Insights
Leaders as conductors: harmony without sameness.
A conductor does not produce harmony by asking every instrument to sound alike. Neither does an organization.
I have always liked the analogy of leaders as conductors.
A conductor holds the larger vision in mind: where the piece is now, where it is going in the next few minutes, and the shape of its complete arc. The conductor does not produce the sound. The musicians do. The conductor listens to the whole, changes the tempo, brings one voice forward, asks another to hold back, sharpens an entrance, softens a transition.
No section makes the music alone. Nor does harmony require every section to play the same note, at the same volume, in the same way.
What the word actually meant
Harmony is not sameness.
It is worth being precise about harmony, because the word is usually used to mean pleasant agreement. That is not what I mean here.
In 1924, the Polish engineer Karol Adamiecki published a series of articles arguing that poor coordination between departments and work cells was one of the greatest sources of waste in industry. His theory of harmonization had three parts. Harmony of choice: the people and tools brought together for a task must be genuinely compatible. Harmony of doing: work must be timed and sequenced so that one part is not sitting idle while another is overloaded. Harmony of spirit: a good team is built deliberately, and cooperation does not appear merely because an organizational chart says that people belong together.
Adamiecki reached for a musical analogy himself. More precisely, he compared the manager with a composer, whose aim was to ensure that every part was played at the right time, neither earlier nor later.
The conductor extends that analogy from design into daily practice. A composer creates the relationship among the parts. A conductor helps real people bring that relationship to life under changing conditions. The point is not to get every instrument to play as loudly as possible, or to flatten every voice into agreement. It is to know which part needs to come forward now, which needs to wait, and when the timing itself is what has broken down.
That is the kind of harmony worth seeking in an organization: a place where each voice has a role, can be understood, and is valued for what it contributes to the whole.
But a conductor also knows that a trombone cannot sound like a piccolo, however hard it tries. Workplaces are not always as wise. Many still reward a narrow range of ways to concentrate, communicate, participate, and show competence. That is why neurodiversity belongs in a serious conversation about leadership, and not only in a policy about accommodations.
Handling the evidence honestly
What research can, and cannot, tell us.
Neurodiversity is an umbrella term for the natural variation in human cognition. Neurodivergence commonly includes autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and other forms of cognitive difference. It is common enough that almost every classroom, workplace, and leadership team includes cognitive differences, whether or not anyone has named or disclosed them.
Research has identified group-level differences associated with particular neurodevelopmental conditions, including differences in patterns of brain structure, activation, and network connectivity. Those findings matter, and they have to be handled carefully. Results are mixed, conditions overlap, and people within the same diagnostic category remain highly individual. A brain scan cannot tell a manager how a particular employee thinks, what they are capable of, or what support will help them do their best work.
The practical conclusion is simpler and more useful: these differences are real, and their effects depend on context.
Fluorescent lights are a minor annoyance to one person and a serious barrier to concentration for another. An open-plan office energizes one employee and drains another. A meeting without an agenda feels spontaneous to one participant and makes it almost impossible for another to organize a useful contribution in time.
When someone struggles in those conditions, the problem does not necessarily sit inside the person. It often lies in the fit between the person, the work, and the environment.
The cost nobody sees
The invisible labor of fitting in.
Many autistic and other neurodivergent adults describe masking: monitoring or suppressing natural behaviors in order to meet neurotypical expectations. In a workplace, that means managing eye contact, movement, tone, facial expression, sensory responses, or communication style while also trying to do the work itself.
Masking is not identical for everyone, and it is sometimes a deliberate way of navigating a particular situation. Sustained masking, however, takes effort. Research on workplace masking associates it with exhaustion, reduced authenticity, and poorer wellbeing. The effort stays invisible precisely because the person has become skilled at performing what the environment expects.
An organization that sees only the performance never notices the cost. It also misses what the person could contribute if less energy went into appearing conventional.
Neurodivergent people are sometimes associated with strengths such as pattern recognition, sustained attention to a complex interest, visual thinking, detailed memory, or unconventional connections between ideas. Those are real strengths for some people. They are not universal, and turning them into a new stereotype helps no more than treating neurodivergence only as deficit.
The leadership task is not to assign strengths by diagnosis. It is to become curious about the person in front of you, the work they are trying to do, and the conditions under which they can contribute well.
Whose account gets believed
The injustice of not being believed.
There is useful language for another part of this problem: epistemic injustice, a wrong done to someone in their capacity as a knower.
Testimonial injustice occurs when someone's account is given less credibility than it deserves because of who they are. A neurodivergent employee says that a room is too loud, an instruction is ambiguous, or a process is creating overload. Instead of treating that report as useful information, others read the person as difficult, inflexible, or insufficiently resilient.
Hermeneutical injustice occurs when people lack the shared concepts needed to make an experience understandable. In a workplace with no vocabulary for sensory overload, executive function, masking, or processing time, an employee struggles to explain what is happening, even to themselves. The experience is real. The language needed to raise it and act on it is missing.
Neurodivergent employees face both at once. Their account is discounted, and the organization has not developed the language needed to understand it accurately.
Building a shared vocabulary matters. It lets people describe a mismatch without turning it into a character judgment. Vocabulary alone is not enough. Leaders also have to change the structures through which people participate and work.
What to do on Monday
Build for the team you actually have.
Neuroinclusion is more than a nod to diversity, and more than a set of accommodations made after someone discloses a diagnosis. It is the discipline of designing work around the people who are actually doing it.
That begins with ordinary practices. Send an agenda and the central questions before a meeting. Give people a moment to think or write before asking for immediate discussion. Let useful contributions be made verbally, visually, or in writing. Make roles, decisions, expectations, and transitions explicit. Reduce sensory demands that do not contribute to the work. Ask individuals what helps them think and contribute rather than inferring it from a label. Evaluate the quality of the outcome without confusing stylistic conformity with competence.
None of that is useful only to people with a diagnosis. Clearer expectations, more than one way to participate, and better-designed environments improve the conditions for everyone. The point is not to remove every demand or eliminate productive tension. A conductor sometimes asks a section to stretch. The difference is that the conductor understands the instrument, the score, and why that stretch is necessary.
Acknowledging neurodivergence therefore asks something substantial of leaders. It asks them to learn who makes up their team, to believe people about their own experience, and to build structures that harmonize with the range of minds already present.
A trombone asked to sound like a piccolo will exhaust itself trying, and the music will be worse for it. The aim was never to make every instrument the same. It was to build a piece capable of holding what each one actually is.
Sources
- Adamiecki, K. (1924). Harmonization as One of the Main Foundations of Scientific Management. Article series in Przegląd Techniczny. English translation in Olga and Craig Stritar, Harmonic Leadership: The Collected Works of Karol Adamiecki (2023).
- Doyle, N. (2020). Neurodiversity at work: a biopsychosocial model and the impact on working adults. British Medical Bulletin, 135(1), 108 to 125.
- Harikumar, A., Evans, D. W., Dougherty, C. C., Carpenter, K. L. H., and Michael, A. M. (2021). A Review of the Default Mode Network in Autism Spectrum Disorders and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Brain Connectivity, 11(4), 253 to 263.
- Pryke-Hobbes, A., Davies, J., Heasman, B., Livesey, A., Walker, A., Pellicano, E., and Remington, A. (2023). The workplace masking experiences of autistic, non-autistic neurodivergent and neurotypical adults in the UK. PLOS ONE, 18(9), e0290001.
- Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.
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