NeuroConnect
Part of The IN Group Communities, NeuroConnect is community dedicated to supporting and empowering neurodiverse talent in the workplace.
Each episode brings you honest conversations with neurodivergent voices, allies, and industry leaders who are reshaping the way we think about inclusion. From personal stories to practical insights, we uncover how embracing neurodiversity drives innovation, creativity, and belonging.
Whether you’re neurodivergent yourself, a people leader, or simply curious about how to create more inclusive environments, this podcast is your space to learn, listen, and connect.
NeuroConnect
How Much Unprofessional Behaviour Do I Have to Accept?
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Nancy Doyle didn't get diagnosed as neurodivergent until she was 38 — despite being expelled from school routines by 14 and forging her own truancy notes to avoid getting caught. Today she's a professor, author, and founder of Genius Within, an organization of 200+ people helping neurodivergent adults thrive at work.
In this raw, unfiltered conversation, Nancy unpacks the uncomfortable question she gets asked in HR workshops — and why "being neuroinclusive" doesn't mean tolerating bad behaviour. She breaks down the difference between support and infantilization, why so many well-meaning managers are quietly de-skilling their neurodivergent employees, and what it actually takes to build a workplace where people don't just survive, but thrive.
From forged school notes to running a global coaching business, this is a conversation about potential, accountability, and what happens when we stop lowering the bar — and start raising the support.
Watch the video podcast: https://vimeo.com/1215443044?
Part of The IN Group Communities, NeuroConnect is community dedicated to supporting and empowering neurodiverse talent in the workplace.
Welcome to the podcast, Nancy. I hope you're well. How are you?
SPEAKER_02I'm very well, thank you.
SPEAKER_03You look excellent. I love the outfit, especially the boots. Nancy, uh this podcast recording is gonna be a little bit different potentially to what you're used to. All our audiences are used to, because I'm sure that you are approached a lot of the time around who you are as a professional. But I always do like to interview guests, professionals, and understand a little bit about their personal upbringing, their bit of their personal life, just so that we can feel and understand who you, Nancy Doyle, is. Is that alright?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's absolutely grand.
SPEAKER_03In speaking to you before and in getting to know you a little bit, I know that you're very unfiltered, which I love. It's helpful for podcasts. It is, it is, it is. If you don't mind, just provide a brief overview into your upbringing. What was the world of Nancy like?
SPEAKER_02Mixed. Um, so my my dad is a builder from New Jersey who left um New Jersey in the 70s to uh as a protest and a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. So he came over to this country and um was working on a building site in Oxford and wandered into Balliol College, Oxford, one day, covered in cement, and said, What do you dad, what do you gotta do to go here? To some Don. Um, and anyway, cut a very long story short, ended up doing um a philosophy degree and an MPhil in um politics and philosophy. And so for my life growing up, he was part-time teaching philosophy and politics in Southampton and part-time carried on as a builder. Okay, so it's a very interesting intersection of middle class and working class values, uh, language, approach, style. My mother is from a sort of very quiet suburb of Berkshire, so obviously that was quite a quite a match or mismatch, I should say. No, they're not any longer together. And um, and I've got two younger sisters who are absolutely chamasing, and my my ride or die sisters, in fact, it actually says that on the back of this, that they gave me for my 50th birthday, ride or die sisters. Um, so with all that, I I think the the biggest standout feature of my childhood is that um I was uh a professional truant. And when I say professional, um at the age of 12 when I went to secondary school, um I resolved to never give the school a genuine letter from my mother so that they never had a copy of her handwriting to compare any letters to.
SPEAKER_00Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_02So I was I was ready and prepped for truanting at that point, and um when I was 14 um I had quite an intense period of mental distress, and after that I basically didn't go to school again. Um, I used to go on a Monday and collect my work from my teachers, go home and do it, which is uh a reasonable adjustment for what was then absolutely undiagnosed ADHD. Um, which, you know, being a Gen X woman, you you don't get ADHD as a diagnosis as a child unless you're violent, basically, in that era, and and I and I wasn't violent, um, I was withdrawn. Um but yeah, so so I think that adjustment was both a blessing and a curse, you know. I mean, I I didn't enjoy education until I did my PhD. It was always a means to an end at that point. I I left home at 16 and and started working in um uh care homes for adults with learning disabilities. Um, and I found work the antidote to school, which is not always true for people. A lot of times, if you hate school, you hate work. I hated school, I loved work. So I had this kind of mission, if you like, to kind of make work as inclusive as possible so that more people could have that experience because I would see around me all the time the effects of people who hated school, and mostly they were neurodivergent. Um, and so that kind of absence from school period was distressing, it was isolating, it was it wasn't great socially. Um, I don't I absolutely was was very psychiatrically distressed at that point, and um and it wasn't a great era for me, but I also see it as a point of privilege, actually, because if you think about that arrangement, going into school, getting my work and being allowed to take it home, with no one giving my parents a hard time. Well, do you know if that isn't white privilege, I don't know what it is, but also a privilege of the time, you know, the era. There's no way that that I would be able to do that now.
