Autistic listening

If you’re looking for a good listener, you’re probably not going to look for an autistic person. The stereotype is that we’re un-empathic and prone to talking incessantly about our own special interests to the exclusion of any listening at all. But the stereotype is just that – a stereotype – and not always a particularly realistic one. In fact plenty of the autistic leaders and managers I know are very good listeners – but for a particularly autistic set of reasons…

It’s important that autistic voices are heard and that we celebrate autistic leadership, but part of being heard and people allowing you to lead them is being able to listen yourself. Leadership is all about communication and you’re far more likely to persuade someone to do something if you let them have their say and understand their perspective before you set out your vision. The autistic tendency to default to an assumption that a clear statement of the facts will be persuasive isn’t helpful. But autistic communication preferences can be turned to an advantage at listening.

If you’re autistic communication can be a nightmare as you try to work out what the right words to say are in any given circumstances. You’re afraid that you’ll come across as too blunt, rude, or disengaged. I’m very aware of those risks and also the risk of exhausting myself through the constant concentration needed to take part in conversations. It’s actually much easier for me to listen to someone else talk than to try to work out what to say myself. So if I’m tired and struggling with communication (which is the case more than half the time) I will use active listening to try to get the other person to speak.

But how to get someone else to talk? One benefit for an autistic person is that while you need a separate “script” for every different social interaction, the script for active listening works in pretty much any circumstances. You can say “yes”, “uh-huh” and similar things to show you’re paying attention, can ask clarification questions, and can repeat back to check understanding. It takes a bit of attention to work out which part of what someone is saying is where they want to expand on more, but other than that you’re on fairly safe ground.

The pitfalls of autistic active listening are in jumping too quickly to suggest solutions (it feels weird to me as an autistic person that someone might just want to talk for human connection rather than solutions, but I know it to be so) and offering “autistic empathy” of responding with a similar experience of my own. It seems that if I do that, the other person hears what I say as being self-centred or attempting to “trump” their anecdote whereas what I intend is “I have encountered a similar situation to you which is why I feel empathy for you”.

So, provided the pitfalls are dodged, I am effective at being an active listener, and happy to do it. I honestly do want to hear what the other person has to say – partly out of naked self-interest in that if they’re talking I don’t have to be myself – but also out of actual interest. At work, it can be incredibly powerful to allow someone the time to talk about what they need to talk about. Doing that has allowed some problems to come out that I would never otherwise have found out about. If a person feels comfortable communicating with me then they may feel relaxed enough to let on about that niggling little problem that they’ve been avoiding mentioning that if caught now will be nothing, but if left alone could result in a major headache. I suspect a lot of autistics in the workplace do this trick of active listening as a safe route to communication – we shouldn’t be afraid to celebrate it! Being a good listener can be a really good leadership trait.