“It’s not for the faint hearted, but what you get out of that is an extraordinary amount of authenticity and trust. It’s worth it, but most organisations are still at the toolkit stage, yet what we’re really talking about here is cultural change.”
PROFESSOR NANCY DOYLE, FOUNDER OF SOCIAL ENTERPRISE GENIUS WITHIN
these characteristics are disabling or non-disabling depends on the social model, environment and the role people are expected to play. Genius Within supports
thousands of clients and their employers each year to achieve their potential in work and education. Prof Doyle, who is herself diagnosed with ADHD, holds a Visiting Professorship at Birkbeck, University of London in the School of Management where she co-founded the Centre for Neurodiversity at Work. “Genius Within is a not-for-
profit organisation with 68% of staff disabled/neurodivergent (or both) in the company,” she explains. “We work with about 5,000 people a year who were either in work or preparing to go into work because they’re long- term unemployed. When we look at the issues that affect them, it is the organisation of work, the planning of work, the concentration and managing the social relationships – people misinterpreting what they are saying or feeling or doing as negative when the intentions are good – that crop up over and over again.”
CREATING WORKSPACES WELCOMING TO ALL When considering what accommodations are needed to help neurodiverse people, the
question often arises as to
whether the job needs to shift to accommodate the individual and how much the individual needs to shift to accommodate the demands of the job. “That is one of the difficulties
with hidden disability,” she says. “It is easy to interpret those cognitive differences as intentional and as personality deficits. When someone behaves in a certain way, we think of what we would need to be feeling or thinking in order to behave that way.” At Genius Within, the support within the workplace is
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“a very delicate management of relationships and being very, very clear about expectations,” she says. “It is about managing boundaries and giving people run-off space so that when something happens, there’s a way of reconciling and recovering relationships.” This also includes looking at
augmented support to help people with different needs and putting in place measures to mitigate the chance of people getting into difficult states where their emotions are not as easy to control. “How can we reduce sensory
overwhelm by allowing people to work at home or encourage them to put on noise-cancelling headphones or sit in a corner rather than in the middle at a desk?” she says. “How can we manage diaries with colour coding and reminders so that we don’t get behind? Can people have email-free Fridays, so they’ve always got time in their diary for catching up on their admin and they never get behind?” She says that managing
a company with a majority neurodivergent staff team is not easy. “I’m an ADHD person and I like to break rules. I work with autistic people and they find that really annoying. It is a constant collaboration and connection, and it requires reflectivity.” She did not write a business
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