SPEAKER_03And this was in the UK?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that was in the UK, it was in Southampton, in in kind of you know, a city school in Southampton.
SPEAKER_03There's lots to unpick there already. You know, um, from your perspective, when you're very reflective, as I know you are, you said it was a blessing and a curse. You were able to see others who were similar to yourself in terms of their approach, hating school, loving work.
SPEAKER_02Were you aware of just hating school and hadn't realized that work was something you could live, you could love, you know?
SPEAKER_03Potentially because of the age in which they were. Yeah. Right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, or their backgrounds. Do you know? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Thinking about that now, what would you say would be the biggest lessons that propelled you for the career that you were about to have?
SPEAKER_02Um, I think that the major one is the waste of human potential. So when I left home at 16 and I was kind of living in bed sits and I was living with um a collection of people uh who I've recently started seeing um in various guises. And you know, I feel so lucky that I met that group of people. I was a very vulnerable young woman, and I could have met any group of people at 16, 17. And actually, what I met was a group of fairly neurodivergent misfits who were all struggling in their own way, but were all really safe, uh, solid people, and I do feel very grateful for them actually. But you know, a lot of them were struggling, a lot of them were trying and failing to do A-levels, trying and failing to start jobs, and but I could see around me how much intellect and how much creativity and how much talent there was in that group of people, and I I enjoyed the heck out of them. Um, and I'm not very tolerant, do you know? So, you know, they were they were they were yeah, they were a thrive, they could have been a thriving bunch, and I just used to sort of think, you know, why can't that why can't you find a way through into a job that suits you, you know, and and what what could we do with you? What could we do with this with this writing ability you've got, this sculpture sculpture ability that you've got, this this musical talent that you've got. Um, so yeah, frustration, I think, at the number of people who just did not have any way to get a career path. And and and what what's going on in our schools that people leave feeling like they've got nothing to offer when they do. That is still the case today. It's it's at it's actually worse today, I think. Genuinely, I think it's worse. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03You were, as you mentioned earlier on, uh going through some mental challenges at a very young age. You left home at a very young age, you were working at a very young age. They're challenges that adults have, and the burden of that, dealing with that, I can only assume, because I don't know if I can't diagnose myself in terms of having mental health issues per se. However, as a young teenager, I can imagine it might have been exciting and scary and challenging, all within the same ball of emotion. Tell me about your educational journey because I know what you are today in terms of your qualifications, but if you don't mind, just give a very quick run-through in terms of you know, someone who actually was truant in from school who you know crafted a letter from mum, provided it's a teachers. The odds should be against you. I know in terms of you know, if you're holistically looking at your profile, but you made it work. So, what qualifications do you have?
SPEAKER_02So, um, with that approach, I actually got six A's, two B's, and a C at GCSE.
SPEAKER_03Okay.
SPEAKER_02So that's a decent collection of GCSE.
SPEAKER_03But what we're not saying to our listeners is to leave school and you know, at 14 years of age, get your homework. It was right for you.
SPEAKER_02It was absolutely right for me. And I imagine that there are lots of other teenagers that it's right for right now who are not able to have that, who are struggling. Um, a lot of their parents will be homeschooling them now, they'll be official homeschoolers. That's that's probably a possibility these days. Um so I do, you know, I was interviewed by someone who was doing a PhD on post-traumatic growth, and uh he was trying to say to me, What, you know, what was it the school could have done that would have allowed you to participate in the school? And I was just like, not be a school. There isn't anything. Um, but anyway, so I so I did manage to get some decent GCSEs, and then I started eight different A levels over four different years. So I, you know, I just started them as like, now I can't be bothered, don't like this, started again. No, I don't like this, can't be other don't. I managed to get myself onto an art A level without having an art GCSE. Um, I started classics, I started uh sociology, I started uh English, French, a whole bunch of things. Um and so over a four-year period, I didn't finish any of them. And then I went to another thing that doesn't exist anymore, so that privilege of the era that I lived in, um, the Connections Career Centres. Do you remember them?
SPEAKER_03No.
