Different Brains. Better Teams

00:00:00: If your neurodivergent colleagues don't feel safe enough to ask for what they need, that's really just about them.

00:00:08: It is usually telling you something true... ...about the psychological safety of your team.

00:00:26: Welcome back to The Coach Duck!

00:00:28: I'm Kai and this season we're going talk about healthy leadership not the yoga mat version but where your team actually performs And You Don't Burn Out getting there.

00:00:43: And today I want to talk about something that sits right in the middle of that, neural diversity!

00:00:50: Now before you switch episodes because you think this is going to be a diversity lecture let me be very clear about something... This episode is not about identity politics.

00:01:01: i'm not here to tell you what to say in a memo on how to write..I am here in your next meeting.

00:01:13: And why?

00:01:14: understanding how they actually work is one of the most underused performance levers in leadership today?

00:01:21: This is a business topic, it's a personal topic yes!

00:01:25: It happens to also be a fascinating neuroscience topic.

00:01:30: so let's go and jump into the topic.

00:01:35: here's a number that tends to surprise people roughly One in five, maybe one in seven people you work with is neural divergent.

00:01:46: That means their brain processes attention focus social information or sensory input In a way that's noticeably different from the statistical majority ADHD autism dyslexia A few others.

00:02:06: And here's the part that really matters for you as a leader.

00:02:10: Most of them, You don't know about... A lot these people are undiagnosed or diagnosed quietly Or simply never mention it because For most their working life mentioning It never seemed to help.

00:02:25: So do The math with me for a second.

00:02:28: If your leading team Of fifteen People statistically Two or three of Them Are wired meaningfully differently Then you.

00:02:38: Again, they're not broken.

00:02:40: They are less capable and just differently wired.

00:02:44: And whether that becomes an asset or a liability for your team has almost nothing to do with them.

00:02:50: It has to deal how well YOU understand what actually is going on How you design the environment around it.

00:03:01: Now let's get this definition right because words matter here.

00:03:05: Neurodiversity is not something a person has.

00:03:10: It's population level fact like biodiversity for brains, your whole team statistically IS neurodiverse!

00:03:19: Like fingerprints perhaps they're different.

00:03:22: so are our brains?

00:03:24: They are wired differently.

00:03:26: an individual person whose brain works differently from the average.

00:03:31: it's called neurodivergent small distinction, but it changes how you think about.

00:03:38: You don't deal with neurodiverse employees... ...you lead a neurodiverse team some of whose members are neuro divergent.

00:03:48: It's the system view not an individual diagnosis and I like this systems view.

00:03:54: as you know i'm a systemic coach because This is The way How?

00:03:57: I believe our behavior And also Some Aspects like conflicts can be explained best by also considering always the context.

00:04:09: So in that world, we almost never ask what's wrong with someone.

00:04:14: What's wrong?

00:04:15: With this person.

00:04:16: We asked what's the fit between this person and this system?

00:04:20: meaning what's The best fit between This person for example end-the-team or the way how we Set up meetings?

00:04:29: a brain That struggles In one environment Can Be Brilliant in another.

00:04:34: That's not a soft feel-good statement, that is actually where the neuroscience takes us to!

00:04:59: So let's go for a moment a bit deeper... Let's have look into our brains ...the brain part.

00:05:05: briefly I promise NOT to turn this into lecture.

00:05:07: there was still some interesting studies i would like to share.

00:05:13: There was one major study in two thousand twenty four In The American Journal of Psychiatry.

00:05:18: Two hundred forty-three brain imaging studies, more than twelve thousand people.

00:05:26: What they found is that autism and ADHD share some neural patterns... ...and diverge sharply in others!

00:05:35: Then just this year, January two thousand twenty six a study out of the University of Minnesota looked at brain imaging data from over nine thousand six hundred people.

00:05:46: their age was between five and sixty four years And they found that something beautiful, honestly.

00:05:53: Autism and ADHD often follow different sometimes almost opposite patterns of brain development.

00:06:03: not broken patterns just different patterns Different workable ways Of building a functioning brain.

00:06:10: Here's one phrase I keep coming back to Neither pattern is broken They're just different roots To a working brain.

00:06:21: And there's an old, very well-established piece of neuroscience that I would like to share and that explains why this matters so much for leadership.

00:06:30: Donald Hepp described it back in nineteen forty nine.

00:06:33: he says cells that fire together wire together.

00:06:37: That's a phrase i had in my previous episodes already mentioned again.

00:06:44: Brain cells that Fire Together Wire Together.

