing at all.

Over the next few articles, I’m going to explore some of the questions I hear most often. I’m not going to pretend there’s always a neat answer, and I’m not going to suggest that neuroinclusion means saying yes to everything. I want to look at what sits underneath these questions and, most importantly, how managers can have better conversations when someone experiences work differently from them.

So I’m starting with probably the most common question of all:

“But doesn’t everyone struggle with that?”

There’s a question I hear in almost every neurodiversity training session I deliver: “But doesn’t everyone struggle with that?”

Everyone gets distracted. Everyone forgets things. Everyone procrastinates. Everyone gets overwhelmed. Everyone finds noisy environments difficult sometimes. Everyone would probably prefer their manager to give them clear instructions rather than vaguely telling them to “sort that out”.

And the answer is yes. Of course they do.

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot recently because, if I’m completely fair to the people asking it, I can understand where it comes from. If you haven’t experienced significant sensory differences, executive functioning difficulties or slower processing speed, some of the things I describe in training can sound like fairly ordinary human experiences. You hear “difficulty concentrating” and think about the afternoon when you couldn’t focus. I talk about working memory and you remember going upstairs and forgetting what you went there for. I talk about sensory sensitivity and you think, “Well, I don’t like a noisy office either.”

The problem isn’t recognising something of yourself in somebody else’s experience. In fact, that can be a really useful starting point for empathy. The problem comes when “I experience that too” becomes “therefore I understand how significant it is for you.”

That’s where we need to look at frequency, intensity, duration and impact.

Most of us get distracted, but that doesn’t mean we all experience attention in the same way. Most of us get overwhelmed, but that doesn’t mean we all experience sensory overload. Most of us occasionally forget things, but that doesn’t mean we all experience significant working-memory or executive-function difficulties.

And sometimes those differences really are disabling.

We need to be able to talk about disability

I think this is something we sometimes shy away from in conversations about neurodiversity. There has understandably been a move away from talking only about deficits. We talk about strengths, different ways of thinking and the value of neurodivergent people in our workplaces. I absolutely want us to do that.

But I don’t want us to go so far in celebrating difference that we become afraid to acknowledge disability.

Not every neurodivergent person identifies as disabled and there is enormous variation between individuals, but autism, ADHD, dyslexia and other forms of neurodivergence can have a substantial impact on someone’s everyday life and work. Someone can be highly intelligent, enormously capable and very good at their job while also experiencing significant difficulties with sensory processing, communication, executive functioning, processing speed or working memory.

There is a legal context here too. Under the Equality Act 2010, disability is defined in terms of a physical or mental impairment having a substantial and long-term adverse effect on someone’s ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities. “Substantial” means more than minor or trivial. ⁠UK Government guidance on the definition of disability under the Equality Act 2010. ACAS also advises that neurodivergence will often amount to a disability under the Equality Act, depending on the individual circumstances and impact. ⁠ACAS guidance on reasonable adjustments for neurodiversity

That legal definition is useful even if we put the law to one side for a moment, because it brings us back to impact. Whether I occasionally experience something similar doesn’t tell me how substantially it affects somebody else.

Clear expectations are a really good example

This came up in a training session recently. We were talking about clear expectations and almost everybody agreed that they work better when they know what is expected of them. That wasn’t particularly surprising. Who doesn’t want to know what their manager actually wants?

But then we started thinking about the instructions people actually receive at work: “Can you sort that out?”, “Use your judgement”, “I need it ASAP”, “Just keep an eye on things”, “You know what I mean” or “Do what you think is best”.

There is an enormous amount of interpretation hidden in those apparently simple instructions.

For one employee, that ambiguity might be mildly irritating. They make an assumption, fill in the gaps and carry on. For another employee, the same instruction can create significant cognitive load. What exactly am I being asked to do? Which part is the priority? What does ASAP actually mean? Am I authorised to make that decision? What happens if I get it wrong? Should I ask for clarification again, and if I do, will my manager think I’m incompetent?