SPEAKER_02Okay, well, they were these things and they were just offices, and you could just walk in and chat to someone about education and career options. So I just literally walked in there at the age of 19 and said, I want to go to university, I want to do psychology, I'm fed up with meeting psychologists that don't know what they're doing, they're all useless. I need to go and study this thing and find out what it is that they know so that I can argue with them. And the lady said to me, Well, you can either wait till next September and do an access course, or could you finish any of those A levels that you started? So I was like, I could probably finish English and French. So I did that, and then I got a place at Middlesex University to do psychology, and I was so sure I was going to fail those A levels anyway. I was like, I mean, I'd finished them in three months as a correspondence course, and I was like, this is not gonna go well. So um over the summer I skipped town. I went to New York so that I wasn't around when the results came out. Yeah. Um uh and went to New York and lived in New York for a year, but I did get into university and um with a D and an E. Wow. I know that's called the gift of the gab, folks. But um uh, but yeah, so I did get in and I just enjoyed staying in New York anyway. Um, came back because I was the last year of grant assisted study. I know. Again, do you know? I'm just like I know I couldn't justify hanging out in New York when I could get a degree for free. I was like, that's just silly. So I went, came back, went to London, did my degree, and from then on I would say I was on a pretty even track, actually, career-wise. That's probably where I really started to sort stuff out. And I went from I went into psychology like most people do, thinking that I wanted to do clinical psychology. Um, and about halfway through the degree, I was like, nah, I can't do that. I I I can't work for the NHS, and that's the only way to train as a clinical psychologist. You have to work for the NHS. I can't work for the NHS, it will be the ruin of me. I will spend my entire time fighting the system and I I will, it will, it will break me. Um, there was at the time you couldn't get sponsorship to be a clinical psychologist if you were over, I think the ages was about 26, 27. Um, and I just thought how short-sighted that was because I realized I didn't have enough experience to do what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was to help young people like me who were struggling in school, who were struggling with various kinds of traumas, what I now know to be neurodivergence, um mental distress. And what I realized in that degree is that I had no experience of parenting. And when you've got young people, if you don't understand what's happening for their parents, you cannot help them. It's too easy to get into a rescuer position and to, you know, be on their side and see it, you know, to be drawn into that battle. And I thought I would rather become a parent, live my life, and then go and do it. And there was no route to do that. So that just made me even more dismissive of the whole profession, really. I was like, so what is this? This is an profession entirely staffed by well-meaning middle-class white girls that have no experience. Like, how is this as a profession going to succeed? I am pleased to tell you that it is much more diverse now, and they have changed a lot of those rules, and things have moved on tremendously in clinical psychology. But also in that degree, I did the occupational psychology module, which is the psychology of work, the psychology of careers, of ambition, of work performance, of motivation, of uh organizational culture, of um methods of assessment and uh training and development and lifelong learning. And I was like, ooh, I kind of like this. Um, and I nailed it, I got first without even trying, you know, and I was like, that's it, that's that's what I'm gonna do.
SPEAKER_03Well, that's interesting because think about what you said earlier on when you went to work in the care homes when you saw others and you wanted to give, you wanted to support, roughly seven, eight years later down the line. It's coming together.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so I did the occupational psychology masters and then I did my chartership as an occupational psychologist. Um, so I finished that in 2004 or five. Um, and my first early jobs in the early 2000s, I worked for access to work, so I would do disability uh workplace needs assessments and recommending adjustments for people. Um, the DWP used to pay for diagnosis at that time as well, would you believe? So I used to do a lot of dyslexia and dyspraxia diagnoses and later ADHD as well. Um, and then I also trained as a coach because um I was doing some other work with people who were long-term unemployed with a lot of really good coaches, and I kind of fell in love with coaching as a method of support. I personally started to get more personal development out of coaching than I ever had had out of support from clinical psychologists. So I was like, actually, there's something in this coaching stuff. Um, and so I carried on with the coaching and um and then kind of genius within sort of my business sort of grew out of that, uh, initially mainly focused on coaching because I kept kept recommending coaching for people as part of an assessment and then just hoping that they'd get a good coach. Yeah, and then thinking, nah, I need to be providing this. I know a ton of good coaches, let me get this sorted. Um, yeah.
SPEAKER_03So there are a number of coaches, professionals who are great at having the gifts of the gap, inspiring, motivating from your journey, having understood education, having experienced the highs and the lows, what are your thoughts in regards to having the actual qualification to carry out the work that someone in your circumstance is doing currently? Is it important to have the paperwork?
SPEAKER_02It's important to do due diligence to your craft. Um and there are a number of different ways of doing that. So you know, I think with with coaching, there's no there's no one qualification that is perfect, you know. Um there's lots of different routes into coaching. You can do a level three in coaching, you can do a level five in coaching, you can do a level seven in coaching, you can do a coaching master's degree, you know, there's lots of ways you can get into it. Um, and you can do some things that aren't regulated at all. And I would say I probably learned more out of those um sessions than anything else. There's a there's a stream, there's a strand of coaching, which is also a therapeutic strand called uh clean language and symbolic modelling, which I dedicated myself to for about five or six years, and I probably learned more out of that than any of my formal qualifications. Um, but one of the things that you learn out of a formal qualification and out of a professional training process is around things like your competence to practice. So the point at which you say, Do you know what, this is beyond me, and I now need to refer you on. So you know you know you start to learn what your limits are and work to those. Um, you get challenged on your own stuff. Um, so you you need to be challenged on your own stuff if you're gonna do people work, you need to know where your boundaries are, and because it particularly if you have lived experience. So I would say if you have lived experience, that's even more important because you're gonna meet clients who are gonna trigger you. They're gonna be like you, they're gonna have had similar things to you, and it's it's difficult to not get drawn into that emotionally. You have to know that that's gonna happen, you have to prepare for it, you have to have supervision groups, people where you can go to bounce that off, and you have to know when it's too much for you and you have to refer that person on. And I think that stuff's overlooked in a lot of the kind of oh, have a six-week certificate in ADHD coaching. Like people aren't taking care of that. And in my community, in neurodiversity, neurodivergent people are vulnerable. We're much more likely to have PTSD than the general population. Um, we've been ostracised, discriminated against, we think we have no value, we're worried about our careers, we're worried about our livelihoods. Can we put a roof over our heads? Because will we ever manage to hold down a job more than two years, six months, whatever it might be? So that level of vulnerability requires due diligence and it requires safeguarding and support structures. So I wouldn't say that you have to do a qualification, but what I would say is you have to do that.
