The Leaders Who Decide
Whether Autistic People Get Hired.

This week, you might be reading through applications for one job at a company of forty people, or deciding who leads the next big project at a food distributor. Or maybe you're signing off on who gets promoted this year at a city's public works department.

Each of those decisions feels small while you're making it. It's an ordinary part of the week. But for an autistic person, when you make decisions like those, you're deciding whether they get hired at all, and how far they get to grow after that. If you lead anyone, you're one of the leaders who decides whether autistic people get hired.

This is The Autistic Leader Podcast. I'm Uday Kiran Bolusani. Each week, I take one piece of advice every leader already gives, and I give you one skill that makes it work for every kind of mind.

This is the first episode of a new season, Season 4. And this week is a little different. There's no skill this time. Instead, I want to tell you why I do this work, and who it's for.

So here's where it starts. For about six months now, I've written the newsletter and made this podcast every single week. And over those six months, I saw something I want to tell you about.

I'm a senior leader, with a graduate degree in leadership. So I know the research on how organizations are led, and I've sat in senior roles. That research, and what I've learned in those roles, is critical to everything I write. I lean on it every week.

But here's what I saw. Said only in academic terms, that research isn't what helps autistic people get hired and grow. It has to reach the people deciding who gets hired, who gets the big project and who gets promoted, in words they can use on an ordinary workday. If you're the one reading job applications, that means you.

And you're the one who decides whether an autistic person gets the job. And if you're choosing who leads the next big project, you decide whether that person gets real work once they're hired. So every Friday, I post an essay on my site. In each one, I take what I've learned from research and from senior roles, and I say it in words you can use on a workday.

Now, I want to be precise about who's talking to you. I'm autistic. The DSM-5-TR is the diagnostic manual clinicians in the US use, and every one of its criteria for autism applies to me. And there is a lot I take on in private.

I chose one focus for this work. How organizations are led, and what I can do to change that. That focus comes from my community, from my own experience, from my expertise, and from a lot of conversations. It isn't everything about being autistic. And I'd never want you to hear it that way.

So who is this for? It's for leaders at every level, in every kind of organization. And I mean every level.

This show is for the person leading a team for the first time. Maybe you just got promoted, and now you run a team of six at a moving company. This month you decide who gets the big job moving a company's whole office, and who keeps doing the small house moves. That's a call about who gets real work.

It's also for the leaders of leaders. Or you run three teams at a county health department, and each team has its own manager. Every spring, you decide whose name goes forward for promotion.

And it's for executives. At the top, you might run a software company of ninety people, and you set how the whole company hires. What gets written into every job posting, and what your interviewers ask in every interview. When you change that once, it changes every hire after it.

And it's for people who don't manage anyone at all. Picture a data analyst at a hospital network who's getting five teams to use one weekly report instead of five different ones. They decide how each team's work gets set up, and what gets written down, so someone new on any of those teams doesn't have to guess how the work runs.

Those decisions look different at every level. But at every level, the leader making them shapes the same three things for an autistic person. Do they get in? Do they get real work? And do they get to grow? Over a whole year, those decisions add up to how far that person gets.

There's another group I write for, and they matter a lot to me. Some of the leaders I make this for are autistic or neurodivergent themselves. And that includes the broader umbrella of neurodivergence. And some of them are only finding that out now, after years of rising through their careers.

They're looking back and realizing they've been masking all along. Hiding how their minds work, so they'd fit the jobs they were in. And now, as they make sense of their whole lives, a lot of them want to make the way easier for the autistic and neurodivergent people who come after them. They want to do this work with me. And if that's you, I'm really glad you're here.

And there's one more group. This show's also for the parents and caregivers of autistic and other types of neurodivergent children too. Those parents want organizations to change, so their children can one day work in them, and still be more fully themselves when they do.

So when those children start their first jobs, I want their managers to already know how to lead them well.

Here's what I'm working toward. With this new season, my goal hasn't changed. I want autistic people, and others whose minds work differently, to reach executive roles, and to sit on company boards.

But for a lot of autistic people, getting there starts much earlier. It starts with a first job leading a team. And that job may well be at a small or medium organization.

So I work on two things at the same time. I work to put executive roles and board seats within reach of autistic people. And I want organizations to run in ways that hold no autistic person back.

And I hold that goal knowing where things stand today. For example, in the UK, the government's own figures show that just over a third of working-age disabled people who report autism are in paid work, against about four in five non-disabled people. So the first gap, being in paid work at all, is still open.

So how do the essays actually work? That's the next thing I want you to know, because I chose the format on purpose.

Each week, I take one piece of advice leaders already give. Advice you've heard your whole career. And I turn it into one skill that's simple and practical, with an example from a different industry every week. One week it might be a hospital, and the next a construction company.

A skill like that can sound small. But it changes how a person's working day goes. And it changes how well the whole organization does. That's good for the person, and for your results too.

And a lot of the time, the skill is about what you hand your people. You give them at least the background your organization already writes down for its AI. Think about how much your organization writes down for its AI tools now. What the task is, what good looks like, what to watch out for. Your people have earned at least that much.

Starting next week, the essays run a new way too. Each month, I take one change to how organizations work, and I follow it through every level, one essay a week.

The first essay of the month is for executives. The second is for leaders of several teams. The third is for managers, including people leading a team for the first time. And the fourth is for the people who lead without managing anyone.

That fourth one matters to me. You lead by understanding the change, and driving it from where you sit. That's leadership too.

There's one more thing I want to be clear about, because everything else in this work starts from this. Accommodation, and the disability laws where you work, still matter. Following them is a given. And inclusion programs matter too.

What I write sits on top of all of that. It's about how an organization hires, hands out work and grows its people. And that includes what it now does with AI.

So here are my reasons again, in a few sentences. The leaders who make ordinary calls every week decide whether an autistic person gets hired, gets real work and gets promoted. What I've learned from research and senior roles has to reach those leaders in words they can use, so I write to carry it to them. I write for every level, for the leaders finding out about themselves now, and for the parents and caregivers of the children who'll be hired next. And the goal is still executive roles and board seats, starting with the first role leading a team.

On my site, you'll find the frameworks behind this work, and the new essay every Friday.

Here's my ask. I built the show to help leaders who think differently reach senior roles, by changing how organizations are designed. Every person who subscribes is one more leader this work reaches, every week. So subscribe to the Substack, and take each week's skill to your team.

And follow the show wherever you're listening. A follow brings you every new episode, and it helps more leaders who think differently find this work.

This week, when you decide who gets hired, who gets the real work, or whose name goes forward, remember that you're deciding how far that person gets to grow.