“What if I get it wrong?”

The questions managers ask me about neurodiversity – Part 10

There is one question that has been sitting underneath almost every article in this series, even when nobody has actually said it out loud: “What if I get it wrong?”

What if I ask something I’m not allowed to ask? What if I say no to a reasonable adjustment and discriminate? What if I say yes and it creates a problem for everybody else? What if I challenge somebody’s behaviour and it’s connected to their autism? What if I expect too much from someone? What if I make so many allowances that I’m actually expecting too little?

I hear this anxiety a lot when I work with managers. In fact, sometimes the more neurodiversity training people have received, the more frightened they seem to be of getting something wrong. They’ve learned about masking, sensory processing, executive functioning, communication differences, reasonable adjustments and disability discrimination, but they haven’t necessarily learned what to do when they’re sitting opposite a real person with a complicated workplace problem.

That worries me, because I don’t want neurodiversity training to produce managers with a longer list of things they’re frightened to say.

I want it to give them more confidence to have the conversation.

Fear of getting it wrong can create its own problems

When managers are frightened of making the wrong decision, I’ve noticed a few things can happen. Sometimes they avoid the conversation altogether. They hope the problem will resolve itself, particularly if it involves something uncomfortable such as performance, behaviour or conflict within a team. By the time they finally address it, a relatively manageable issue has become much bigger.

Sometimes managers do the opposite and agree to whatever is requested because somebody has used the words “ADHD”, “autism” or “reasonable adjustment”. They don’t explore the barrier or consider whether the proposed adjustment will actually help because they’re frightened that questioning it might be discriminatory.

Other managers hand everything to HR. HR absolutely has an important role, particularly when things become complex, but neuroinclusive management can’t mean “As soon as somebody mentions disability, send them somewhere else.” The day-to-day relationship between the employee and their manager is still where many of the most useful adjustments and conversations happen.

And sometimes managers simply become so cautious that they stop managing. They don’t give difficult feedback, don’t clarify expectations and don’t address something that is affecting the rest of the team because they are frightened that doing so will somehow be discriminatory.

None of those responses is particularly inclusive.

You are allowed to manage

This is something I say quite often in training.

If an employee is neurodivergent or disabled, you are still allowed to manage them. You can talk about their work, discuss expectations, ask what is happening when something isn’t working and give feedback about behaviour. You can ask questions about the impact of a workplace barrier and explore what support might help.

What changes is that you may need to think differently about how the employee can meet the required standard and whether disability is creating a disadvantage that needs to be addressed.

The Equality Act 2010 requires employers to consider reasonable adjustments where a disabled employee would otherwise be placed at a substantial disadvantage. ⁠UK Government guidance on reasonable adjustments for disabled workers Acas guidance also emphasises talking with the employee, avoiding assumptions, considering possible adjustments and reviewing what has been put in place. ⁠Acas guidance on reasonable adjustments

None of that requires managers to become clinicians. It requires them to understand enough about what is happening at work to make thoughtful decisions.

Good decisions start with better questions

One of the things I’ve realised while writing this series is how often we rush towards an answer before we have properly understood the question.

“Can they have this adjustment?”

“Is that behaviour because they’re autistic?”

“Do they still have to do this part of the job?”

“Is it fair on everybody else?”

“Are they really working independently?”

We want a yes or no because certainty feels safer. But most of the situations we’ve explored in this series don’t start with enough information for a sensible yes or no.

If somebody says, “I can’t do that because I have ADHD,” we need to understand what happens when they try. If somebody asks colleagues not to wear perfume, we need to understand the barrier rather than immediately arguing about the proposed solution. If the team says somebody is rude, we need to know what they’re actually doing rather than managing a label. If someone says they don’t know what support they need, we can make the question smaller and start looking for patterns.

The same principle runs through almost every one of these conversations: start with what is actually happening.

Understand the barrier before you design the solution

I think managers sometimes feel they need much more specialist neurodiversity knowledge than they actually do.

Knowing about autism, ADHD, dyslexia and other forms of neurodivergence can certainly help. It can give us ideas about what somebody might be experiencing and challenge some of our assumptions. But knowing that somebody has ADHD doesn’t tell us which adjustment they need, just as knowing that somebody is autistic doesn’t tell us how they communicate, what sensory environment they need or whether they can make a particular decision.

That’s why I keep coming back to impact and barriers.

What happens when the person tries to do the task? When does the difficulty occur? What is different when things go well? How significant is the impact? What does the job actually require them to be able to do? Is the difficulty with that requirement itself, or with the way we’ve currently designed the work?

Once we understand those things, the conversation about support becomes much more useful.

We can start exploring options rather than reaching for a standard list of “autism adjustments” or “ADHD adjustments”.

You don’t have to make the perfect decision first time

This is another reason I want managers to feel less frightened.

Sometimes you can make a reasonable, thoughtful decision and discover that it doesn’t work.

You might agree to a quieter workspace and discover that the person feels isolated. You might provide written instructions and realise that the real problem was prioritisation rather than memory. You might change someone’s working hours and find that it solves one barrier but creates another. An employee might ask for something they genuinely believe will help and discover after trying it that it doesn’t.