SPEAKER_03Thank you. This discussion um we have to cover a community which you've already mentioned you're part of and very proud to be a part of. You smile whenever we talk about it. And I know also that it frustrates you a little bit as well, but we'll get into that a little bit later. A bit of a loaded question for you now. Why is neurodiversity so important to you?
SPEAKER_02Um again, it goes back to that wasted potential. Um in my PhD thesis, I did a my PhD was later. I didn't do it until my late 30s, early 40s. I finished it when I was 42. Um, but when I was finishing it, my supervisor said to me, you know, most people run out of steam in their last chapter, Nancy. You need to finish it with a bang. You need a couple of really strong sentences right at the end to just top it off. And the sentence I chose was that um inclusion is a moral, social, and economic imperative, and we all lose when human potential is squandered. Um, and I I really believe that. I believe that the the human species is diverse for a reason. It makes sense to have people that are specialist in one or two areas. Um, and you know, what we've got naturally occurring in the human species is neurodiversity. So we've got a bunch of people, two-thirds of people, are average. They are competent at most things. Um, they'll have strengths and weaknesses, but they're much of a muchness, they're falling within a you know, a range of the average ability or uh tendency. And then we've got some people with these big spiky profiles, like myself. So I've got a very high uh IQ for visual spatial reasoning and much, much lower for working memory.
SPEAKER_03How did it feel when this was presented to you?
SPEAKER_02What that I have that. Yeah. So when well I didn't get diagnosed until I was 38, which is ridiculous. I mean, I've just told you my history, right? Didn't go to school, started eight A levels, only finished two. Like if that isn't textbook ADHD, I don't know what is. Um, but so by the time I I had this experience, I already knew the field. Yes. So I was going into this knowing I had a spiky profile, knowing that this was likely to have some um, you know, some big differences between strengths and challenges. And so I think it's an I don't think I'm a good example of that. But I have diagnosed hundreds of people, and the typical response is that people are massively reassured to discover their strengths because that's the bit that nobody Talks about. So a neurodivergent person coming for diagnosis as an adult will know what they struggle with. They'll be able to tell you the things they can't do because it will have been pointed out to them over and over and over again in the education system or in the workplace, you know. And so when you do that assessment and you you feed back the things that they're good at, that's the conversation for me in the diagnosis. That's the bit, that's where you can reinstall hope. You can get people to start appreciating the things they've been taking for granted and saying, you know, I know just as an example, um, I once assessed a policeman and he was in the top 3% for verbal skills, okay, and the bottom 10% for working memory. So he so he was, you know, he was struggling with attention, concentration. Working memory is kind of how many tabs you can have open in your mind before you start to crash. So can you hold three or four things? Can you hold seven or eight things at any one time? His is quite low. It was like, you know, three or four things. So he already knew about that. Um, and when I said he was in the top three percent for verbal comprehension, we started talking about what that meant in in regards to policing. In and I was like, it's this will affect your ability to interview, this will affect your ability to build rapport, to speak to people in the street and get to know them, to build an understanding with the community that you're policing, um, to find the right words at the right moment to um uh support a victim. And he was like, Oh, I am really good at that. And I'm like, Yeah, I can I can see that you'd be really, really good at that. And you know, he was taking that for granted. What he was hyper focused on the difficulties he had writing up notes accurately, the difficulties he had inputting stuff into the into the date, inputting data. And so drawing that focus back to here's your strength, here's the thing that you do, and and that's what takes me back to why neurodiversity is so important, because neurodivergent people have we have different and diverse strengths. And if you think about a community of humans in our evolutionary state, so go back tens of thousands of years, you've got a a tribe, a group of about 150 people, it makes absolute sense for 5% of them to be ADHDers. We're curious, we don't sit still, we're hyper-vigilant. So while everyone else is chatting around the fire, we're like, What's happening here? What's going on? Yeah. Should we go and look over that next hill? Let's go and see what's over there. Ooh, antelope. You know, so if all of us were like that, it would be bedlam. But for a minority of us to be like that, brilliant. And then you've got kind of 10% of the population who are dyslexic, who don't read and write, but that's not a that's not an evolved skill, is it? And it's also increasingly not needed. Um, but dyslexics are very often really good at visual spatial reasoning and mechanical reasoning. So when when the ADHD has gone and found the antelope, the dyslexics will come and build a bridge over the river. And meanwhile, the autists who haven't been speaking to anybody, they've just been sitting around the fire to the side, you know, carefully sharpening something. Oh, they've invented a spear, you know. So there's this sort of naturalness to human diversity, which is powerful. And we've lost it in the industrial revolution. We've we've we've created systems where we wanted everybody to be the same, we wanted humans to be automatons so that we could be part of a production line, and it doesn't work. You you exclude too many people from work and life and society like that. So that's why it's important to me. We need every ounce of human intelligence to get through the next 50 years.
