There’s a conversation happening in workplaces at the moment about neurodiversity.
You’ll hear phrases like “we need to be more inclusive”, “we should support ADHD and autism better”, or “neurodivergent people bring unique strengths”. And while all of that is true, it often stays at a surface level.
Because underneath those conversations, something more subtle and more important is happening every day.
People are being assessed.
In meetings.
In emails.
In performance reviews.
In small, almost invisible moments that build a picture of who someone is as an employee.
And in many of those moments, neurodivergent employees are not being seen for what they actually bring.
They are being… interpreted. Often incorrectly.
This article is about that gap, the difference between what employers think they are seeing, and what is actually there.
Because most organisations are not missing talent.
They are misreading it.
What Employers Think They’re Seeing
From the outside, workplace behaviour often feels easy to interpret.
Someone interrupts in a meeting and it registers as a lack of professionalism. Someone misses a deadline and it looks like poor organisation. Someone avoids small talk and is quietly labelled as not being much of a team player. Another person explains things in great detail and is seen as going off track or lacking clarity.
These interpretations don’t come from bad intentions. They come from experience, from workplace norms, from a shared understanding of what “good” behaviour looks like.
But that shared understanding is not neutral. It is built around a very particular way of thinking, processing, and communicating.
And when someone operates differently, the behaviour is still judged using the same framework.
That’s where things start to go wrong.
What’s Actually There (But Not Being Recognised)
If we slow down and look a little more closely, many of these behaviours start to tell a different story.
That person who interrupts in meetings may not be careless or impulsive in the way it appears. Their brain might simply be making connections quickly, so quickly, in fact, that waiting for the “right moment” in a conversation feels like losing the idea altogether.
The employee who struggles with deadlines is rarely lacking effort. More often, they are dealing with the invisible complexity of executive functioning – holding multiple steps in mind, prioritising, sequencing, and initiating tasks, all while managing competing demands.
The colleague who avoids small talk may not be disengaged at all. They might be conserving energy, choosing to focus on the parts of work that actually require their attention, rather than navigating social exchanges that feel effortful or draining.
And the person who overexplains? In many cases, that isn’t confusion. It’s precision. It’s someone who has learned, often through years of being misunderstood, that clarity requires more context than most people expect.
When you start to see these patterns, something shifts.
The behaviour hasn’t changed.
But the meaning of it has.
The Misinterpretation Gap
This is where the real issue sits – not in the behaviour itself, but in how it is read.
There is a gap between what is visible on the surface and what is happening underneath. And most workplaces, understandably, operate almost entirely on what they can see. They reward people who respond quickly, speak confidently, and communicate in a way that feels familiar. They value consistency, clarity, and ease of collaboration.
None of these are wrong. But they are not universal measures of ability. They are preferences, often aligned with a more neurotypical style of processing.
So when someone brings a different rhythm, a different way of thinking, or a different communication style, it can quietly register as “not quite right”, even when the underlying capability is strong.
Over time, this gap becomes more than a misunderstanding. It becomes a pattern.
A Meeting That Looks Simple (But Isn’t)
Imagine a fairly typical team meeting.
One person speaks clearly, summarises points neatly, and contributes in a way that feels structured and easy to follow. Another person joins in a little more abruptly, adds ideas as they come to them, and occasionally overlaps with others.
From the outside, it’s easy to decide who the stronger communicator is.
But if you pause for a moment, you might notice something else.
The second person may be tracking multiple threads of the conversation at once, spotting connections, anticipating outcomes, and trying to contribute in real time. Their difficulty is not in thinking, but in matching the social timing of the discussion.
The problem is not the quality of their ideas. It’s that those ideas don’t arrive in the expected format.
And in most workplaces, format matters more than we realise.
When Misreading Becomes Official
These subtle misinterpretations don’t stay subtle for long. They show up in feedback. In performance reviews. In career progression.
