Most jobs come with two descriptions. The one that gets written down is about outcomes: deliver this analysis, manage this caseload, draft these contracts, service these clients, hit these targets. That description ends up in the position description, the contract, the performance review.
The other one isn’t written anywhere. Be approachable in the kitchen. Read the room in meetings. Show enthusiasm for the new initiative. Come to Friday drinks. Notice when a colleague seems off. Make a bit of small talk before getting to business. Pick up on what isn’t being said. Build relationships with people. Be likeable in a particular kind of way.
Many workers don’t notice the unwritten description. They’re doing it without thinking about it. However, some neurodivergent workers find the unwritten part takes more energy than the written one.
What workplaces gain from social fabric
Some of the unwritten description does real work. Workplaces function better when people are connected to each other. Trust gets built in informal moments. Information flows through corridors and over coffee in ways it doesn’t flow through email. Ideas surface when people feel safe enough to try them out aloud. Teams with some mutual familiarity coordinate better when things go sideways.
A lot of what gets called “team fit” or “culture” or “being a strong communicator” is something different. On closer inspection, it’s a particular set of neuro-normative conventions: sustained eye contact, the right cadence of casual chat, visible energy in meetings, comfort with ambiguous instructions, a specific kind of warmth in greetings. None of these conventions is required to deliver the analysis, manage the caseload, draft the contracts, or service the clients. They’re signals that a worker is enacting the cultural style of a particular kind of workplace.
When an employer says someone isn’t a good fit, the question worth asking is whether the misfit is with the job or with the conventions. The two get conflated.
When behaviour does affect colleagues
Sometimes a worker’s behaviour does genuinely make it harder for colleagues to do their work:
a communication style that consistently leaves a colleague in tears
repeated interruptions in meetings that derail what the team is trying to do
a meltdown in the open plan office that means the rest of the floor can’t focus for an hour
a coworker who has stopped suggesting ideas because the response from one team member has been bluntly dismissive every time
Some neurodiversity advocacy flattens situations like these. The framing is that any colleague discomfort is neuro-normative fragility, that everyone should extend more understanding, that the workplace is the only thing that should change.
That framing catches some real things. A lot of what gets called “everyone is uncomfortable” turns out to be specific people being asked to make small accommodations they aren’t used to making. Workplaces often produce difficult behaviour through bad design and would do better to look at the design before the worker. The same colleagues who claim to be troubled by a stim or a tone of voice often manage to tolerate much worse from neurotypical colleagues whose conduct is louder, ruder, or more entitled.
Some behaviour does have real impact on the people working alongside it. Those colleagues also have work they need to do, and their needs sit alongside the worker whose behaviour is in question.
Distinctions worth emphasizing
Three distinctions help when working through this kind of situation.
Discomfort and harm aren’t the same thing. A colleague who feels awkward because someone doesn’t do small talk is in a different position from a colleague who can’t do their job. A colleague startled by stimming they haven’t seen before is in a different position from a colleague directly impeded by it. Some discomfort is real, and the neurodivergent worker isn’t always responsible for managing it.
Style and conduct aren’t the same thing either. Direct communication that lands more bluntly than the recipient expected is a style. Repeatedly telling a colleague their work is worthless is conduct. Speaking out of turn because the meeting structure is opaque is a style. Shouting at someone is conduct. The first kind has solutions in communication frameworks and process design. The second kind may be more of a challenge.
Environment carries more weight than people often assume. The same person who melts down in a noisy open plan office may have none in a different setup. The same person whose communication style derails meetings may be effective in written asynchronous work. The same person whose attention wanders in three-hour seminars may concentrate intensely in two-hour focused work blocks. Before concluding that someone can’t do a job, it’s worth asking what the current setup is making harder than it needs to be.
Some roles do have inherent social requirements: front-line customer service, team leadership of certain kinds, some collaborative creative work. Not every job can be reshaped to remove every social demand. The question is whether what’s being treated as inherent really is inherent, or whether it has been normalised that way.
The limits of understanding
Understanding why a behaviour happens doesn’t dissolve its impact on colleagues. A colleague who has been on the receiving end of a particular communication pattern for two years still has the experience she has, regardless of what she now knows about its origin. Her work is still affected, and her own capacity to stay regulated has its own cost.
The conversation in this kind of situation usually involves three positions, all of which deserve attention:
The neurodivergent worker has a right to be in the workplace, to do their actual work, and not to be punished for differences that have no bearing on what they were hired to do.
Colleagues working alongside them have a right to a work environment that lets them do their own work.
The employer has an interest in outcomes being delivered, and a legitimate question about which of the social requirements are necessary to deliver them.
Treating any one of these positions as the only legitimate one tends to close down the analysis before it can produce anything useful.
What this means for practice
Practitioners working in this space need to keep all three positions in view for long enough to look carefully at what’s going on.
Practitioners often try to resolve the tension too quickly. The common shortcuts are dismissing colleague discomfort as fragility, or treating neurodivergent behaviour as a performance management issue. Both shortcuts close the analysis before it can do useful work.
Some questions worth working through in the cases that come up:
What does the role actually require? The current team expectation isn’t always the same thing as what the work itself needs.
What is the environment producing, and what is about the person?
Where does the line fall between style and conduct in this particular situation?
What is the impact on colleagues, and is the workplace amplifying that impact through poor design?
What would change if any of those variables were different?
These questions don’t always have clean answers. Some of them lead to genuinely difficult conversations about whether a particular role is workable for a particular person, accommodations or not. The field sometimes avoids that conversation because it can feel like a betrayal of advocacy. Avoiding it doesn’t help.
The written and unwritten descriptions aren’t going to merge. The practical task is to sort which parts of the unwritten description do real work in the workplace, which parts are dressed-up convention, and which parts are doing harm.
Questions for reflection
When an employer talks about “fit”, what specifically are they describing: the job, or the conventions around it?
In the situations I’ve worked with, where has discomfort been confused with harm?
Where does the line fall between style and conduct in the cases I am currently holding?
What features of the work environment are making behaviour harder than it needs to be?
Which conversations am I avoiding because they feel uncomfortable to advocacy?
If today’s newsletter resonated with you, you may be interested in Working with Neurodivergent Clients in Conflict, an on-demand course from Conflict Management Academy. Designed for mediators, conflict coaches, HR professionals, leaders, and other practitioners, the course explores how neurodivergent people may experience conflict differently and offers practical strategies for creating more accessible and effective conflict resolution processes.
The program examines common neuro-normative assumptions, communication differences, accommodations, and ways to better support meaningful participation in mediation, coaching, and workplace conflict conversations. Learn more at www.conflictmanagementacademy.com.