“I asked what would help and they said, ‘I don’t know.’ What am I supposed to do with that?”

The questions managers ask me about neurodiversity – Part 7

There is a piece of advice we give managers all the time when we talk about neurodiversity and reasonable adjustments: ask the person what they need. I give that advice too. It is certainly better than making assumptions based on somebody’s diagnosis, finding a generic list of ADHD adjustments online or deciding that because something worked brilliantly for one autistic employee, it will obviously work for another.

But I think we’ve made it sound much easier than it actually is. Sometimes a manager does exactly what we have told them to do. They sit down with the employee and ask, “What would help you?” and the employee says, “I don’t know.” Or perhaps they say, “Nothing. I’m fine.”

The manager is left wondering what they are supposed to do next. They’ve asked. The person doesn’t know. The manager isn’t an expert in ADHD, autism or dyslexia and doesn’t want to make assumptions, so the conversation stalls.

I think there is something important we’re missing here. Knowing that you are struggling is not the same as knowing why you are struggling, and neither is the same as being able to design a workplace solution.

“Ask the person” is good advice, but it isn’t the whole answer

We often say that neurodivergent people are the experts in their own experience, and I think that’s true. But being the expert in what it feels like to be you doesn’t automatically make you an expert in workplace adjustments.

You might know that you are completely exhausted by Wednesday afternoon but have no idea which parts of your working day are creating that exhaustion. You might know that meetings are difficult without understanding whether the problem is the number of people, the speed of the conversation, having to listen and take notes at the same time, not knowing when you will be expected to contribute, the lighting, the noise or a combination of all of those things.

You might know that every time your manager changes your priorities halfway through the day everything seems to fall apart, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you understand what is happening with your working memory, task-switching or executive functioning at that moment.

Then somebody asks, “So, what reasonable adjustment do you need?”

When we think about what we are actually asking the person to do, it is quite a lot. We are asking them to understand what is happening internally, identify the workplace barrier, connect it to their neurodivergence, generate possible solutions and predict which of those solutions will work in their particular job. For someone who may already be overwhelmed, that can be an enormous cognitive task.

Sometimes people genuinely don’t know

I think this can be particularly relevant for people who are newly diagnosed, self-identifying or only beginning to recognise their neurodivergence later in life. Imagine discovering in your 30s, 40s or 50s that some of the things you have spent decades believing were personal failings might actually be connected to the way your brain works. You don’t walk out of an assessment with an instruction manual explaining which parts of your working life are affected and exactly what you should ask your employer to change.

In fact, by that point you may have become incredibly good at compensating. Perhaps you arrive at work early because that is the only way you can organise yourself before everybody else arrives. You spend your evenings finishing tasks that colleagues seem able to complete during the working day. You write everything down because you know you won’t retain verbal instructions, avoid certain meetings, prepare excessively or replay conversations afterwards because you aren’t sure what people meant.

From the outside, you might look as though you’re coping extremely well. You might even believe that you are, because if you have spent your whole life assuming that work is simply this difficult for everybody, it can take time to recognise which parts are creating particular barriers for you.

So when somebody says, “I don’t know what would help,” I think we should sometimes take that answer at face value. They may genuinely not know yet.

And sometimes they say, “I’m fine”

This creates a slightly different problem. The manager can see that something isn’t working. Perhaps deadlines are repeatedly being missed, the employee stays late every evening, becomes visibly overwhelmed when priorities change or there are recurring misunderstandings with colleagues. The manager asks whether support or adjustments would help and gets, “No, I’m fine.”

I don’t think the answer is for the manager to respond, “No, you’re not.” We need to respect somebody’s autonomy and shouldn’t force them to describe themselves as struggling, insist they disclose more about their neurodivergence than they want to or decide that because they have a diagnosis we understand what is happening to them.

But the manager can still manage what they observe. They might say, “Okay, you don’t need to decide anything about adjustments now. I have noticed that the last three weekly reports have been submitted late, though, and I’d like us to understand what’s getting in the way.” Or perhaps, “I’ve noticed that when we change the plan during a busy shift, you sometimes seem to lose track of what you were working on. Is that something you recognise?”

Now we are talking about the work and the barrier rather than trying to persuade somebody that they need help. You don’t need a diagnosis to manage a barrier, and you don’t need to turn every workplace difficulty into a conversation about somebody’s diagnosis.

Make the question smaller

This is probably the most practical thing I suggest to managers. If “What support do you need?” produces a blank look, stop asking somebody to solve their whole working life and start looking at particular moments.

Ask which parts of their week tend to go well and which take much more out of them than they think they should. If you have noticed that Friday afternoons seem particularly difficult, ask what is happening by that point. If they manage normal customer orders brilliantly but become stuck when several unusual requests arrive together, explore what changes in that moment. Ask what tends to happen just before things become overwhelming, or what is different on the days when a particular task goes well.

