Leading differently doesn’t mean leading less effectively.
Senior roles bring particular demands: complexity, ambiguity, competing priorities, difficult decisions, relationships, visibility and an expectation that you’ll keep delivering whatever is happening around you.
Being neurodivergent can add another dimension to that.
You may already know you’re neurodivergent. You may have been diagnosed later in your career and be looking back at years of working and leading through a different lens. Or you may simply be trying to understand why some aspects of a role you are very good at take more out of you than others.
I work privately with neurodivergent senior leaders to understand how they work and lead at their best, without assuming that the answer is to become better at working like everybody else.
Our conversations are confidential.
This work can be arranged privately or sponsored by an employer. Where an organisation is paying, we’ll agree clearly at the outset what, if anything, is shared. The substance of our conversations stays between us.
You’ve been successful, but the way you’re working isn’t sustainable.
You can do the job. You may have been doing it extremely well for years. But the effort required to keep everything going has become too great, or you’re questioning whether you want to continue working in quite the same way.
Something has changed.
A new role, greater responsibility, organisational change or a difficult period at work has disrupted ways of working that served you well in the past.
You’ve been diagnosed later in your career.
Diagnosis can explain a great deal, but it can also raise questions. You may find yourself reconsidering how you’ve worked, the strategies you’ve developed over the years, what you’ve found easy or difficult and what, if anything, you want to do differently now.
You want to understand yourself better as a leader.
Not because something is wrong, but because understanding how you think, communicate, make decisions, manage competing demands and respond under pressure can give you more choice about how you lead.
WHAT MIGHT BRING YOU HERE
The work is about you, not a programme.
THE WORK
There isn’t a standard formula for neurodivergent leadership.
We might explore where your neurodivergence helps you, where it creates friction and where you’ve developed ways of compensating that may no longer serve you.
That could take us into priorities and attention, decision-making, communication, relationships, managing energy, ambiguity, delegation, boundaries, disclosure or the expectations that come with senior roles.
Sometimes the work is very practical. Sometimes it’s about making sense of your career or leadership experience differently. Often it’s both.
The purpose isn’t to change who you are. It’s to understand yourself well enough to make conscious choices about how you work and lead.
I’ve spent more than three decades working in and leading complex organisations, including executive and board roles. Most recently, I was Chief Product Officer at Innovate UK and Executive Chair of Innovate UK Business Connect. Earlier in my career, I was a Managing Director at Ipsos MORI, leading a national operation of around 1,000 people, alongside senior roles at Sky, British Gas and Direct Line Group.
I know what it is to carry senior responsibility, make difficult decisions, lead through uncertainty and be accountable for what happens next.
I was diagnosed with ADHD in my fifties.
That gave me another perspective on a career I’d already spent decades building. It also means I come to these conversations with an understanding of both the demands of senior leadership and what it can mean to think, work and lead differently within them.
I don’t have a formula for how a neurodivergent leader should behave. That’s rather the point.
I’ve sat on your side of the table.
A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE
What this work is, and what it isn’t.
This is developmental and advisory work. I don’t provide therapy, diagnosis, medical advice or occupational health assessment.
If I’m advising your organisation about a matter involving you, I won’t separately work with you on that same matter.
If what you need sits outside my role, I’ll say so.
SCOPE AND BOUNDARIES
We can start with what’s happening now.
You don’t need a diagnosis story, a list of goals or a neatly defined problem.
You might simply know that something about the way you’re working needs to change. Or you may be curious about what understanding your neurodivergence could mean for the way you lead. That’s enough to start a conversation.
You don’t need to become a different kind of leader. You may need a better understanding of the leader you already are.
STARTING
