Leanne Maskell struggled in class. Absorbing information, listening, and sitting quietly for extended periods was hard. But when exam season came around, she sailed through with straight As. Educators didn’t know what to think – one college economics teacher asked her classmates how she’d managed to cheat so convincingly.
“Everyone was really shocked at my grades. They were like ‘oh we thought you were stupid’,” she says. “The fact was, I was able to just prepare the month before by hyper-focusing and teaching myself what I needed to know.”
Maskell found that she was neurodivergent years later when a doctor told her that she had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). For her, this means things like acing an exam, working a law job or writing a book (she’s written three so far) are easy. But food shopping is almost impossible.
When it comes to the sphere of work in the 2020s, there appears to be a greater awareness of how neurodiversity – which can include autism, ADHD, ADD, dyslexia, dyscalculia and dyspraxia – affects people. Very few leaders create conditions that enable neurodivergent people to thrive. Even fewer realise that doing this will lead to a serious business advantage.
Today Maskell runs ADHD Works, a company that helps people with ADHD maximise their strengths. She educates leaders on how they can improve life for teams with the condition, and her book, ADHD: Figuring it Out Step by Step is a practical toolkit on how to live better with ADHD.
Leaders keen to create a more inclusive workplace would do well to learn from companies that have neurodiverse founders. Roei Samuel is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and start-up mentor. He started his first business – RealSport – at university, then sold it in a multi-million pound deal. Today he’s CEO of Connectd, a platform that connects entrepreneurs to investors and non-executive directors. He attributes his successes to the boundless enthusiasm that his ADHD offers. “Three years ago Connectd was just me,” he says. “It’s grown because of an unrelenting drive. With neurodiversity, balance doesn’t look like standing still – I’m not comfortable in my own skin unless I’m going a hundred miles an hour.”
Samuel has designed the culture at Connectd to play to the abilities of neurodiverse teams, and in doing so he’s unearthed a startling fact. Working environments that maximise the potential of neurodiverse employees do the same for people who are neurotypical. “Our office is about 80 per cent breakout space,” explains Samuel. “If you want to work between 5am and 1pm, you can. Here’s the thing: we’ve found that neurotypical people do amazingly working in this way too. We have a 96 per cent staff retention rate. I think that designing work in this way will be crucial in retaining Gen Z teams.”
Removing the yoke of traditional office life is crucial for neurodiverse teams, but so is re-thinking the way people communicate in meetings. Sascha Evans is the co-founder of Uncommon, a digital platform that helps neurodiverse students thrive in education. She borrows techniques from her theatrical training to make meetings more productive, creative and inclusive (her team is neurodiverse too). “When you improvise in theatre, you have to create a space that’s free of inhibitions, criticism or ridicule,” she says. “Try not to say no to an idea, even if doesn’t make sense at first. Instead, let thoughts run until you hit on the right solution or course of action.”
Employers have a long way to go in unlocking the potential of neurodiverse teams. Making deliberate steps to doing so will make organisations kinder and more inclusive, but also more creative, innovative and resilient.
