Mistakes I Made as a Neurodivergent Leader
Dr Nancy Doyle is an Organisational Psychologist and the CEO/Founder of the social enterprise Genius Within CIC. Her book Learning from Neurodivergent Leaders empowers leaders to navigate challenges, harness their strengths, and thrive as a neurodivergent leader.
My first and most fundamental mistake as a leader was naivety and idealism. Having worked in corporate life and found the politics and hierarchy demotivating, I assumed everyone would be the same. We hear so many narratives about a ‘toxic work culture’ and ‘bad managers’, that it is easy to assume the problem comes from the top down. I genuinely believed, as my company grew big enough to need management structures, that as long as we were nice people everyone would be fine! And I consider myself very lucky to say that I have always worked with nice people. But meaning well is not, sadly, enough, and being nice is not the same as leading. This is a hard lesson to learn.
To compound my error, I also reviewed the management science regarding leadership and my naivety was reinforced. Academic literature and training focuses on the need for managers to be good listeners, to be compassionate, to care about their team, to be transparent and to support their development. I read about the ‘Dark Triad’ of leadership, where studies have found that Machievellian, Narcissistic and Psychopathic personality traits are more widely found in leaders than the general population. Well, I thought, I don’t recognise these as traits in my colleagues and we would support anyone with a clinical diagnosis related to personality to focus on their strengths and address their challenges, so this so-called ‘Dark Triad’ won’t be a problem. In fact, I kind of scoffed at how unhelpful the term was, and how it pathologized mental health issues. My reading confirmed that my lovely team of mainly female, neurodivergent women would in fact be brilliant leaders and I had nothing to worry about. How I was wrong!
What nobody warned me about, was what I now call, the “Female Dark Triad”. These are traits – possibly related to personality, more likely related to social conditioning of women, disabled people, those marginalised by poverty, sexuality, transgender or race – which undermine leadership success and derail careers. They cause burnout and undermine productivity. I didn’t really recognise them (I thought it was just me) until I watched my predominantly female, neurodivergent junior managers go through the same hurdles that I had faced. Over and over. These are the three mistakes of the Female Dark Triad.
Rescuing: akin to tying a kids shoelaces rather than teaching them to tie their shoelaces, this is short term gain and long term pain. Managers who take over and do their team’s work for them are often harassed and in a hurry, often hoping to ‘help’ someone who is struggling, but long term they are setting up an unsustainable pattern. Their team don’t learn, or progress, and the manager takes on too much – which works until it doesn’t, and they stop coping. Teams become resentful when the rescuing stops as they have come to expect it and relationships break down. Some teams feel aggrieved that they haven’t been trusted to do the work themselves. Ambitious team members leave.
Martyrdom: A stage beyond rescuing, where the need to be needed and seen as the ‘the one who copes’ has become part of the manager’s identity. Martyrs sacrifice their own wellbeing and time for everyone else’s which may be fair on occasion, but not as a constant. Their teams fail to grow, their health suffers and they inevitably end up letting everyone down by falling over completely. Martyrdom can also lead to resentment that no one else has stepped in to rescue, as the manager expects their manager to do for them as they do for others.
Deference: when leaders doubt themselves unduly, and ruminate over decisions or choices that others have challenged, to the point where they cease to trust themselves and hand the power to others. Listening and allowing others to influence is a positive, but when this is overplayed, the leader appears incompetent and can flip flop between different positions. This causes anxiety in teams, because they are looking to the leader to set a vision, a direction and the teams want to feel safe, like someone knows what they are doing. For the leader themselves, it causes sleepless nights, a derailed career trajectory and, ultimately, the inability to do the role. Making decisions, working out what you all need to do IS leadership. One can hold space for contributions whilst still being the person who synthesizes and agrees the final plan.
Often deference happens when someone with leadership aspirations, or from a different gender, race, class, age, neurotype or personality comes in strong, with confidence. When a leader is masking self-esteem and confidence issues, a challenger with confidence is hard to resist.
So over time I have realised that these traits are endemic in women leaders, but also specifically neurodivergent women, neurodivergent people of all genders, those from racially minoritised backgrounds, working class people who are breaking the class barriers – so many people. When I reached out to diverse potential contributors for my book ‘Learning from Neurodivergent Leaders’, I shared my initial chapters. The leaders typically responded with comments that they ”felt seen”. Their stories and examples flowed freely and my hunch was correct – these difficulties are not “just me”.
The standard leadership training advice on listening and being kind is a correction to the dominant paradigm of white male non-disabled cishet privilege, where historic abuses of power need to be corrected. But for those who grew up powerless or barriered, we need different advice. We need to learn to feel safe within our newly acquired power and influence, to be assertive, to set boundaries and to prioritise self-care as well as caring for others. You cannot pour from an empty cup. In my book, my contributors and I take you through that journey, with personal development questions to help you reflect and process your own, specific dark triad (or dark quadrant etc). The book outlines where we went wrong, in the hope that you can avoid some of our pitfalls. My hope is that we bolster the leadership confidence and ambition of leaders like us, so that fewer of us derail and more of us find ourselves in positions of power and influence. Diverse leadership is essential to solving the world’s problems.
Learning from Neurodivergent Leaders is a practical book that empowers leaders to navigate challenges, harness their strengths, and thrive as a neurodivergent leader.