Working with Uneven Skills: Why Everyone Loses When Employers Make Assumptions About Mental Health
This is the second of the talks I gave at this year’s Mental Wealth Festival
In 1997 I turned up as a terrified graduate student at the Royal Festival Hall to the very first Mind Sports Olympiad. It was the gathering of a single community itself made up of devoted communities of people dedicated to every game you could imagine from chess to scrabble, from bridge to crosswords, Settlers of Catan to mind mapping. I may have found the nearest corner and spent most of my time hiding there, but it was still clear that I had found a place where people like me could feel at home.
Last month I was back at the Mind Sports Olympiad, where I won the Creative Thinking World Championship for the second year running. In the intervening year I have had the wonderful good fortune to win the Oxford University Humanities Innovation Challenge with a new game designed to prime people’s brains to be more creative.
Creativity is rated by 46% of CEOs of the world’s biggest companies as the most important skill for the 21st century. For some reason that probably has to do with neurology, the key ingredients such as diverse interests, impatience combined with the ability to concentrate for absurd lengths of time, scatterbrainedness, contrarianism, not understanding rules, and being willing to make a fool of myself, have converged in my brain, and combined with constant work that means I’m good at it.
And the more I read research on how creative brains work, and how to be more creative, the more I find myself coming across things that for some reason I’ve just always done. So it seems I have been lucky enough that from an early age I intuitively knew how to learn to get better at being creative.
Just two days after that, our washing machine broke. As a result of the extreme good fortune of having won the competition two days earlier this was not, as it almost always would be, a financial disaster. We could just about afford a new one. For most people, ordering a new washing machine (we even knew exactly which one we wanted — my wife is autistic and has bipolar disorder, I have bipolar disorder with anxiety, paranoia and a certain amount of neurodivergence, and we have developed a system of avoiding “I can’t make a decision” scenarios by having an overriding “I’ll have the same as last time” default) would take about 5 minutes, and an hour of someone’s time when it was delivered.
It took me 10 hours just to place the order. The company I went to (because one of my needs is finding a place I can go to for things I find difficult and sticking with it) had an option to let me communicate with them in the way I need (an online chat — being telephoned to arrange delivery is not possible) despite the store telling me they didn’t, but over the course of the day, in order to use that method I had to recount intimate details of my and my spouse’s autism and mental ill health to more than 10 different individuals before they would allow me to do something other than telephone. It was distressing, humiliating, and left me wrung out and temporarily broken.
The next day I sat at a deskbut no “work” resulted. It is the equivalent of a lecture theatre having an induction loop they keep in a cupboard and making someone who needs it put their hand up at the start of the lecture and ask, and then watch the lecturer huff and puff disgruntledly as they clamber over the junk to get to the cupboard then struggle to install it — and then put it away at the end of the lecture so it has to be put out afresh next time. Eventually the person will simply stop going to lectures. That learning will be lost to them, and the lecturer will shrug and say “not my fault, we’ve got an induction loop, we did our bit”
I posted something to this effect on Facebook and got a very interesting comment back — “genuinely interested, do you have any idea what it is about the difficult stuff that means you can do it when you can’t do the easy stuff”. It took me completely aback because the answer is obvious — I can’t do the difficult stuff, answering a telephone call, I can do the easy stuff, solving puzzles. And then of course it clicked. As a society we have objectified our definitions of easy and difficult rather than accepting that the terms are relative. If you can do “difficult things” therefore, you must be able to do all difficult things with no help at all, and if you can’t do “easy” things you must be a waste of space.
It’s something I encounter in the workplace all the time.
I am very lucky that I have a job. I have a very low grade management role in higher education.
Academics see me in an administrative role and, and like so many I am defined by a contract that tells me my brain is invisible.
One of the things I also get to do in my job is to go, with a wonderful colleague, to different departments in the university and deliver training to managers on how to make the workplace more accessible for anyone who has mental ill health. At the start of our sessions we talk about our journey to work that morning. My colleague explains that her day starts at 7 the night before, when she takes the medication that renders her insensible for the next 12 hours. And I recount how I get up half an hour early so I can stand by the door and wait for the sound of all activity in the corridor to cease so that I know I will not have to encounter another human being. And people look and you can see the dissonance between what they have just been told and the seemingly confident speakers standing there talking to a room of senior managers.