00:06:49: And decades later, Eric Kendall won a Nobel Prize confirming the biological mechanism behind exactly that principle.

00:06:57: What it means in plain language?

00:07:00: The brain is not fixed at birth!

00:07:02: It keeps adapting your whole life based on what it repeatedly does and repeatedly experiences which means...and this is the leadership punchline…the environment you build around someone measurably changes how her or his brain performs.

00:07:21: Not metaphorically, literally biologically.

00:07:25: So when I talk to leaders about neurodiversity i'm not asking you To be nice!

00:07:31: I am telling that You are quite literally part of the environment The meetings you run...the way you communicate.. ...The way you send emails.. ..The flexibility and rigidity Of your team's habits.

00:07:46: That is not just culture That's neurobiology in action.

00:07:52: Let me make this real with a little story, completely constructed by the way not to recline just a composite of patterns I see constantly.

00:08:02: now imagine um A team member let's call her Mia and Mia is a data analyst in the production team.

00:08:10: In meetings she asks very direct Very specific questions sometimes at moments that feel a bit off-rhythm to everybody else.

00:08:19: She would say something like, wait why aren't we assuming that number is stable?

00:08:24: Where did the number even come

00:08:26: from?".

00:08:27: Now her manager for months quietly filed under.

00:08:31: she's a bit blunt and hard to read The Room not hostile about it just low great friction shaped how much responsibility got handed.

00:08:42: And then three weeks before a major launch Mia asks exactly that kind of question about revenue projection.

00:08:49: everybody else had nodded along to in four previous meetings.

00:08:55: So actually the decision was taken, now Mia just resists and turns out the number is wrong not slightly wrong enough that launch pricing would have missed target by a meaningful margin.

00:09:10: So Mia caught it because she does not do something like social smoothing over unresolved detail.

00:09:18: Her brain doesn't let inconsistently slide quietly by, that's not rudeness!

00:09:24: That is just a genuinely different cognitive style.

00:09:28: the same pattern recognition and detailed focus that shows up again and again in research of autistic and ADHD cognition saved the launch for a company and a lot of money.

00:09:43: Here's my point, nothing about Mia needed to change or this happened.

00:10:05: what needed to changed was her manager way to read her and signals.

00:10:11: now directness isn't always communication problem to be corrected.

00:10:16: sometimes it is signal you haven't learned.

00:10:23: Let's have a look in the second team.

00:10:25: And here is somebody else, let us call him Lukas!

00:10:28: Lukas leads small cross-border teams.

00:10:30: Munich and Singapore work together on this same project.

00:10:34: Lukas himself has what he would say as a classical ADHD shaped working rhythm.

00:10:43: so that means bursts of intense creative energy.

00:10:50: brilliant first drafts.

00:10:53: He does have occasional trouble following through on the unglamorous back half of a project, but very brilliant.

00:11:00: Very fast and again a lot creative energy.

00:11:05: in Munich his team has quietly learned to work with that rhythm.

00:11:10: someone always picks up The follow-through And honestly the trade feels fair because His bursts generate ideas.

00:11:18: nobody else on the team would produce so Difference here culturally in Singapore, because why?

00:11:27: In Singapore that same energy reads completely differently.

00:11:31: In Southeast Asia I would say and again –in this case– in Singapore.

00:11:37: unpredictability can look like a lack of professionalism or reliability not because anyone there is wrong to feel it but the cultural default for what reliable leadership looks like is different.

00:11:54: And here's the thing that struck me when I heard this story.

00:11:57: and by the way, This Is A True Story... The skill set Lucas needed to fix this wasn't a manage.

00:12:04: your HAD better.

00:12:05: it was the exact same skillset he'd need for any cross-cultural leadership challenge!

00:12:23: and adjust your communication deliberately instead of expecting everyone around you to just adapt to YOU quietly.

00:12:32: Once Lucas, the guy from this story started putting a short written agenda out twenty four hours before every meeting nothing fancy Just three bullet points.

00:12:43: Both teams reported that collaboration got noticeably smoother.

00:12:48: Not because his brain changed Because the system in this case the two teams around his brain got a small, deliberate redesign.

00:13:20: I want to be honest with you about one more thing because i think overselling this topic actually damages it not.

00:13:27: every neurodivergent person is secretly a genius hiding under management misunderstanding.

00:13:35: The strengths are real Sustained hyper focus Strong pattern recognition Real attention to detail.

00:13:43: There's decent research behind all of that, but so are the challenges.

00:13:48: This isn't a story about hidden superpowers.

