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.

“It’s not my fault – I’m autistic!”

I realise that as we autistics become more visible, then it can be tempting to call out all criticism of us as anti-autistic prejudice. But sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes we are being prats. If we shrug off all possibility of being at fault by saying “but I’m autistic!” then we’re setting ourselves up to be intolerable and unemployable in society. Each one of us needs to take responsibility for the things we have a choice about, and only claim the “but I’m autistic!” excuse when we’re really entitled to it.

Am I to blame?

Autism certainly can sometimes lead to the autistic person causing hurt or harm without intending to. If my autism has led me to be socially clumsy in a way that upset someone, then I hope to be forgiven because I didn’t intend the harm. But on the other hand sometimes we cause harm because we’re not good people. In which case we totally do deserve blame – we’ve chosen to do bad things, and can be held accountable. Inconveniently, you can’t establish in advance that all autistic people should or shouldn’t be blamed for what we do. Some of it’s down to the autism, some of it’s down to our choices, and each one of us is different.

Autism and culpability

As the old joke says, it’s not what you have, it’s what you do with it. If I have autistic weaknesses that hurt other people and I could have avoided that happening, then I’m somewhat at fault. Not as at fault as a person would have been who wasn’t contending with the autism, but I still had some choices to make and can be judged on them. Equally if I deployed my autistic honesty in a good way then I should get some credit for making good use of the qualities that I have, although perhaps not so much as someone for whom honesty was more of a challenge. As so often there are shades of credit and blame, responsibility and helplessness, and very few easy answers. If you agree “I’m not naughty, I’m autistic”, then the corollary is “I’m not nice, I’m autistic”. Which leads to “I’m not fully human”. So really, the slogan ought to be “I’m sometimes naughty, and I’m autistic”. But I guess that wouldn’t make a very good T shirt.

Getting the words wrong

Making conversation for me as an autistic person is a stressful and tiring thing. I save brain energy by using sequences of remarks that have worked before: “scripts”. As an example, there’s almost no conversation in the UK into which you can’t put a remark about the weather or say that you really need a coffee. At work it’s also hard to go wrong complimenting someone on their personal tea or coffee cup. Such cups are usually a clue to personality (does it have an animal, a club logo or a sports team on?) and very unlikely to be a sensitive or difficult thing to talk about. So if you meet me in the lift at work, you can bet safely that I’m either going to say: “gosh I need a coffee” or (if appropriate) “that’s a nice coffee cup – where did you get it?” That’s how my scripts work.

Give me some emotion-signalling please!

People putting emotional demands on me on purpose is something I struggle with. I think that’s why the colleague who sits opposite me and simpers all day in order to make other people respond positively to him/her is so maddening (to me – not to other people!) It’s not that I’m not empathic – I certainly am – and if someone just expresses their emotion, I am very likely to respond to it. What makes me autistic skin crawl is when someone demands a particular emotional response from me and won’t stop figuratively poking at me until I’ve provided that response.

Giggling…

Today I’m sitting at my desk in the office absolutely fuming, and why? Because the colleague sitting opposite me has spent most of the last hour talking and giggling. I appreciate that s/he is enjoying spending the day in the office bonding with colleagues and these are important things. The fact that s/he has a colleague who always talks at the top of his/her voice in response is pure chance. Much of the talking is about work and is probably getting useful things achieved, and the giggling is probably oiling the wheels of social communication. It’s all very neurotypical and probably highly effective working behaviour. The end result though is that I am incredibly annoyed by the sounds I’m hearing – I’m distracted, as I would be by any sounds – but somehow this in particular is absolutely getting my goat. Which got me wondering – why?

You’re weird – did you know that?

If you want to tell me you think I’m autistic, why would you be doing that? If it’s to help me access reasonable adjustments, thank you kindly, but don’t forget they can be offered without a diagnosis. But are you imagining I don’t know I’m autistic, and that that information should be public property? Possibly I know full well and I don’t want everyone else to know – my brain, my business, right? Or you might feel I need to be alerted to the problem that I have and the fact that it’s noticeable. You might be hinting (and it’s not going to go well because autistic people aren’t great with hints) that I should be covering up my autism more effectively. But should I really? Autistic people may choose to mask for professional reasons, but we’re not obliged to to make the rest of the world feel more comfortable about us.

I think my colleague is autistic – help!

If you spot that your colleague is in trouble, the human instinct is to help, isn’t it? If they’re in mental distress or limping or whatever – you want to fix them, to make them “better”. Suppose you’ve had experience of a particular condition – if you see someone else with it, you want to alert that person to their situation, don’t you? For example, if you’ve had skin cancer and you spot (no pun intended) that someone else has an unusual mole, you’d probably point it out to them and suggest they get it checked? You might actually save someone’s life. The problems for we autistics come when someone notices that we’re autistic and wants to point it out and “fix” it, in the same way they would with a disease.

What, not how

Society at large sadly tends to see autistics as not-particularly-intelligent children (horrible generalisation I know, please forgive me) which means managers of autistics break down tasks into the simplest steps they can – as they would for a child. Do this, first then that, and then that. While that might work for a child, it can make things much harder for an adult autistic who needs to know what they’re supposed to be achieving and then left to achieve it in their own way.