Re-Learning to be a leader

As Pete Wharmby says, autistics don’t so much grow a personality as construct one. We take bits of how other people operate and incorporate them into our own personalities or at least our own public personas. The same goes for leadership style, I’d suggest. The potential pitfall for an autistic leader is that if you learn from those around you, you’re dependent on those people being good leaders, and you’re also in danger if norms and expectations change. I’d like to begin constructing some leadership guidance aimed specifically at autistic leaders so I thought I’d start collecting some pitfalls that we autistic leaders need to avoid.

I was talking to a friend who works at an organisation I obviously won’t name earlier in the week and my friend said that that organisation is rather full of senior people who’ve been in post for a long time and whose manner of behaving isn’t really appropriate any more. These particular senior people are (apparently) a bit sexist and a little unaware of the concerns of the more junior members of staff, and particularly how the world has changed since the pandemic. I happen to know that the organisation in question has a reputation for employing a lot of autistic people, and so I got wondering if there was a connection. To be absolutely clear, I don’t think that being autistic is particularly correlated with, or an excuse for, being an old-fashioned sexist poor manager, but I can see a way in which being autistic would make it harder to shake off old patterns of behaviour.

Thinking of myself as a leader I can well imagine that if I had learned to behave in a certain way in a former era, I might still be behaving that way. (I’m flattering myself that I’m young enough not to have lived through particularly big cultural shifts in my working life yet!) Given I’m not very good at picking up unspoken cues from the culture around me, I would probably fail to notice that times had changed unless it was explained to me in words.

For example, as an autistic person I have constructed “scripts” in my brain of how to operate in all the sets of circumstances that regularly crop up at work. As a thought experiment, imagine I had developed those scripts that controlled my speech purely from watching 1970s sitcoms. I would come out with a great deal of language that was deeply inappropriate but it wouldn’t be because I necessarily believed the racist and sexist underpinnings of much 1970s popular culture. I would be operating in the same way as an Artificial Intelligence trained to mimic humanity based on exposure to a particular culture that inevitably picks up the forms of words from its model.

If I had learned how to be a leader based on what I saw around me in (say) 1980, then I might think it was normal behaviour to shout at more junior staff and smoke in the office. Neurotypical leaders from that date would gradually pick up from the culture around them that that behaviour was no longer acceptable. An autistic leader could miss people around them hinting that cigarettes were no longer appropriate in the office, and might fail to read the emotional reaction from junior staff who were frightened and upset. Being autistic doesn’t make the poor behaviour OK by any means, but it might help explain how it happens in some cases.

So – as an autistic leader how can I guard myself against falling into the trap of failing to update my behaviours and scripts as times change? It’s a tricky balance because I need to give a lot of credibility to the views around me, sense checking whether I’m getting the tone of what I’m doing right. There are definitely some areas of human behaviour where I should trust neurotypical people around me more than I trust myself. However, as a leader I also need to know my own mind and be able to act with confidence and set direction. The skill that I aspire to as an autistic leader is allowing those around me to guide me on the things where my autistic brain has blindnesses, but not become blown by the winds of opinion, become a puppet for others, or lose confidence in my own judgement. Before I had my autism diagnosis I had probably gone too far towards trusting others more than myself, which was very corrosive for my sense of self. Now I know the areas where I’m people-blind because of autism, I at least have a more informed opinion on how to balance other peoples’ views with mine.

But ultimately the most important thing for me to remember is that I need to keep listening. Nothing is more important than a culture where colleagues feel safe to point out things that are going wrong or that aren’t working for them. I don’t have to agree with every piece of feedback, but I do need to hear it, and that includes feedback that I might not particularly want to hear. I’m writing this in a slightly self-righteous way but I in no way claim to have sussed the tricky balance of autistic leadership. What I do feel that I’m learning the techniques that help make it work, and I’d like to share them more widely. We autistic leaders cannot allow our mental leadership models to grow stale but must keep them perpetually under review.