00:13:51: It is just a different and equally legitimate way of processing the world one That comes with real friction points too.

00:14:02: The honest useful message for a leader Is Different Not Automatically Better And not automatically worse Just Genuinely Different and worth understanding on its own terms.

00:14:16: So practically three things you can actually do starting this week with none of these requiring a training budget or an HR initiative, Three tips.

00:14:26: here's tip number one in your next round of interviews notice how much weight You're putting on confident free flowing small talk versus actual job-relevant thinking.

00:14:40: Why is that important?

00:14:42: Because unstructured interviews reward exactly one skill, performing well in unstructured interview.

00:14:50: That skill has almost nothing to do with whether someone will be excellent at the job.

00:14:57: A short structured set of questions The same for every candidate tells you far more.

00:15:03: So again just double-check how you interview people and what other criteria under which you would offer somebody a job.

00:15:13: My second tip, put your meeting agenda in writing in advance.

00:15:19: twenty four hours is plenty.

00:15:21: this single habit as small as it sounds measurable helps neurodivergent colleagues prepare and contribute.

00:15:30: And here's the twist It helps almost everybody else too.

00:15:34: good design for the edge cases tends to be Period.

00:15:40: My tip number three, and this one is more of a mindset shift than an action.

00:15:46: There's a concept from organizational psychology.

00:15:49: I really like it.

00:15:51: Perhaps you heard about Amy Edmondson.

00:15:54: She is a Psychology professor at Harvard And her big topic that she is known for is psychological safety.

00:16:03: Psychological Safety Is the shared belief that your team is safe enough for people to take an interpersonal risk, meaning?

00:16:12: To ask the obvious questions or to admit they didn't follow something.

00:16:18: Or to ask for what they actually need.

00:16:22: neurodivergent team members are often in effect you're so-called cannery and the coal mine here.

00:16:28: now.

00:16:28: this is a metaphor.

00:16:29: I have it explained as interesting story because miners in old days, used to carry caged canneries into the shafts because the birds reacted to dangerous gas long before a human could sense it.

00:16:44: An early warning system built right into the team so you could compare that to neurodivergent colleagues.

00:16:52: if your neurodiversion colleagues don't feel safe enough to ask for what they need That's really just about them.

00:17:00: It is usually telling something true about the psychological safety of your team.

00:17:06: And here's that transactional analysis lens on all of this.

00:17:09: just briefly because I can't resist, you know?

00:17:11: I have been trained in TA and transactional analyses... ...and many of my training candidates and people i work with have learned differences between adult to adult or parent-to-child communication.

00:17:27: So much comes down whether you're leading from adult to adult stance, which would mean clear direct fact-based and respectful of the other person's competence.

00:17:40: Or whether you slip into a parent-to-child stance where you quietly decide on someone's behalf what they can or cannot handle based on how they come across rather than what they actually

00:17:55: deliver.".

00:17:57: Neural inclusive leadership – that is my message at its core.

00:18:02: It's just really consistent.

00:18:03: adults to adult leadership.

00:18:05: it is not a special program, its the same good leadership habit applied little more deliberately.

00:18:11: what I think interesting that only about twenty five percent of organizations at least in Germany currently train their managers on any office which tells you two things first most leaders are improvising including good ones and second This is a genuinely open, competitive advantage sitting right there mostly untouched.

00:18:37: You don't need a huge program.

00:18:39: you need better meeting habits, a fairer hiring process and leadership stunts that treats directness and difference as data not as a disciplined problem.

00:18:53: so here's what I'd leave you with somewhere in your team... Right now!

00:18:58: There is a Mia, I'm one whose difficult question Is actually the most valuable thing in the room.

00:19:05: If you're willing to hear it that way.

00:19:09: And there's probably a Lucas too someone who's rhythm looks like a flaw In one context and a genuine strength in another depending entirely on how You feel and recognize The signals and how deliberately the environment the team around them was built.

00:19:28: The brain research is honestly on your side here, brains keep adapting environments shape outcomes and leadership at its best.

00:19:38: it's exactly that kind of environmental design now!

00:19:43: That's it from me today.

00:19:44: thanks for spending a couple of minutes all day with this episode.

00:19:48: gave you one thing to try this week even something as small as writing the next agenda.

00:19:57: Take care of your team and take care of our own brain too.

00:20:01: It's the only one you have!

00:20:03: So see ya next time.

00:20:04: on The Coach Talk, my name is Kai Your Psychological Host in this show.

00:20:09: Bye bye talk to you soon.