Empowering people, autistically

If you’re a leader, an awful lot of your job is getting the best out of your staff. After all, your organisation isn’t paying them to be items of office furniture or yes people. But how? I don’t claim to be an authority on this but I have been blessed with a great many wonderful colleagues and team members and applying an autistic approach to getting the maximum value out of them seems to work quite well.

It’s a rare member of staff who isn’t trying to do a good job. I’m sure they exist, but most members of staff seem to want to be good at their job and receive praise. That leads my simplistic little autistic mind to conclude that good work should always be rewarded with praise. I realise that sounds like a glimpse of the obvious, but I have seen managers treat praise as if it were a commodity that needed to be rationed. The praise auditors aren’t going to come round in a year’s time and say “why did you praise both Joe Bloggs and A. N. Other – you have to be pick one!” The danger would be if you failed to point out someone’s failings with constructive feedback alongside praising their successes. So long as you’re not misleading someone by only praising them and failing to tell them when what they do needs improvement, you’re on pretty safe ground.

As to when someone’s not doing the right thing, it’s definitely worth checking why. My autistic brain starts with wondering what I’ve done wrong to cause the member of staff to misunderstand – my communications aren’t perfect, I may have missed a subtext or accidentally misled someone who over-interpreted my words. So if Joe Bloggs has messed up, my first thought is “oops, I’ve let Joe Bloggs down, I’d better listen to his point of view to see what’s up”. And quite often it is my fault. But even if it isn’t, starting with listening to the staff member has got to be a good start. After all, they might be underperforming at work because (say) their child is ill, or they’ve suffered a bereavement or all manner of stressful outside-of-work things. And if those things are happening, me as a manager grouching about poor work isn’t going to make anything better. What they might need is a listening ear and possibly some time away from work to get their head straight. So I think the caution I’ve learned as a precaution to avoid autistic jumping-in-with-both-feet can actually be useful in terms of leadership and management. If you can’t always trust your own brain, it’s a good discipline to listen before doing anything else.

Work life can be very stressful and the way I think/hope I’ve added most value for colleagues has been to keep reminding them what they can do. Imposter phenomenon/syndrome is very widespread – that feeling that you’ve only got where you are by luck and are bound to get found out soon. Part of feeling like an imposter as I experience it can be to assume that everyone else is confident and in control and I’m the only one who isn’t. But actually I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had a really brilliant member of staff explaining to me that they’re not good enough at their job and about to be found out. So my autistic passion for justice kicks in and I remind the person that actually they’ve done 15 brilliant things this month and have a strong track record of achievement and are actually probably just doubting themselves without evidence. The phrase “you are enough” might be crude pop psychology but there’s definitely something in it too!

Finally, being autistically logical about hierarchies and power structures means that I’m very clear that if anything goes wrong in my team, then it’s my fault. I messed up the leadership, I messed up the supervision, I set the wrong vision or whatever. My team = my fault. Making that clear can be liberating for a team; they can take a few calculated risks and you’ve got their back. Also, you’re not going to be dropping them in it by playing the blame game. You might fear that the team will take advantage – but really how many people would think “right – I’m going to drop my boss in it”? You’d have to have annoyed them pretty badly for them to do that. Plus of course it’s not like you’re about to say “blame it all on me” and then disappear to the ends of the earth. You’re still there day in day out providing advice and keeping an eye.

I don’t know if what I’ve written is any help (here comes the imposter phenomenon again) or a statement of the obvious. It seems clear to me that not pretending to be any more competent than I am, listening, treating people as humans etc generally seems to work in work as in life. Seems like a kind of Golden Rule “do as you would be done by” thing. Your team is bound to have lots of skills and talent in it – it’s just a question of letting it out.