Play To Your Strengths: Learning From Leaders With Autism

We spend a lot of time in leadership culture trying to learn new skills and compensate for what we’re not so great at. Maybe, we should work harder at finding work that is the right match for our specific strengths, and forget the rest.

I have learnt so much from my podcast guests who are on the autism spectrum, because they know what they’re great at, and have built careers that play to those gifts. At the same time, they’ve built strategies to work around what they’re not so great at. They really know the intricacies of their brain, their mental health and their needs. We should all know these things! We truly do our best work when we have a baseline of understanding what our brains need to thrive, and then figure out how to communicate or translate that into our career.?

There’s a saying: If you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.? There's so many stereotypes around autistic people. And the first episode I did on managing autism at work played into those stereotypes, as many of you pointed out to me! We featured a software developer who was a white man who excelled at math and computer programming. I’ve learned a lot since then, and frankly I should know better. One of the people I love most in the world has ASD. They are so NOT a stereotype. They're funny, emotional, and not great at math. ?

If you’re neurodivergent or you struggle with your mental health, it can be easy to feel like you’re broken or a project that needs to be fixed. That’s not true. When you understand how you function best, you can ask for what you need.

Today’s guest is someone who was diagnosed with autism at the age of 38 - well into her career journey. And that revelation helped the writer and podcaster Tara McMullin rethink her relationship with work and what she needed from her daily schedule and the infrastructure in her life. And here’s the thing: Everyone benefits when work becomes flexible and adaptive. So let’s learn from an expert!

Here are a few other Anxious Achiever episodes highlighting leaders who are on the autism spectrum or identify as neurodivergent. I love this interview with Daniel Mangena . After some big failures, Dan learned how to apply his gift, which he calls "the organization of ideas into something bigger, and the ability to see through the mess and find solutions," to business challenges. At the same time, he knows he needs to create limits around his time and engagements with others.

Finding the Right Work Fit When You’re Neurodivergent. Sometimes even the place you work creates challenges. Noted author & expert Amanda Morin says: “Sometimes my unique way of thinking and experiencing the world gets in the way of me moving forward, or doing something that is probably a little easier for somebody else who experiences the world more typically. So for example, in a room where there are lots of lights and lots of noise, I am not a productive person because I'm very distracted and my whole body goes into shut down. For a long time I tried to hide that and couldn't anymore. Just couldn't anymore.”

ADHD, Neurodiversity, and Bias. There’s a stereotype that most people who struggle with ADHD are white, male, and often young. In this episode host I speak to Stephanie Ozuo, a career advisor in the UK, about her experience being diagnosed with ADHD as a 25-year-old Black woman.

Neurodiversity at Work. In the second half of this episode, Emily Kircher-Morris tells it like it is: The stereotype is that autistic people are these tech-y, math-y, introverted, quiet people, but I think that what we are really learning is that that’s not necessarily true.