So yes, clear expectations are good for everyone. But the absence of clear expectations doesn’t necessarily affect everyone equally.

That’s the bit I think we’re missing when we say, “Isn’t this just people?”

Sometimes an adjustment can sound unreasonable

This is another area where I think we need to be more open about what managers are actually thinking.

Imagine someone tells you that they can’t work effectively when colleagues wear perfume. Or that food smells from people eating at their desks are overwhelming. Perhaps they struggle with bright lighting, background conversations or somebody playing a radio. Maybe they find last-minute changes extremely difficult.

If you’ve never experienced significant sensory sensitivity, I can understand why your immediate reaction might be, “Really? We’re going to ask everybody else to change because of that?”

I’ve sometimes heard myself explaining adjustments and thought that, from the perspective of someone who hasn’t lived around autism or ADHD, what I’m describing could sound excessive. That’s precisely why we need the conversation.

If perfume is simply a smell that I don’t particularly like, asking an entire workplace to change because of it might seem disproportionate. But my experience of perfume tells me absolutely nothing about how somebody else’s nervous system processes that sensory input or what effect it has on their ability to function.

That doesn’t mean the manager has to immediately agree to whatever solution is suggested. The need and the proposed adjustment are not necessarily the same thing.

If someone says, “I can’t cope with food smells, so nobody should be allowed to eat at their desk”, we don’t have to choose between “Absolutely, we’ll ban it tomorrow” and “That’s ridiculous, everyone has to put up with things they don’t like.” We can understand the barrier first. What happens? How significant is the impact? When does it happen? What does the employee need to be able to do? Then we can explore different options, including the effect those options might have on everybody else.

That’s reasonable adjustment in the proper sense of the phrase: understanding the disadvantage and exploring what might reasonably reduce it.

Perhaps we’re asking the wrong question

The more I have these conversations, the more I think “Doesn’t everyone struggle with that?” isn’t actually a bad question. It’s just an incomplete one.

The better conversation starts when we add: “But what is the impact for this person?”

That takes us away from comparison and towards curiosity. Instead of deciding that someone’s difficulty can’t be significant because we experience something similar, we can ask what happens for them, how often it happens, what makes it worse, what makes it easier and what they’re trying to be able to do.

There is a phrase used frequently in inclusion: “Good for everyone, essential for some.” I think there’s a lot of truth in it. Clear expectations, predictable communication, quiet spaces, written instructions and flexibility can benefit huge numbers of people. We should probably be doing much more of those things anyway.

But I also think we need to be careful. “Good for everyone” shouldn’t become another way of making disability invisible.

There is a meaningful difference between an employee saying “I prefer it when my manager gives me written instructions” and another saying “Without written instructions, I regularly lose information and cannot reliably complete the task.”

The solution might benefit both of them. The impact of not having it may be very different.

So when someone asks me, “But doesn’t everyone struggle with that?”, I’m going to keep saying yes.

Perhaps they do.

But then I’m going to ask the much more useful question:

How much does this person struggle with it, what is the impact, and what could we do about it?

Because that’s where inclusive management actually starts.

Start with the impact, not the comparison

The next time someone tells us they are struggling with something at work, perhaps our first instinct shouldn’t be to compare their experience with our own.

Instead of asking, “Don’t we all find that difficult?”, we can ask:

“What does that difficulty look like for you?”

“What impact is it having on your work?”

“What would make it easier for you to do your job well?”

Those questions don’t assume an adjustment is reasonable. They don’t remove expectations or accountability. And they don’t mean a manager has to have all the answers.

They simply give us a much better place to start.

Because inclusive management isn’t about treating every difficulty as a disability, or saying yes to every request. It’s about being curious enough to understand the individual impact before deciding what happens next.

And sometimes, a small change that is helpful for everyone can be the difference between someone coping at work and someone being able to thrive.

Next in this series: I’ll look at another question I hear regularly in training: “If they can’t do that part of the job, should they really be doing it?”

More on organisational training from our team at Inclusive Change: Change Management & Inclusive Leadership | Inclusive Change