SPEAKER_03Agreed, and you know, the way in which you presented those examples there, you know, everyone, everyone who you speak to or everyone who's listening to this will think of scenarios, I'm sure, of what they've experienced. You know, I think about when I used to be in school myself a number of years ago. It was an all-boys grammar school. Yeah, ex-grammar school. However, in the canteen at break and lunch times, you would have the blacks in one corner, the Asians in another corner, the Greebos in one corner, the skateboarders in the middle, and anyone else of sorts who found themselves liking each other in another corner. And they all stayed within their groups every single day. We then go on a trip to Poland, you know, all on a coach for 36 hours from Northamptonshire, where I grew up. And you think about why those trips were so great, is because not everybody was the same.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03It the stories that you'd be able to laugh, discuss, where actually the bonding takes place, knowing that this black ADHD student actually was going out with a white, dyslexic woman or girl at the time, and where they found that balance, that that joy, the excitement, it's in the people. But everyone's skill sets and actions are very different. What I love is how obviously you being a professional, how you articulate this so that those who aren't aware, and this is why we're doing this, because I wanted to reach out to those who aren't aware, who don't know, who might be wondering, it's in a similar light, it's in a similar vein. Um, you know, neurodiversity is something which is huge now, for some reason, over the last five to eight years, has just spiked. Everyone's saying, This is the space to be a part of. This is the people, these are the discussions you need to be having.
SPEAKER_02And it's been both brilliant and not brilliant in many ways, actually. I mean, I I'm I'm a I'm a small drop in that wave of making that happen with the BBC documentaries that I made in 2017, 2018, the things that I've written. There's a there's you know, there's quite a few people that have brought neurodiversity awareness into the public space. Um, and I think, you know, I there's been there was the explosion in not just neurodiversity, but DEI, particularly uh racial injustice awareness in the 2020-2021 era, and then the snapback has been absolutely ferocious. And I think the neurodiversity snapback has taken a bit longer. It's it's it's just coming now, but it's coming. So I think with all inclusion movements, you see these these kind of inflection points where it looks like suddenly some change is gonna happen, and then there's this retrenchment, isn't there? And it's having watched this space for 25 years, I um I'm not reassured at the moment that that things are gonna be fine, actually.
SPEAKER_03You're a you're a writer, you do um you do some great writing. Um, I've read a number of your articles. And something that you wrote in one of your articles, quote, if we really want truly new inclusive workplaces, places where talent thrives rather than stalls, we need to dial back the parenting and return agency to neurodivergent adults. Talk to me about that.
SPEAKER_02So that's the current trend that I'm seeing. So prior to the awareness, we had a lot of discrimination. We had a lot of uh, well, in my day, people weren't dyslexic, they were just thick. You know, in my day, kids didn't have ADHD, they were just naughty, they need to be disciplined, you know. You had all of that. And people would vocalize that quite openly. And I think in some spaces they still do. That's not gone away. Um, but it's quieter than it was. Uh, no one was interested in the strengths of neurodivergent people. I used to have to kick people's doors down to get them to think about spiky profiles. Um, but what I do see happening that's problematic now is um managers who are very well-meaning, who want who support the idea of inclusion and neurodiversity, but who don't know how to support neurodivergent people to thrive. So what they will do instead is take over. So if they've got someone who's struggling with a certain task, let's say it's a report that has to be written once a week, they'll start doing that report for them. They, if they've got someone who is struggling to regulate their emotions and does kind of overspill, uh, quite sort of direct, unpleasant language, you know, is quite rude to people, they think that they're not allowed to talk about that. So they'll just sort of let that person carry on doing it and they'll tell everyone that they just have to suck it up. And what that's doing is robbing neurodivergent people of the opportunity to learn. And what happens is when that manager runs out of steam because they've been covering, um, that neurodivergent person is left out on a limb. All of a sudden the expectations change and they don't have those skills. So we're de-skilling neurodivergent people by not believing in them. There's there's nothing about being neurodivergent that doesn't mean you can't learn to meet deadlines. There's nothing about being dyslexic that means that assistive technology can't get you to write a report as as fluently and quickly as someone who isn't dyslexic. Um I'm I'm a neurodivergent woman, I've had to learn how to manage my emotions. I wouldn't be running an organization with 200 people in it if I couldn't manage my emotions. We have we have the ability to learn. The adjustment is that you help us and you don't blame us for not already being able to do those things, not that you lower the standards for us. And so what I'm seeing is a lot of lowering of standards for neurodivergent people. I've I actually heard in a workshop an HR, a senior HR professional