Why the adjustment worked and the job still didn't

When a reasonable adjustment does exactly what it was supposed to do, but the person is still struggling, perhaps the adjustment isn't the problem.

Over the years, I've seen versions of the same situation more than once.

A neurodivergent person is struggling at work. Their organisation responds. Conversations take place, reasonable adjustments are agreed and, in practical terms, those adjustments work.

The person can organise their work differently. A particular barrier is reduced. Something that was making their job unnecessarily difficult becomes easier.

And yet the situation continues to deteriorate.

The difficulty has moved somewhere else: into relationships, communication, expectations, perceptions of behaviour or performance.

More processes may follow. Managers become involved. HR becomes involved. Sometimes occupational health is involved. Each part of the organisation deals with the issue in front of it.

And still nobody quite asks the larger question:

If the adjustment worked, why isn't the situation working?

We tend to start with the individual

Much of the way organisations respond to neurodivergence starts, reasonably enough, with the person.

Someone discloses that they are neurodivergent, or begins to experience difficulty at work. We try to understand what they need. Their manager, HR or occupational health may become involved. Reasonable adjustments are considered and put in place.

This matters. The right adjustment can remove a very real barrier.

But there is a risk in the way we frame the problem.

Once we have identified something the individual needs, it is very easy for the individual to become the focus of everything that follows.

Are they coping? Is the adjustment working? Do they need more support? What could they do differently?

Those may all be legitimate questions.

But there is another question that gets asked much less often:

What is happening around them?

The organisation on paper isn't always the organisation people experience

Having spent more than three decades working in and leading complex organisations, I've learned that every organisation has at least two versions of itself.

There is the formal organisation.

It has structures, reporting lines, policies, processes, job descriptions, performance frameworks and governance.

And then there is the organisation people actually experience.

That's where some decisions are made in meetings and others have effectively been made before the meeting starts.

It's where an organisation can say it values challenge while people quickly learn which things are safe to challenge.

It's where being visible can quietly become associated with being productive, responding quickly with being committed, and thinking aloud in a meeting with being decisive.

It's where priorities can change faster than they are communicated.

And it's where assumptions develop about how a good colleague communicates, how a manager should behave and what leadership is supposed to look like.

These things aren't necessarily deliberate. Some may be entirely sensible. Others may simply have become the way we do things here.

But they form part of the environment in which somebody has to work.

And for a neurodivergent person, that environment can matter enormously.

The person is easier to see than the system

Organisations are generally much better at seeing individuals than they are at seeing themselves.

An individual's performance can be measured. Their absence can be recorded. Their behaviour can be discussed. Their diagnosis can be disclosed. Their adjustment can be documented.

The organisation around them is harder to capture.

An organisation chart can't show you whose opinion really matters.

A policy won't necessarily tell you that priorities are constantly changing but nobody acknowledges it.

A performance framework can't capture every assumption people make about what a senior leader should sound like.

And a reasonable-adjustment process may tell you what someone needs in order to do their work without telling you very much about what happens when their way of working meets the expectations of everybody around them.

So when something isn't working, we naturally gravitate towards the thing we can see.

The person.

The difficult situations aren't always about noise, working hours or where somebody sits.

Sometimes they're about people.

A neurodivergent leader may be very direct. Colleagues may experience that directness as intimidating or even bullying. Someone may process information differently in meetings, communicate with unusual intensity or challenge things other people have learned not to challenge.

The impact on colleagues is real and needs to be taken seriously.

But simply labelling the behaviour doesn't necessarily explain what is happening either.

What belongs to the individual? What is connected to their neurodivergence? What behaviour should reasonably change? What does the manager need to do? What do colleagues need? And what assumptions in the organisation itself are shaping how the behaviour is interpreted?

Those questions can all exist at the same time.

And they are much harder to answer than agreeing an adjustment.

I didn't always see this either

I was diagnosed with ADHD in my fifties, after I'd already spent decades building a successful career.

Diagnosis helped me understand some things about myself differently.

But it also made me look differently at organisations.

I don't say this from the comfortable position of somebody who has always been able to see what organisations get wrong.

I spent years making decisions inside them before I knew I was neurodivergent.

I understood the value of process, consistency and clear expectations. I still do. I've run large, complex operations. Organisations need structure. Managers need to be able to manage. People have a right to expect appropriate behaviour from the people they work with.

But I also understand now how easy it is to treat the individual as the thing that needs to adapt, because the system around them feels normal to the people operating within it.

The same person can flourish in one role and struggle in another. They can perform exceptionally under one leader and find themselves depleted under the next. A way of communicating that is valued as clarity in one environment can be experienced very differently in another.

Their neurodivergence hasn't changed.

The context has.

That doesn't absolve the individual of responsibility.

It does mean context deserves to be examined too.

When everyone follows the process

The difficulty comes when a complicated human situation gets divided between several processes.

A reasonable-adjustment process looks at one part of the picture.

A grievance or performance process may look at another.

A manager sees behaviour and performance.

HR sees policy and organisational risk.

Occupational health may see functional impact.

Each may be doing exactly what it is supposed to do.

But the person experiences all of it at once.

At what point does somebody stop and ask what the different pieces are telling us?

When everyone has followed their process, who is responsible for asking whether the process is producing the right outcome?

That, for me, is where this becomes an organisational question rather than simply an individual one.

It isn't about deciding that the neurodivergent person is right and everybody else is wrong.

Nor is it about excusing behaviour because somebody has a diagnosis.

It is about being able to hold more than one thing as true.

A colleague can have been genuinely affected by somebody's behaviour.

A manager can have legitimate performance concerns.

A neurodivergent employee can have needs that aren't being understood.

An organisation can follow its processes correctly.

And the overall response can still be wrong.

Look at the person. Then look around them.

When difficulties continue, we need to be curious about what is happening around the person as well.

How is behaviour being interpreted? What assumptions are being made? What does the manager understand? What are colleagues experiencing? What is the culture rewarding or discouraging?

And perhaps the hardest question:

Has anybody stepped far enough away from the individual processes to see the situation as a whole?

Sometimes the individual needs to change something.

Sometimes the environment does.

Often it will be both.

The difficult work is understanding which is which.

So when a reasonable adjustment has been made properly, has helped with the thing it was designed to address, and the person is still struggling, don't immediately conclude that the adjustment has failed.

Perhaps it worked.

Perhaps it is telling you to look somewhere else.

Lisa Hazelden PhD is the founder of Hazelden Advisory. She advises organisations and senior leaders on neurodivergence at work.