More of Your Colleagues Will Tell You How Their Brain Works

A new colleague mentions it in their first week, quite casually. They have ADHD, so they would rather have the meeting agenda the day before, and they work best with headphones on. Later another teammate says they are autistic and find open ended social events hard. Ten years ago, very few people said things like this at work. More and more of them do.

In many countries, adult diagnoses of ADHD and autism have risen sharply in recent years, and waiting lists for assessment are long. Many people are being diagnosed in their thirties and forties, after years of wondering why some parts of work felt so much harder for them than for others. At the same time, more employers have started to talk openly about neurodiversity and to offer adjustments.

For you, this means some practical changes are coming, whether or not you manage anyone.

Expect people to describe how they work best, and take it at face value. You do not need to understand the diagnosis, and you should never ask for proof. A request for written instructions after a call or a quieter desk is usually small, and it often helps far more people than the one who asked.

Notice how much of your team's work depends on unwritten rules. Meetings with no agenda, decisions made in corridor chats, feedback delivered as hints. Many people find these hard, neurodivergent or not. Writing things down, saying exactly what you need and by when, and giving people time to think before they answer will make your team easier to work in for everyone.

Keep what you are told private. If someone shares a diagnosis with you, it is theirs to share further, not yours. Do not mention it to other people, even with good intentions.

And look again at your own habits. You may recognise yourself in some of this. Plenty of capable engineers have quietly built their own workarounds for years without a name for why they needed them.

The teams that handle this well will not be the ones with the best policy document. They will be the ones where telling people how you work is simply normal.

– Asael Shinder