says to said to me, How much unprofessional behaviour do I have to accept in order to be neuroinclusive? Well, I see your eyebrows. Yeah, exactly. Now we can have a long conversation about what you call unprofessional, you know. I mean, one person's micromanagement is another person's support, one person's direct is another person's rude, one person's polite is another person's insincere. There's, you know, there's there's nuance to all of this. But do you have to accept unprofessional behavior to be inclusive? No. Um, what you should do is you should give that person the benefit of the doubt, and you should um assume that they're not trying to be malicious or malevolent or um aggressive or you know, lazy or any of those things. But what you should do is help them and say, okay, so I can see you're struggling with this. What can we do to support you? You see all that good stuff you do over there, great, we want more of that, but we can see that you really struggle with planning and prioritising your workload. So, how do we support you with that? Managers can give some support, coaches are there for exactly that sort of thing. And and so I think that's my fear at the moment is the infantilisation of neurodivergent people. And I think it probably has um parallels to uh the, you know, we, you know, in terms when I think about the anti-racist work that happened uh in 21-22, we saw a lot of white saviorism, and I think it's got parallels to that. So it's it's that stage. And what it says to me, this isn't this is an immature conversation. This the neurodiversity conversation is at a stage of maturity where people want to help, but in helping they're taking over and they're diminishing the ability of neurodivergent people to take responsibility for themselves, to be agent, to be empowered.
SPEAKER_03So, on that, on the back of that, two points. What there are a number of managers who manage professionals in their team who would like to be able to do what you've just advised. However, there's a fear.
SPEAKER_02There is.
SPEAKER_03Okay. Now that's okay. How you address that and how you present yourself, that's how you deal with that. However, what do you say to a the managers in terms of dealing with these professionals who have identified as being neurodivergent? And also, second to that, from a company's perspective, what what would you advise to companies? You've already mentioned, for example, having coaches, but not all companies want to invest in professionals to support the business, to support the people. So, what would you say to that?
SPEAKER_02No, well, I I am I know you've got plenty you can say. Yeah, I've got plenty I can say. Well, first of all, on the point of coaching and not wanting to invest, if you're in a very small business and you can't afford to provide coaching for your um neurodivergent or other other um otherwise disabled uh employees, that's what access to work is for. So access to work is a government-funded DWP program. Uh, you apply for support with adjustments that are unaffordable by your business. They'll give you a free assessment and they'll recommend things for you. Um, and then if your business is small enough, they'll pay for those things. So access to work does exist. And for people that are wondering what to do with their budget, what I would say to you is that the average coaching program comes in at less than a grand, and the average cost of rehiring is a heck of a lot more than a grand. And the the cost, it's all the hit, you know, it's it's a hard ask because you're comparing a direct cost with an indirect cost or a hidden cost, but the hidden cost sort of underperformance, the hidden cost not just to that person, but to their manager who's trying to cover up, or the rest of their team who's trying to cover up, what that does to relationships, to sense of what's fair and what's not fair, to trust, to honest communication and psychological safety within those teams, that's an issue. Now, for the want of a few hundred quid, we could pretty much solve that problem. Um, 95% of uh Genius Within's coaching clients keep their jobs. And I never want that to be 100%, because 5% of them leave because they should, they're in the wrong job, and that's actually a good outcome. If someone leaves elegantly because through coaching they've realized they're in the wrong job, I consider that a win. Um, and 25% of our clients get promoted within a year. Our NPS score for coaching is is 89%. I don't know if you know what an NPS score is, but that is like you know, 70% is considered world class. Yeah. So coaching works when it's done properly, it's not massively expensive. There you can invest in it. And and also there are a lot of managers that are naturally very good coaches. So those principles of coaching, um, I created a digital platform called the Genius Finder, which is a psychometric self-assessment of functional everyday work performance that lets you work out your spiky profile from a from an everyday perspective, not from an IQ perspective, but just from a what do I find easy, what do I find hard? And then in that platform are all the kind of coaching exercises, developmental tasks that I would give clients to help them develop that skill that they're missing. So I've created something that's quite affordable and accessible that you can work through on your own as a and or with a manager to kind of give those guardrails to managers of what they can and can't talk about, what they could and couldn't suggest. So I'm trying to sort of open that access because I do recognise that not everyone can afford coaching and not everyone can go through the paperwork of ADHD. But but I I think you know there's stuff out there, is what I'm saying. There's stuff out there.
