Embrace Neurodiversity
I was sitting in a tense people review. My sales leader, let’s call him Frank, was telling me all the reasons one of his new employees, Kate, was not performing.
“Her pipeline is not big enough.”
“She doesn’t put updates in the system on time.”
“She is too different from the rest of the team…”
My heart sank. Kate was empathetic, persuasive and resilient - all qualities we want in our salespeople. However, her approach to sales appeared flawed to Frank. Kate is neurodivergent and she has had to teach herself workarounds to allow her to try to ‘fit in’ despite her ADHD, dyslexia and dysgraphia.
Kate had a smaller sales pipeline, which Frank saw as a performance issue. But, she built deep relationships with her clients, which over time, Frank would learn, resulted in higher conversion and deal sizes.
She didn’t keep our sales tool updated in a timely fashion and when she did, her updates were brief and often had misspellings. Frank viewed this as insubordination and laziness. “She insists on using her cell phone for account notes!” But Kate struggled with the time required to manually put these updates into our tool; what took her peers 10 minutes could take her 2+ hours. Instead, she used a voice recorder and captured her notes in an app, which Frank refused to even look at: “She is just making things more difficult for me.”
Kate did things differently and because of that Frank did not think she could be successful or fit in with the team.
Frank’s bias on what a great salesperson should look like was limiting his ability to see Kate for who she is and her true value to our organization.
I coached Frank on neurodiversity and how to embrace it to unlock the potential in each individual. Within a month, he went from telling me Kate was not performing to advocating for our sales tool to be more user friendly for our diverse workforce. He fought for an integration so voice updates from Kate’s phone app would be translated to text in our sales tool. Frank became Kate’s biggest advocate and Kate thrived, becoming his top performer and outselling his next best on the team by over 100% that year. Frank learned a valuable lesson managing Kate, which was amplified a few years later when his own child was diagnosed with autism.
How many Franks do you know at your organization?
Embracing neurodiversity is not just a step towards a more inclusive society; it’s a strategic business move. Neurodivergent team members bring unparalleled strengths to the table—innovation, creativity, and unique problem-solving abilities—that, when leveraged, can significantly contribute to a company’s competitive edge.
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