That doesn’t necessarily mean somebody got the original decision “wrong”. It means you’ve learned something.

This is why trials and reviews are so useful. Instead of treating every adjustment as a permanent decision that must be perfectly designed from the beginning, we can sometimes say, “This seems like a reasonable thing to try. Let’s do it for six weeks, see what happens and review it.”

The important part is the review. Did the adjustment reduce the disadvantage? Can the person do the work more reliably? What has changed? Has something unexpected happened elsewhere? Do we continue, modify it or try something different?

That is decision-making based on evidence rather than fear.

And yes, write things down

I think this is sometimes framed rather defensively in management training: document everything in case you end up at tribunal.

That’s not the main reason I want managers to keep a record.

I want them to write things down because complicated decisions are easier to review when we can remember why we made them.

What did the employee tell us? What did we understand the barrier to be? What was the impact? What did the job genuinely require? What options did we consider? Was there an impact on the wider team or another competing need? What did we agree to try, and when are we going to review it?

A good record helps the employee too. They don’t have to explain everything again when a manager changes, and both sides have a shared understanding of what was agreed.

Most importantly, it makes the reasoning visible.

A good decision isn’t just one where we can say what we decided. We should be able to explain why.

Sometimes you will need help

There will be situations where a manager shouldn’t be trying to work everything out alone. HR, occupational health, Access to Work, workplace needs assessments, trade unions or specialist advice may all have a role depending on what is happening.

But asking for help is different from handing the problem over.

If occupational health recommends an adjustment, the manager still needs to understand how it could work in the role. If HR advises on the legal or procedural position, the manager still needs to have the conversation with the employee. If Access to Work recommends support, somebody still needs to make sure it works in practice.

The manager remains an important part of the process because they understand the job, the team and the day-to-day working environment in a way that an external adviser often cannot.

Equally, the employee remains part of the process because nobody else experiences the barrier in quite the way they do.

What if you say the wrong thing?

I think this is the fear underneath quite a lot of this.

And the reality is that sometimes you probably will.

You may ask a question badly. You may use language somebody doesn’t like. You might misunderstand what they’re trying to tell you or make an assumption and realise halfway through the conversation that you’ve got it wrong.

If that happens, you can correct it.

“I don’t think I asked that very well. Let me try again.”

“I think I made an assumption there. Can I check I’ve understood?”

“You said something earlier that I don’t think I properly understood. Can we go back to it?”

Those are useful management skills far beyond neurodiversity.

Creating psychologically safe workplaces doesn’t mean nobody ever says the wrong thing. It means there is enough trust for people to clarify, correct, challenge and repair when they do.

Perhaps this was never really a series about neurodiversity

Writing these articles has made me realise something.

We’ve talked about disability, reasonable adjustments, ADHD, autism, communication differences and neurodivergence. But many of the questions underneath them are actually questions about management.

How do we know what a job genuinely requires? How do we distinguish an outcome from the way we’ve always achieved it? How do we give useful feedback? How do we balance individual and team needs? How do we make decisions when we don’t have perfect information? How do we respond when somebody experiences the workplace very differently from us?

Those are leadership questions.

Neurodivergence makes some of them more visible because our usual assumptions stop working. The instruction that everybody else seemed to understand suddenly needs to be made explicit. The workplace environment we thought was fine turns out to be creating a significant barrier. The employee who is extremely capable can’t demonstrate that capability through the process we’ve designed.

Perhaps neuroinclusion forces us to examine some of the things we should have been examining anyway.

So, what if you get it wrong?

Don’t start with the diagnosis. Start with the person and what is actually happening. Understand the barrier and its impact, be clear about what the job genuinely requires and explore the options rather than jumping immediately to yes or no. Think about the individual, the team and the work that needs to be done. Ask for advice when you need it, make your reasoning visible, try things where appropriate and review whether they actually work.

Most importantly, stay in the conversation.

I don’t want managers leaving neurodiversity training with a longer list of things they’re frightened to say. I want them to leave feeling more confident about asking good questions, listening to the answers and making thoughtful decisions when there isn’t an obvious solution.

You won’t always get every conversation or every adjustment right first time. Neither will the employee always know exactly what they need.

The goal isn’t to never get it wrong. The goal is to get better at working it out together.

Want your managers to feel more confident having these conversations?

Inclusive management isn’t about having the perfect answer every time. It’s about knowing what to ask, how to explore barriers and how to make thoughtful decisions when the answer isn’t obvious.

Explore our neurodiversity and inclusive management training

This is the final article in my series, The questions managers ask me about neurodiversity. I’ve written the series because I don’t think difficult questions become less difficult when people are frightened to ask them. If we want genuinely neuroinclusive workplaces, we need spaces where managers and employees can talk about disability, standards, behaviour, adjustments, competing needs and the reality of getting work done — without reducing the answer to a slogan.

Better conversations won’t solve everything. But they’re a very good place to start.