SPEAKER_03You have served in many different types of positions from training manager, operations manager, director, section editor, writer, professor, managing director, chief science officer, CEO, founder? My question to you is with the world that you live in, the jobs day to day, how does Nancy hold herself accountable when diagnosed as being neurodivergent managing so many people?
SPEAKER_02How do I hold myself accountable? Lots of different ways, really. I don't I mean, I don't think we're ever finished. We're always in process, right? You live in process. So I don't think there's ever been a point in my professional career where I wasn't in some sort of coaching and or therapy, you know? Um, and within my business, we've very much set it up in a kind of shared leadership style. So rather than one person being the boss and their word goes, there's a sense of this is more your sort of style issue. What do you think we should do here? You know, so I'll just my my longest standing business partner is Fiona, and she's a very different personality to me. Fiona is someone who likes to take a long time over decisions, but once she's made a decision, she very rarely changes her mind. I make decisions very, very quickly, and I can change my mind quite quickly. So between us, what's happened is we've learned to respect each other's differences, and and I think that's the important thing. So, I mean, if anyone's gonna respect diversity of thought, it's gonna be me, right? So I've got to walk that talk. And that means respecting the fact that Fiona makes decisions very differently to me. When we first started working together, um, I would ask her a question and then she wouldn't get back to me. And I'd be like, come on, Fiona, I'll be chasing her.
SPEAKER_03Um hi Fiona.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, she knows this. I tell this anecdote all the time. Where are you, Fiona? Um, and and I learned that I had to give her space because if I didn't give her space, I wasn't gonna get the well-thought-through, well-reasoned um approach that I have come to love her for, you know. But what she also learned is to send me a holding message. So if I'd asked her a question, she'd be like, I'm gonna need to think on that. It's Friday, I will let you know on Monday, or it's Tuesday, I will let you know by the end of the week. And that would that would hold me, but it would also, and I would then be able to hold space for her. Um, conversely, if there's a crisis, I am the absolute best person for the job, and Fiona will trot along after me doing exactly what I say because I I think quickly enough for crisis response. So within the first two weeks of the pandemic, we had completely reorganised our business to from face-to-face coaching and assessments to online everything. Um, and I was busy lobbying the British Psychological Society to validate over the diagnostic assessments over the phone. So, you know, that there's there's strengths and challenges in the way that I operate, and there's strengths and challenges in the way that other people in my leadership team operate. And the important thing is that we build a diverse team and we recognise each other's strengths. We know what each other is good at and we respect that. And that's I think my main daily accountability is knowing that I'm I'm not surrounded by yes people. I'm surrounded by people that will tell me if I've gone too fast.
SPEAKER_03How do you deal with that? How do you deal with the challenge?
SPEAKER_02Um, I love being challenged. Okay. Yeah, I'm really happy to be challenged. And I and I notice I notice my own responses. Do you know? I can um I notice if I'm having a response that that means that I've got some drama about it, and I probably need to work that out before I make something happen. Um, I've learned the the power of writing the email and then not sending it until the next day. Um, those kind of things. But you know, that's that's personal development work. I think any any leader has to go through that stuff. Anybody in a leadership position has to do work on themselves because you you can't create psychological safety in a business if you haven't got it for yourself. You need to know your own boundaries, you need to know how you feel when your boundaries are transgressed and how you deal with that in an emotionally safe, non-dramery way. And you need to be able to execute that, and then you also need to know that you're not perfect and that sometimes you will fail on that, and that you can fess up and apologize and take accountability for that. So I think all leaders need to be good at that.
SPEAKER_03Yes. The um there's a lot of leaders who will try to hide mistakes.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_03They want to feel that they're the person, they're the man, they're the woman, because I'm the CEO, because I'm the director. Well, we we're both aware it's out there. We are, we're some of your clients might be those people.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And They might listen to this conversation or hear you speak on many platforms and say, Well, look, it's easy for you because you've been in therapy, you've been in coaching, you've studied psycholog psychology from the age of 15. And it's been since before that.
SPEAKER_02I was I was in therapy from 13.
SPEAKER_03Right, from 13 onwards. You've been able to use tools to work on you. And then that evolves into the professional workplace. That evolves into your coaching practice, that evolves into you being the professor. That gives you a very different approach when writing for magazines on a global scale. What would you say to those people who have no idea about coaching, about using tools, about seeking help?
