Autistic Stimming: What It Actually Does
Stimming is regulation, not a habit I did a thing with my hands for about fifty years before I had a word for it. No one taught me to do it, and no one had to say stop in so many words. I learned on my own, early, that it was better done where it…
Keep readingBrave
I’m commonly told I’m brave for speaking up about neurodiversity and autism. To me, it’s not brave. The feedback, if anything, is confusing. I speak up because as a society we are needlessly wasting huge amounts of human potential. And organizations are missing out on much-needed skills and traits. In being diagnosed after 37 years…
Keep readingDeficits Deficits Deficits
The first D in ADHD stands for Deficit. The DSM-5 categorizes autistic people as having a deficit in social communication. The other criteria are all stated as deficits. Research shows that autistic people communicate with each other as well as neurotypical people communicate with each other. But when you are the minority who communicate differently…
Keep readingWe Need To Think Outside the Box
I can’t tell you how many times I heard this when working at large companies. There are people who naturally think this way. The bottom-up thinkers. They are also the people who struggle with interview questions like: tell me about yourself. To a bottom-up thinker that can be a paralyzing question. Where do you begin?…
Keep readingEye Contact
Today a business school communications professor asked me how to teach presentation skills when eye contact is hard for some students. It’s on the rubric. It has always been on the rubric. I told the room eye contact isn’t correlated with trust. I’m sure Elizabeth Holmes makes great eye contact in the new movie. They…
Keep readingJobs for Autistic Adults: Interview the Environment
What thirty-seven years in leadership taught me about hiring autistic people I spent most of my working life on the hiring side of the table. Four years as a Navy Surface Warfare Officer, then Dell and Tech Data, then two companies I founded and ran. Thirty-seven years of deciding who got the job. Here is…
Keep readingHigh-Functioning Autism: A Label That Grades You
High-functioning is a grade. Other people award it, and they do not award it for how you are doing. A late diagnosis makes that visible in a way an early one does not. I was diagnosed autistic at fifty-five, with thirty-seven years in leadership behind me. The traits were in the room the whole time.…
Keep readingHigh-Masking Autism: What the Performance Cost
The talk went well. People said so on the way out and they meant it, and I drove home pleased with how it had gone. And then the next day was shot. I have written about that day before. Not a slow morning. A full twenty-four hours where the things that are normally automatic are…
Keep readingMasking Autism: Why the Bill Arrives a Day Late
Two days of meetings. A conference talk, a customer visit, a supplier audit. The work went well. By any measure anyone in those rooms would use, I was good at it. Then I got home and lost the next day. Not a slow morning. A full day where the things that are normally automatic were…
Keep readingThe Open Floor Plan
The open floor plan was sold as collaboration. It was bought for square feet per person. Both of those are true, and only one of them is in the announcement. A building gets designed around a cost per square foot and a headcount target. Then it gets explained to the people moving in. The language…
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