Kindly-meant hedging round the issue

If you’re a manager you may well be familiar with the “difficult conversation” – the occasion when you have to take someone who works to you aside and explain to them that they’ve done something wrong. There are whole training courses on “difficult conversations” encouraging managers to get the awkward message across clearly but also so the member of staff is most likely to receive it positively. When it actually comes to having the conversation, though, I and many managers feel the urge to hint and hope that the member of staff guesses what we’re on about. If you were talking to a friend about something embarrassing you’d almost certainly try hinting first because you wouldn’t want to damage the friendship. You’d be more likely to go with “I’ve found this lovely new shower gel – would you like me to get you some?” than “gosh, mate – you smell!”

At work, though, you have different responsibilities and your first duty to a staff member is not to be their friend. If something is going wrong, your task is to ensure it is put right, rather than to save everyone’s feelings including your own. That’s not to suggest that you should be brutal – if something isn’t working it’s definitely worth finding out why, rather than jumping to the conclusion that your staff member is idle or useless. But in order to find out why you need to be able to state the problem so that the member of staff understands what you’re saying and can communicate with you. Going back to my example of a smelly friend, suppose they respond to your offer of shower gel with “no thanks – I’ve given up showering, actually”; you’ve not got the message across with your hint. At that point you can choose whether you fear for your friendship or your nostrils more highly when deciding what to do, but at work you don’t (shouldn’t) have that choice.

If this all sounds like it’s fairly universally applicable to management then yes, it is. It’s particularly important with autistic colleagues though because we are markedly less likely to pick up hints. So if you have an autistic colleague you are going to need to really spell out literally what the problem is. Hints are almost certainly not going to get you there. As an example, I once spent an entire year as a poor performer because my manager was (I deduce, looking back) hinting about what I was doing wrong but doing it so subtly that I had absolutely no idea. At the end of the year my “poor performer” marking was a horrible shock because I had absolutely no idea it was coming. That meant there’d been an unnecessary year of inefficiency from me (I was perfectly capable of doing what was required if I’d only known what it was) plus a great deal of upset all round.

A further risk for you, the manager, of not giving clear, plain feedback to autistic colleagues, is that you may be treating them less favourably than others because of their disability. Which is against the law. I’ve seen far too many autistic colleagues struggling because of not understanding what it is that they’re doing wrong because no-one will actually spit it out and tell them. I’ve also been guilty (as the manager) of not giving the message clearly enough – the culture I come from puts a great deal of value on not being blunt, and as an autistic person I’ve internalised that into my professional persona. An autistic person is by no means immune to having picked up bad habits from society! I need to remember to lean into my autistic strengths in some leadership and management situations rather than just mask as is my instinct!

Autistic people really don’t like surprises and also feel incredibly foolish when we realise that our autism has made us miss a key message that we should have read between the lines. So please – as Shakespeare (via Hamlet) said – sometimes one must “be cruel to be kind”. Give the tough feedback clearly and right at the moment it’s needed – don’t hope the autistic person will pick it up from unspoken cues and hints because – here’s the thing – we probably won’t.