SPEAKER_02Start somewhere. You know, you it's it's yeah, it's not about um it's a it's about being in process all the time. It's about having that supervision group. There are plenty of free communities doing supervision work. My good friend, my good, good friend Whitney Isles, currently runs something called the Rebellious Practitioner, where she holds space for people that are practicing inclusion work, um uh anti-violent violence prevention work, uh, coaching, health work. Uh, and yeah, she holds a free book club where we we do, we we look at various works. We've just done a whole series on uh on trauma. Um, so we've read all of the big trauma books that are out there and debriefed them. Um so that's something I would recommend. The Rebellious Practitioner with Whitney Isles, man, that woman is gifted. Um, I also I wrote a book called Learning from Neurodivergent Leaders, which is a series of stories, not just of mine, but of other neurodivergent people in leadership positions, and it's got worksheets so you can do personal development for yourself within it. Um, so I think it's it's not about finding the best coach always or finding the right therapist, it's it's just it's about having that mindset. What can I learn about myself? How can I be more self-aware? How can I get these corners rubbed off? Um when I when I started training coaches, one of my first gigs actually as an occupational psychologist was training uh people who were going to be unemployment support workers. So, in the very first New Deal for unemployed people back in 2002, um, under the Blair Brown government, um I was part of those for those first contracts. And so I hired a bunch of of people who would would be working with unemployed people in um Hammersmith and anyway, across London. And we used to, we used to we used to say that the most important thing is is rapport because in any therapeutic alliance, any therapeutic interaction, the the power of the of the relationship is what creates the most impact in terms of change. So you have to be able to build rapport. So we used to say to people, go and build rapport with who would you find it hard to build rapport with? Go and build rapport with one person like that. We had we had this one woman who um said that she she was a bit frightened of homeless people. That was something she would find hard. If she had a client who was homeless, she she doesn't know how she would handle that. So we were all righty, your developmental task overnight before we you come back tomorrow is to strike up a conversation with a homeless person. Only has to be one or two sentences. So she leaves the session, um, she goes to the bus stop, and there's a guy selling the big big issue right next to the bus stop. So she's like, right, this is my moment. And one bus comes past, her bus comes and it goes past, she leaves it. She still hasn't built up the courage. She stands there a bit longer, another one of her buses passed. She leaves it, she doesn't build up the courage. She finally builds up the courage and goes and buys a copy of the big issue and strikes up a conversation with this person. It turns out that was his first day selling the big issue, and he has been doing the same thing. He has been stood there trying to build up the courage to ask her to buy a copy of the big issue. I know. So I just feel like the most important thing is that mindset. And the way you get your corners rubbed off is by working with building rapport with people who are not like you. That's how you do it. Yeah. Yeah. You've got to find, you know, my my thing with all my clients when I'm coaching is I've got to find something. What's the thing that I love about this person? And where is the thing that they love? Those are the two things I'm always looking for. I'm looking for the spark in someone's eye when they start talking about something in their work or something in their life that they suddenly change their posture, their face lights up. Because that right there, that's their career. And I need to find it. I need to find that that magic seed. And um and what's the thing I love about them? You know, what is it that they can do that's so uniquely them? So I think I think that's the most important thing that you do. That find people to work with that are not like you, learn because that's you will learn doing that, and have a safe sounding board space where you can take stuff so that you don't spill your emotional bucket over everybody that you're working with.
SPEAKER_03Well, listen, Nancy, thank you for coming on and speaking to me and shedding some light into your world and your life, your upbringing, your advice, your insights. Um my last question to you very quickly You're at a significant stage in life where it looks like things are thriving. What's next for for yourself and for the genius within?
SPEAKER_02That's a big question right now. Um I don't know if I can give that in a short answer. Um, I was actually feeling really burned out at the end of last year because of how difficult things have become in the DEI space, the the kind of sense of backlash. It is it's like a heavy cloak, isn't it, right now? It's a heavy, heavy cloak that we are wearing and carrying when we work in this space. And I was feeling quite burned out. And um I had this conversation. My husband is like, my husband is so funny. I love him to death. Uh, he is the yin to my yang, and um, he is the kind of person who's been putting the recommended amount into a pension plan since he was 22 years old. God love him. Obviously, I have not, I'm not that person. Um, but um, so he was he had a financial advisor come round to talk to him about his pension, and he they were saying, you know, well, actually, you know, you could feasibly retire at 57 if you wanted to really lower your standard of living. And then the guy looked at me and said, If if your husband was retired, what would you do? And I just simply hadn't thought about that. I hadn't thought about it. But even though I hadn't thought about it, I came out with this ferociously passionate answer. And as it was, as the words were coming out of my mouth, I was like, Oh my god, that's true. I'm not burned out, I'm not burned out at all. So, um, so what of what I actually said was, oh my God, if Dan retires and all he's doing is pottering round the house, knowing where my passport is and ironing things, oh my god, I would have a second career, I would take over the world, I would run 10, I would write 10 books. And then I went, oh, that's true.
SPEAKER_01I'm not done yet.
SPEAKER_02So since that meeting, I've been planning what my what my next moves are, and you'll just have to wait and see.
SPEAKER_03There we go. Nancy, thank you so much. I look forward to seeing what the plans will be. I look forward to seeing you on the main stage. I look forward to reading more of your articles, and I look forward as well to eventually seeing you at a music venue somewhere soon when we're breaking in our shoes together. But thank you so much.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for having me. Take care.