Phrases like “needs to be more organised”, “can be inconsistent”, or “should communicate more clearly” begin to appear. They sound helpful, even reasonable. But often, they are simply descriptions of difference, framed as problems to be fixed.
What’s missing in these conversations is curiosity.
Not “how do we correct this behaviour?”
But “what is driving it, and how might we support it differently?”
Without that shift, the same patterns repeat. And over time, the employee starts to internalise the message.
What It Feels Like from the Inside
If you’re neurodivergent, this experience can be quietly disorienting. You might be told that you’re capable, intelligent, even highly valued – and at the same time, that you’re inconsistent, difficult to read, or not quite meeting expectations.
You know you are thinking deeply. You know you are engaged. You may even see things others don’t.
But somehow, that doesn’t translate into how you are perceived. So you begin to adjust.
You hold back in meetings. You spend extra time rewriting emails. You try to appear more organised, more structured, more “together”.
This is often described as masking.
And while it can help in the short term, it comes at a cost. It takes energy, reduces authenticity, and over time, can lead to burnout.
Not because the work is too hard. But because the effort of being understood becomes exhausting.
What Employers Are Missing
From the employer’s perspective, none of this is usually intentional. Most organisations are not actively overlooking neurodivergent talent. They simply haven’t been taught how to recognise it. They are working within systems that assume a certain kind of consistency, a certain pace of communication, and a certain way of demonstrating competence.
Those systems work well for some people.
But they are not neutral. They are designed around a particular model of how a “good employee” behaves.
And when someone doesn’t fit that model, the difference is often interpreted as a limitation, rather than a variation.
Read more: Undiagnosed ADHD at Work: How to Cope Without Burning Out
Support That Helps – But Doesn’t Fully Solve It
It’s also important to acknowledge that many organisations are already trying. Over the past few years, there has been a real shift towards offering reasonable adjustments – flexible working, quiet spaces, assistive tools, more awareness of ADHD and autism. These are meaningful steps, and for many people, they make a genuine difference.
But even with these efforts, something subtle often remains unchanged.
The goal is still, quite often, to help the individual function within the existing system, rather than asking whether the system itself might be part of the difficulty.
In other words, the adjustment becomes a way of reducing friction just enough for the person to cope – while still expecting them to operate in a largely neurotypical way.
And that’s where many organisations, despite good intentions, continue to miss something important.
Rethinking What We Measure
So what needs to change?
Not everything. But something quite fundamental.
It starts with a shift in attention – from behaviour to mechanism.
Instead of asking why someone is behaving in a certain way, we begin to ask what might be driving it. What kind of thinking is underneath it. What conditions allow that thinking to work at its best.
It also requires separating performance from presentation.
Someone can be highly capable, insightful, and effective, while still struggling with the way that capability is expected to show up. If we only value the presentation layer, we risk overlooking the substance entirely.
And perhaps most importantly, it means questioning our assumptions about consistency.
Not all valuable work looks steady. Some of it comes in bursts. Some of it depends on the environment. Some of it emerges when the right conditions are in place.
That’s not inefficiency.
It’s variability.
And in many roles, that variability is where the value sits.
A Final Thought
Neurodiversity is often framed as something organisations need to accommodate.
But there’s another way to look at it.
Many organisations already have neurodivergent employees. They are already hiring them, already working alongside them, already relying on them in ways they may not fully recognise.
The issue is not access.
It’s interpretation.
Because when talent is misread, it doesn’t disappear.
It just goes underused.
Closing
So the question is not only:
“How do we support neurodivergent employees better?”
But also:
“How many people are we already overlooking, simply because we don’t recognise what we’re looking at?”
Because when you start to see it differently, something shifts.
What once looked like inconsistency may turn out to be context.
What looked like difficulty may turn out to be friction.
And what looked like underperformance may, in the right conditions, become something far more valuable
Dana Dzamic
Neurodiversity consultant and ADHD coach
Founder of ADHD Insight Hub