Archives: Work

A lot of disabled people in the workplace don’t “declare” their disabilities. Even I don’t share all of mine (I collect them). To help people be their best at work, we have to create a safe, open space that shows how we can help, not just that we can.

It’s no use being willing to help people and having a supportive attitude to creating reasonable adjustments if you sit waiting for your people to come and ask you for them.

The best way to support disabled people (and, frankly, the whole workforce) is to let everyone know the things that you’re prepared to do.

Someone with chronic pain may need a better chair and a footrest. If you’re willing to do that, tell everyone (especially new starters).

Someone with sensory sensitivities may work better if they’re allowed noise-cancelling headphones in the office. Tell everyone it’s OK to wear headphones.

Someone whose condition causes fatigue, or fluctuates on a daily basis (like many chronic, hidden disabilities do), may benefit from being able to be flexible with the days they come into the office. If that’s cool, make sure everyone knows.

Someone who suffers (and suffer really is the right word) with endometriosis might really benefit from being able to adjust their working pattern based on their cycle. As a male manager, I know that my female team members may well not want to talk about “that sort of thing” with me and they may not want to talk to anyone about it. By telling people that’s ok, it opens the door for people to be able to either open up about it, or just request that adjustment.

Disabled people don’t need much. Almost every adjustment you may ever need to make for us won’t cost you very much at all.

What we want, what we need, is to know that you care enough to offer us options.

And it’s not going to hurt to show people you care.

---

This post first appeared on my Linkedin profile.

“You should know better”. Maybe.

Maybe I’ve made the mistake before and should have learned.

Maybe I haven’t.

In which case now, post-mistake, not only should I know better, I must know better.

If I’m a leader, I’m also duty-bound to try to pass on to others the things I know better, based on my own mistakes.

That won’t always mean they know better.

But they will once they’ve made the mistake.

---

This post first appeared on my Linkedin profile.

Maybe it’s my British blood. I find it really hard to write job applications focused on my achievements. Thing is, I wouldn’t have achieved any of it without my teams. It our achievement, not mine.

When Sean McVay became the youngest head coach in NFL history, he brought a simple focus with him to the LA Rams: “We, not me.” That’s the basis of how I’ve built the teams I’ve been part of over the last decade in the charity sector.

The work we’ve done, the results we’ve achieved, the impact we’ve had has only been possible because we’re a team. If everyone is working only for themselves, it achieves nothing but confusion, disagreements and resentment.

The best teams are the ones that recognise that “greater than the sum of its parts” is only a cliché because it’s true.

There are two vital things I learned (among others) in my year working for Autistica, the UK’s leading autism research charity. First, ‘neurodiversity’ should be used as a blanket term for all of us. Second is that I’m non-autistic neurodivergent.

Recognising, embracing and taking advantage of neurodiversity should be a fundamental part of any organisation’s people strategy. We all bring different things to the table. Full stop.

Being diagnosed as bipolar was an important step for me. Recognising how our brains work and how that affects our personal and professional lives makes an enormous difference.

It also helped me put more effort into understanding how I create the right conditions for me to thrive and do my best work.

That means trying to put meetings into the afternoon because I do my most focused work in the mornings.

It means being confident enough to ask to do audio-only Teams calls when I’m not feeling up to being on camera.

It means being comfortable enough that I can step away from my desk when I need to after those kind of meetings, even if that means telling someone I’ll be late for the next meeting.

It means that my mind is more open to the best way for me to succeed and, at the same time, more open to exploring and accepting how other people’s brains work, too. But more on that tomorrow.

---

This post first appeared on my Linkedin profile.

Edith Head dressed just about every star you can think of over her 50 year career designing costumes for more than 1,100 films. A large part of that success came down to being the ultimate team player.

“Inside I was a Prima Donna who insisted that a costume be made my way or not at all. Outside I was the model employee, easy to get along with and always on time.”

For Head to succeed she needed to win the confidence and trust of the stars she dressed, including incredibly demanding performers like Marlene Dietrich. Doing that required her to dampen down her own ego in order to serve the people she worked with.

Had she behaved like the prima donna she wanted to be, she would never had been able to design and deliver costumes for 30-40 films a year.

Had she not enabled herself to work on so many films, she would never have been nominated for 45 Oscars.

She may have won some, but maybe not the eight she eventually had on her mantlepiece.

Ego is important (we have to believe in ourselves) but we have to be able to recognise when our ego becomes the enemy (hat tip to Ryan Holliday) and our behaviour needs to change.

Being able to keep our ego in check is a vital part of leadership. Sometimes we need to allow others to shine if we want to achieve our goals.

---

This post first appeared on my Linkedin profile.