I Write for Every Leader Who Decides
Who Gets Hired, Gets Real Work and Gets Promoted.

For six months I have written this newsletter and made this podcast every week. I am autistic, and I am a senior leader with a graduate degree in leadership. I meet all the criteria for autism in the DSM-5-TR, the diagnostic manual that clinicians in the US use. There is a lot I take on in private.

As an autistic leader, I chose one focus for these essays. It is how organizations are led, and what I can do to change that. That focus comes from my community, my experience, my expertise and my conversations. It is not everything about being autistic.

In these six months I saw that the leaders who interview people and run teams decide whether an autistic person gets hired and how far that person grows. Those leaders work in every kind of organization. In everyday choices, they decide whether people with every kind of mind can do their best work.

Research on leadership is critical to everything I write, and so is what I have learned in senior roles. Research seldom reaches these leaders in words they can use on an ordinary workday. Getting it to them in those words is why I write these essays.

My goal is still for autistic people, and others whose minds work differently, to reach executive roles and to sit on company boards. For many autistic people, getting there starts with a first job leading a team, and that job may well be in a small or medium organization. I work to put executive roles and board seats within reach of autistic people now. Over time, I want organizations to run in ways that hold no autistic person back, and I build toward that.

I hold that goal while many autistic people still do not have a job at all. In the UK, government figures show that just over a third of working-age disabled people who report autism are in paid work. For non-disabled people of working age, the figure is about four in five.

Some of the leaders I write for are autistic or neurodivergent, and some are only now finding that out, after years of rising through their careers. They see that they have been masking all along, hiding how their minds work to fit their jobs. Now, as they make sense of their whole lives, they want to make the way easier for the autistic and neurodivergent people who come after them, and to do this work with me.

I chose the format of these essays on purpose, so those leaders can use what research and senior roles teach. Each week I turn one piece of advice leaders already give into one simple, practical skill, with an example from a different industry. A small skill changes how a person’s working day goes, and how well the whole organization does. Often the skill gives your team at least the background your AI already gets.

From next week, I take one change to how organizations work each month and follow it through every level, one essay a week. The first essay is for executives, the second for leaders of several teams, and the third for managers, including people leading a team for the first time. The fourth is for the people who lead without managing anyone. They lead by understanding the change and driving it from where they sit.

Accommodation and the disability laws where you work still matter, and following them is a given. Inclusion programs matter too. These essays build on all of that, including the work organizations now do with AI.

Parents and caregivers of autistic and neurodivergent children read these essays too. They want organizations to change, so that their children can one day work in them and stay more fully themselves. I write every week so that their leaders already know how to lead them well when those children start work.