Those smaller questions give us something to investigate. Perhaps the employee realises that they can concentrate extremely well until people start interrupting them. Maybe verbal instructions are fine when there is one thing to remember but become impossible when there are four. Perhaps meetings themselves aren’t the problem at all; it is meetings with no agenda where they are expected to process an unexpected question and respond immediately.

Now we have something much more useful than “I struggle with meetings because I’m autistic” or “My ADHD makes organisation difficult.” We have started to identify what the barrier actually looks like in this workplace.

Managers can be really useful in this process because they may see patterns that the employee doesn’t. That isn’t because the manager understands the employee’s neurodivergence better than they do, but because they see the work from a different perspective. A manager might notice that errors happen mainly at the end of long shifts, deadlines are missed when several projects overlap or communication problems tend to occur when instructions are ambiguous.

They can bring those observations into the conversation without diagnosing the reason. “I’ve noticed that you seem to have no difficulty completing the complex analysis, but uploading the final documents into the system repeatedly causes problems. Can we look at what is different about that part of the process?” is a very different conversation from “Your ADHD means you’re bad at admin.”

One is observation and curiosity. The other is assumption.

“Surely their diagnostic report tells us what they need?”

I was asked this recently, and I can understand the logic. If somebody has been through an autism or ADHD assessment, surely there must be a report somewhere that tells us what support they need at work?

There may well be useful information in a diagnostic report, but a diagnostic assessment is primarily answering a diagnostic question. It isn’t necessarily a workplace needs assessment for this particular person, doing this particular job, in this particular environment. The report might also be years old. Somebody diagnosed at school may have pages of information about their experience in education and very little that tells us what happens when they are managing a team, teaching a class, responding to an emergency, working behind a busy bar or trying to complete payroll while being interrupted.

Even a recent report might tell us that somebody experiences executive-function difficulties or sensory-processing differences. That can be useful, but it still doesn’t tell us exactly what happens at work. “Executive functioning difficulties” might involve starting tasks, prioritising, remembering verbal information, switching between activities, estimating time or several of those things at once.

I also don’t want managers to hear this and think the solution is simply to ask employees to hand over their diagnostic reports. We don’t need somebody’s entire medical or developmental history before we can start having a useful conversation about what happens at work.

A diagnostic report can tell us something about a person’s neurodivergence. It can’t tell us everything about what it’s like to be that person doing this job, in this workplace, with this team, today.

We can work it out together

One of the reasons adjustment conversations become stuck is that both people can feel as though they need to identify the perfect solution before they do anything. I don’t think they do.

If we have identified a likely barrier, we can try something. If somebody seems to lose information when they receive several verbal instructions, perhaps we follow important actions up in writing. If interruptions appear to be the problem, perhaps we trial a protected period for focused work. If priorities become muddled, perhaps we agree how urgent tasks will be identified. If meetings are difficult, we could try an agenda beforehand or give the person some processing time before expecting a response.

Then we review what happened. Did it help? What changed? Is the employee able to complete the work more reliably? Has it created another difficulty? Is there something we need to tweak? Acas recommends discussing possible reasonable adjustments with the employee and keeping them under review because circumstances, jobs and the effectiveness of adjustments can change. ⁠Acas guidance on reasonable adjustments

This takes some of the pressure off both people. The employee doesn’t have to arrive knowing the perfect answer, and the manager doesn’t need encyclopaedic knowledge of every possible adjustment for every neurodivergent person.

Sometimes neither of them will know, and that’s where occupational health, Access to Work, a workplace needs assessment or specialist neurodiversity support may be useful. The purpose of that support, for me, isn’t to hand the employee over to an expert who produces a list of instructions for the manager. It is to help translate “this is what I’m experiencing” into practical things that might reduce the barrier at work, while keeping the employee and manager involved in deciding what is workable.

Perhaps we need to change the question

So yes, I still think we should ask neurodivergent employees what they need. We should listen to them and take their experience seriously, but perhaps we need to stop expecting one enormous question – “What reasonable adjustments do you need?” – to give us everything we need to know.

If the answer is “I don’t know,” make the conversation smaller. What goes well? Where does it become difficult? What is different when it works? What have you noticed? What is the impact? What does the job actually require? What could we change or try, and how will we know whether it has helped?

The employee is the expert in their own experience, but they don’t have to be the expert in workplace adjustments. The manager doesn’t have to have all the answers either. What both people need is enough curiosity to start working it out together.

So if somebody tells you “I don’t know what would help,” don’t assume you’ve reached the end of the conversation.

You may simply have found the place where the conversation actually needs to start.

This is the seventh article in my series, The questions managers ask me about neurodiversity, where I’m exploring some of the difficult questions I hear in real workplaces and training rooms. These aren’t questions I want managers to be frightened to ask. They’re questions I think we need to get much better at answering.

Next: “How long should it take to agree a reasonable adjustment?”