Getting the management basics right

Today may well be your first day back at work after Christmas and New Year. If yes – welcome to an exciting new year of work! OK – sorry about that – probably too chirpy. If you are back in the office or wherever you work though you’ll be back with the day to day tasks of getting stuff done, reading endless emails, going to meetings, managing and being managed. A big contributor to how much you enjoy your job is likely to be your manager – are they are an inspiring leader, dull but OK or a total nightmare? If you, the managed staff member, are autistic, those responses to your manager are likely to be heightened and their pleasantness or otherwise may be a big component of your mental health. A good manager is even more likely to be essential to your success at work than they would be for a neurotypical employee.

Getting the basics of management right sounds worthy but dull but for an autistic staff member it can literally be a life saver. Autistic life expectancy is not as long as neurotypical life expectancy, and some of that is due to people not being able to bear life any longer – I touched on that here and there are signposts to resources if you’re struggling in that post as well. Please don’t suffer in silence. My mental health has suffered as badly from poor managers as anything else in my life, and that’s not because the rest of my life has been a bed of roses. Having a poor line manager can get inside your head, make you feel worthless, convince you that you can’t do anything right, and ultimately have you off work with stress or worse, and that’s when the line manager isn’t actually trying to be horrible. A poor line manager can cause all that harm with the best intentions in the world just because they won’t listen, don’t think, assume things without asking, read the worst motives into others’ actions, or fail to consider anyone’s point of view but their own.

If you’re having a good day at work, a good manager can make that great – helping you to understand what your work is for, why it matters, and appreciating the good you’re doing. If you’re having a bad day, a good manager can help you work out what’s going wrong, correct slips without blame, provide security from more senior people getting involved, and stand up for you if you’re mistreated. If you’re autistic, those things are doubly or triply important. I need to have my communication slips corrected (I speak “people” like I speak French – with mistakes) but in such a way that I won’t feel humiliated for something I can’t help. I can find it difficult to identify the right problem, particularly if it’s to do with how I feel, and a bit of security and understanding at work can give me space to do that. I also experience a fair amount of unintended aggression or rudeness because of my autism – and a good manager and colleagues will stand up for me – possibly taking the colleague who said the wrong thing aside and correcting them politely so it doesn’t happen again. Having a manager who is an ally is an immense gift. [At this point I’d like to put in a big shout out to my absolutely lovely managers in my current and recent roles – you are amazing – thank you. The civil service has many brilliant managers in it.]

Looking at the flip side, the danger with lack of management communication is that I over-think things. If a manager doesn’t say outright what they mean, or hints, or leaves a long time before offering negative feedback, I can never feel safe because I don’t know what I’m missing. If I have to deal with a manager who hints, because I have literally no idea what they may or may not be attempting to convey, my only option is to assume the worst. Did my manager say anything nice about me today? No? It must mean they think I’m useless. You can see how that thought pattern would spiral out of control.

If a manager isn’t clear about what they want done, then I have to guess from their hints and again may get it wrong. I might miss the implications altogether (and conclude they didn’t want me to do anything at all) – and then get in trouble for not having done any work. Or I might mis-guess and head off in the wrong direction. Or I might attempt to do literally what they said and it turn out there were all kinds of constraints and parameters around the task I was supposed to have picked up and built in that I just didn’t. So following through the consequences of the examples I’ve just given, I am likely to have: a) failed to do the work I was supposed to have done; b) done entirely the wrong thing; and c) annoyed colleagues and bosses by failing to understand which things “we don’t do here”. As a result I will find myself a poor performer, I may get sacked, and my mental health may not be in a very good place.

I’m talking about management basics because getting them right is a key plank of changing the world to make it more accessible for autistic employees. “Autism” is not and must not be a dirty word. It is becoming a normal thing to have autistic employees, managers and leaders. We need to be boring, unremarkable and “meh” if we’re to have true equality. But how to achieve that?

On 1 January I talked about the need for reform (the vision) and yesterday started on the actions with Step 1 on my Plan for Reform: Get everyone to realise how common autism is.

Step 2 is:

Get the management basics right.

If your manager has regular conversations with you, listens to you, shares information quickly and clearly and doesn’t load down conversations with emotional baggage, you’re much more likely to thrive at work however your brain is wired. If you’re autistic those things are even more important. It ought to be a no-brainer to get management done well, but it’s not easy for an organisation to ensure everyone is doing everything they should. If today is your first day back at work in 2023 though, perhaps you could make a mental note to do the management basics yourself and encourage your colleagues to too? It’d be a great resolution for 2023 – everyone wins – and for your autistic colleagues (you’re bound to have some), it could be a career- or even a life-saver.

I’ve been doing posts from Advent to Epiphany based on Christian commemorations of the days but there doesn’t appear to be one in the Anglican Church on 3 January; I looked up what commemorations fall on this day, and I can offer you:

• Festival of Sleep Day 
• Fruitcake Toss Day 
• Humiliation Day 
• J.R.R. Tolkien Day 
• Memento Mori “Remember You Die” Day 
• National Chocolate Covered Cherry Day 
• National Drinking Straw Day 
• National Write to Congress Day 
• Women Rock! Day

Accordingly, this post was brought to you by the following line from the Bible that can apply to management or indeed anything else:

Do to others what you would have them do to you.

Matthew 7:12