And this is the essence of how workplaces struggle when faced with the very many of us who have uneven skills, excelling beyond our peers in some others, falling short of what many would consider “normal” in others. And unless institutions and businesses stop making basic errors of perspective and start looking at how they can simultaneously empower and support a diverse workforce, then not only will individuals find themselves facing a lifetime of needlessly closed doors, but the organizations themselves will miss out on the vast untapped potential those individuals offer
So, what is it they do wrong, and how can they get it right?
The problem always seems to boil down to seeing one side of a person and then drawing conclusions about the rest of them from that.
On the one side is the approach that says “we see only what you can do”. You see what we can do? That’s great. Maybe you will give me a job doing something that uses my abilities, allows me to feel fulfilled, stretches me in the way that a really good job should stretch me.
But wait, you see “only” what I can do? So you place me in a shared office, require me to wear clothes that actually hurt my skin in the name of smartness, require me to attend teambuilding lunches and communal coffee breaks, give me a list of exact processes I must follow to produce the results you want, and need me to sit at my desk for 8 hours a day however long it actually takes to do the work, and wherever I might do it best?
Fabulous. Maybe you will give me a great job. After all (this sounds arrogant, sorry) I have no problem being a public intellectual or a communicator of high level ideas. But because you “only see the positive” you put me in a shared office and make me go to teambuilding lunches, and within a week I will be broken down, and all the world will see is “ah well, you weren’t able to be a an intellectual after all” By failing to acknowledge what I am unable to do, you will not permit me to show what I can.
On the other side is a group of really well-meaning people who will see what I can’t do, and will dedicate themselves to removing barriers. But, sadly, for them getting me into work is all about “giving me something I can manage” so they will make life “as easy as possible” for me, not *actually* listening to what I say but giving me what they perceive to be simple, trouble free tasks that anyone could do so I must be able to do (in a way this is what has happened to me — Oxford is super but it still falls into this camp). And, of course, because they haven’t addressed the real problems, I still won’t be able to cope. And I will do a really bad job, and they will resent having to pay me for a job I am doing poorly, and maybe they’ll try and find a job I *can* do — by making it “even easier” — and of course I will do that one even worse.
And they may be even more helpful, and have a really inclusive recruitment policy that is laser-focused on measurable essential criteria so as to weed out anyone’s bias — and, of course, to weed out anyone whose difficulties mean they haven’t been able to spend the necessary years proving they can do things they can do backwards (sorry, Oxford, you are REALLY bad at this one).
In both cases, people end up unable to do what they are capable of doing, and the organisations that employ them end up losing out on their potential. Both sides end up sitting on a narrow spectrum that runs from resentful and frustrated at one end to really not understanding why they bother at the other.
Before looking at how we can get it right, I want to make the moral, and the business, case for trying to do so.
The moral case is very simple, and rests on what kind of a world we want to be part of, what kind of future we want to build, where our values lie. If we want a world in which all are equally empowered to flourish; in which dreams are to be nurtured, cherished, and enabled not just by those who hold them but by communities; in which we unleash our innovative potential to work towards a future that faces down our greatest threats and embraces our greatest opportunities; a future enriched by a polyphony of exquisitely diverse creative voices — if we want any or all of those things, we need workplaces that allow us all to flourish. And that means workplaces that support us where we need support and enables us where we have the potential to soar.
The business case is equally straightforward. First there is the value of diversity. This isn’t simply about branding oneself inclusive or about compliance. It’s about performance. Teams that are more diverse make better decisions. It’s that simple.
And second, institutions love metrics. They especially love efficiency metrics. How well are they using their resources? Are they getting the most use out of their paperclips? Are they buying the paperclips that best combine both longevity and price? Should they even be using paperclips or should they be searching for leaner, more effective ways of loosely combining key documents?
And yet that question is so rarely put properly in relation to the individuals who make up an organization. I don’t mean that organizations never ask questions about their workforce’s productivity. They do. Often obsessively. But so often their questions miss the point completely when we fail to ask if our staff are truly flourishing, doing what they are best able and most willing to do. How many people do we have working in roles where they are unable to use the skills that could transform what we do?
