‘If you’re neurodiverse, you want to take this occasion and really run with it’: Denise Brodey’s advice to neurodiverse jobseekers

Denise Brodey, a neurodiversity consultant as well as founder of Rebel Talent, joins Yahoo Finance’s Kristin Myers and Sibile Marcellus to discuss neurodiversity and the efforts that companies are making to create businesses which are more open and accessible to neurodivergent people.

Video transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

KRISTIN MYERS: Welcome back. Well, it's only been about 20 years since a sociologist coined the term neurodiversity and opened the door for what we are beginning to see more and more today, which is companies not only accepting workers with dyslexia, autism, or other conditions, but actually seeking them out.

SIBILE MARCELLUS: To talk about the efforts that companies are making and why, we're joined now by Denise Brodey, a journalist who covers diversity and inclusion. She's also the founder of Rebel Talent, a consulting company focused on neurodiversity. Now Denise, give us a sense of what neurodiverse workers face in the office. Are their colleagues aware that they're neurodiverse? What is it like for them?

DENISE BRODEY: I would say that most people--

SIBILE MARCELLUS: What has your experience been?

DENISE BRODEY: --hide their neurodiversity. And if you want to go back one step, you could say neurodiversity means all people. So basically, a lot of people don't know that they're neurodiverse. They don't know that it means everybody.

But when you talk about neurodivergent, that's basically a way of saying this is the way I think. This is the way I experience life. This is how I'm different, innovative, talented, however you want to say it. I think--

KRISTIN MYERS: Now--

DENISE BRODEY: Go ahead.

KRISTIN MYERS: No. Go ahead, Denise.

DENISE BRODEY: I think it's really amazing that this change is happening now, because it will include so many more people. The discussion over mental health has really merged with the inclusion discussion and the disability conversation. So all at once, unfortunately due to the pandemic, we have a lot of people suffering, a lot of people not feeling their best at work and not really knowing how to navigate those new situations. Or some may be staying home and not knowing how to navigate interpersonal situations with their boss or with a colleague.

So it's all up for grabs right now. And what I would say, in general, is if you're neurodiverse, you want to take this occasion and really run with it, because you've got a lot of leeway to say, this is how I work. This is what I love to do. Could you help me with this? And I'd like to be, at the end of this year, more talented in X, Y, and Z. Love it here. Can't wait to work with you. It's just a very positive moment.

KRISTIN MYERS: So Denise, I know, you know, it's one thing to get neurodiverse candidates into the door of your workplace. It's another to deal with managing neurodiverse and neurodivergent employees and being that divergent employee yourself. What are some of the biggest hurdles or struggles, do you think, not just from the manager's perspective, but also from the employee perspective? I hear what you're saying that now is the time to really speak up about some of those things, those accommodations that you might need, but what are still some of the biggest challenges that are being faced?

DENISE BRODEY: The biggest challenge right now is in your head. The biggest challenge is that so many of us don't know how to speak about our talent, and so we become anxious, worried. We stress out. We don't perform well. We make silly mistakes.

So if you can wrap your head around the idea that you're just as good as everybody else, maybe even better at some things, then you're walking into a situation where, even if your manager, and I think we said 80% of managers don't have the right words or worry about what to say, you know what to say. And that's what I teach people all the time. You know what to say about yourself, and you know how to do a great job.

So I know you just said, well, what are all the problems, but I don't really actually consider them problems. I just think of them as different things, different hoops people go through. Some people have to jump through a hoop, they're too tall, or too this, or too that, or too whatever. Because I may be, let's say, too weak on keeping information in my working memory, that doesn't mean that I'm going to have to have some horrible discussion with someone. It just is. It's not a problem.

And in approaching it that way when you say, yeah, I know, I know how I can figure this out, and I know how I can do my best, that's going to help every manager out there, and it's also going to help you. And I think oftentimes research shows, oh, we're going to start from the top, right. We're going to say that the C-suite really needs to understand neurodiversity.

But just as importantly now, it's the year of the worker. And the worker needs to know exactly what they can do, what they can't do, and how the job is going to get done, the details of it. So doing those run-throughs becomes just natural after a while, and you really don't have that problem.

You have the bottom coming up, other people at the bottom coming up. And people at the top sort of, oh, now I understand. So they meet in this messy middle, and hopefully the conversation goes much better.

SIBILE MARCELLUS: Well, Denise, we have more questions for you, so please stay with us.