There’s a lot of pressure on team managers to understand and respond to the different needs of different team members. Many of the managers I work with feel out of their depth when it comes to understanding and supporting issues around mental health or neurodivergence. I’m often met with “I don’t know what to do” or “I’m frightened of getting it wrong”.
In fact, in the UK, a worker with ADHD was awarded £200k by an employment tribunal after it was found her employer failed to make reasonable adjustments. The employee struggled to complete detailed tasks in the busy, distracting office. Her employer’s answer was to move her to a windowless cupboard.
In the latest episode of Manage with Confidence, I spoke with Dr Nancy Doyle, CEO of Genius Within CIC. She’s one of the world’s leading experts in neurodiversity at work and you get to access her wisdom and practical ideas for free via the podcast!
I hope you find the episode helpful.
I could have talked about this important topic with Nancy all day but she’s in hot demand, as you can imagine! So, I settled for 50 minutes of her incredible brain. If I had to choose five standout moments from the episode they are:
1.The challenge to stop lowering the bar when it comes to neurodivergent people in the workplace. As Nancy says, “To expect less from someone because they’re neurodivergent is discrimination.”
2. At Genius Within, Nancy’s company, they operate a ‘benefit-of-the-doubt’ baseline. This disrupts the tendency to assume deliberate bad intent. For example, if someone has camera off in a video meeting you might assume they are doing something else and aren’t paying attention. Benefit-of-the-doubt might lead you to instead think the person might find face and eye contact online intense and exhausting and they find it easier to listen with camera off.
3. Many of us know that job descriptions, when left over time, very rarely match what happens in real life. Particularly if there have been company changes and restructures. Nancy advises regular reviews of job descriptions to make sure they are still relevant. At Genius Within they do this twice a year.
4. Nancy developed a tool called Genius Finder® which is a strengths-first view of your workplace skills with — pinpointing both the areas where you excel and the challenges that need support, so you can work with confidence and clarity. Every individual receives a personalised report. It matches their profile with a custom set of recommendations which they can put into place to make the most of their strengths and help develop challenge areas.
5. Managers need to stop thinking they can diagnose people and then giving advice to the person on how to cope. As Nancy says, “We wouldn’t do it if someone had a back problem at work. We’d send them to occupational health for a proper assessment and then get advice from the experts in occupational health. The person’s neurodiversity diagnosis is their journey. What a manager needs to know is how does this person manage their tasks and what do they need in order to do their work effectively?”
Listened to the episode and keen to learn more? I highly recommend getting a copy of Nancy’s excellent book, Learning from Neurodivergent Leaders. It’s full of case studies of neurodivergent leaders sharing the strategies that help them.
About the Manage with Confidence podcast
The Manage with Confidence podcast is full of practical and evidence-based tools, tips and skills to help you be the best people manager possible.
It was launched in 2026 by Dr Hayley Lewis and is listened to by people managers, HR professions and coaches in 22 countries around the world. It exists to support people managers, because better managers means better business and better worklife.
You can find the podcast online including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and YouTube.
Post author: Dr Hayley Lewis. First published on the HALO Psychology website 20 October 2026.
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