The problem with both of these one-dimensional approaches is that they see diversity and inclusion as something reactive, how can we cope with this person, and this person, and all the other people who come over the threshold, and they end up running around like some grotesque parody of bash the alligator. And they operate as an exercise in the provision of minimum
But nurturing a diverse workforce in which everyone flourishes is neither reactive nor a question of minimum kit for compliance. It is a matter of seeing the successful flourishing of your workforce as an essential and an integral part of the success of your organization. It is about making this a central part of your strategy. It is hard, but it can also be really simple.
These are some very simple things that institutions can think about implementing that would help to make them places of real empowerment where the potential of those with uneven skills is allowed to grow whilst their needs never go unmet and whilst unmet needs never get in the way of recognising and then nurturing that potential (many of these featured in a much shorter earlier article I wrote here).
· Quit, at least in some instances, with the well-meaning evidence-based recruitment. Yes, demanding that specific skills can be demonstrated by specific means will cut out some of the old school tie behaviour historically rampant. But for anyone whose life has, for any reason including disability or neurodiversity, followed an atypical path those pieces of paper, those “time when we encountered” examples are just a pipe dream. And so we are forced back to the very basic level of entry to spend soul destroying decades in pursuit of pieces of paper that tell you we can do what we know, and you should have the gumption to realize, we can do — by which time we are so burned out we can no longer do the job we can at least demonstrate we can do.
· Stop thinking about jobs that need doing and start think about problems that need solving. Thinking about a job puts you in the wrong headspace for being flexible. It conjures up all kinds of things as “necessary” like desks and schedules and dress codes and standard operating procedures that aren’t necessary at all when it comes to the problems you need solving.
· Tear up your assumptions about your current workforce. Right now. Those people who enter data in finance. Those people writing low level papers on prospects. Those people who serve you your coffee in the morning. Are they really doing what they could? Are they doing what they dream of doing? Have you ever asked? Maybe if you did they would amaze you. Maybe all they need is a course or a chance or the time to work on something while they still pull a wage. Do you give your senior executives sabbaticals to pursue their interests? Maybe you should offer a sabbatical to some of your most junior staff? Maybe you could hold an anonymous competition for scholarships to have a day a week of free to learn time every week for a year.
· Quit with the “work culture” thing. You *all* go on bonding weekends or whizz down the slide to the cafeteria or play table football on a Friday afternoon or meet for tea at 10.30. Really? If there’s something you *all* do then either you’ve hired robots or there’s a chunk of your workforce that feel like they don’t fit in and you haven’t got a scooby that it’s happening.
· And alongside that, don’t promote based on whether someone is a joiner, whether they stay late at the office or are the first to get a round in or even whether they’re the one who always asks first question at your brainstorming meetings — unless you are hiring for the title “first question asker” or “pint getter inner”.
· Most important of all speak to people who are disabled by mental ill health. Speak to autistic people. Especially those that do not work for you. Consider inviting them into your space, explaining what you do and what you need. And then ask them what would stop them working for you. Listen to what they say. In particular listen to those who share your values, love your product or service, and say they can do what you need — but still won’t, or rather, can’t come and work for you, whether that is because your recruitment practice means they would never get a chance, or whether you insist on open office working or have no scope for flexibility.
There is a long journey ahead and it will be easy for us to take short cuts on the way. Any small victory for inclusivity in the workplace is something to be celebrated, but the journey is not over until we are willing to create structures that both enable us to recruit those with the most uneven of skillsets on the grounds of the incredible things they can do and hold them afloat in the areas where support is needed.
To work is good. To enable someone to work is good. But it is not an ambition. It is not the end of any road that we, as a society, should want to set the first foot upon. It should be our ambition for every one of us to dream, and to create a world where those dreams can be realised through talent and toil. It should be the purpose of our workplaces not to create work but to be the stages on which those dreams play out — to the benefit not just of workers but of us all. Employers, you are the make-up artists, the set designers, sound engineers and lighting directors. You are the playwrights and the producers and it is not just your duty, but your self-interested duty, to make that happen.
Useful Links
The discussion after this talk raised some fascinating questions. First was whether working for yourself in some way was the answer for those of us with mental health conditions. It is often seen as a panacea. We rapidly concluded, I think rightly, that it isn’t, though it may suit some. These documents are relevant.
Taylor Review into the gig economy
Money and Mental Health Policy Institute initial response to Taylor
Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index (including year by year top 100 employers) is the best guide to employers who walk the walk when it comes to equality.
