Is your workplace ready for the next generation of neurodivergent talent? (with Kevin Delaney from Charter)

In this episode of Minds at Work, Nathan talks with Kevin Delaney, CEO of Charter, about the future of work and what it means for inclusion and neurodiversity. 

They explore how hybrid work, AI, and inclusive practices are reshaping the workplace — and why supporting neurodivergent employees is more urgent than ever for business leaders.  Delaney shares practical strategies to build inclusive teams where everyone can thrive, especially as more Gen Z workers identify as neurodivergent.

We love hearing from our listeners! Email us at podcast@understood.org.

(04:08) “The future of work is neurodivergent.”

(06:25) “My job as a leader is to create the conditions for every single worker to do their best work.”

(23:04) “One of the biggest leadership mistakes right now is not communicating into uncertainty.”

Nate: Welcome to "Minds at Work," the podcast for leaders who embrace neurodiversity in business. I'm your host, Nathan Friedman, Co-President and Chief Marketing Officer of Understood.org, the leading nonprofit focused on helping those who learn and think differently thrive. Each week, we're exploring how neurodiversity sparks innovation and how leaders across industries can create a more inclusive future for all.

Today, I'm delighted to be speaking with Kevin Delaney, who is CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Charter, a media and research company focused on the future of work. Over the past few years, I've had the pleasure of talking with Kevin about how a neurodiverse workforce fits into the future. And I think you'll find that he has a lot of interesting things to say about the future work. So, let's get right to it. Kevin, thank you for joining us today.

Kevin: Hey, Nathan, thanks so much.

Nate: So, for those who aren't familiar, what is Charter, and what prompted you to create it?

Kevin: Yeah, so Charter is a media and research company and we're focused on the future of work and what this, our mission and really what prompted us to create it was this view that we wanted workplaces to be the best possible workplaces for everyone and that managers and leaders needed research-backed best practices and tactics basically for leading teams in ways that allowed all workers to thrive. And so, we're a media company. So, we have a newsletter and we host events and do lots of things like that. We also do original research on, a lot of it's on what workers are looking for in the context of AI and things like that.

Nate: In the past, when we've talked about Charter and how it talks about the future of work, you've been talking about three main pillars of that work. Maybe it was AI, hybrid remote working, and inclusion. Can you talk a bit more about how those intersect and how you see those as part of the critical elements of future of work?

Kevin: Yeah, so I would say that those three areas are probably the most urgent and unresolved elements or lanes for leadership. And so, we focus on them in our work. So, if you take each of them individually, you have AI in work. And we're at this moment, clearly, where a lot of our tasks and definitely a lot of our jobs are changing, and actually, how you manage organizations are changing as a result of AI. So, we've been focused on what the research and practices are in that very emerging area. The second one is flexible work and hybrid working, and the playbook for a lot of managers has had to shift for them to figure out how to manage teams more effectively in the context of remote work, hybrid work, teams that are distributed.

And then the third area is inclusion. And while there is a lot sort of discussion and politicization of the DEI topic, it's clearly, at its core, DEI and inclusion is about creating the conditions for every worker to thrive in the workplace. And I know from speaking to business leaders that that work continues to be done. And so a lot of our our efforts there are around how can you continue to do that work, even as some of the public pressures are going against the terms DEI, and some of the specific initiatives.

Nate: There's a lot of obvious headwinds around the terms, particularly equity. And when you think about equity inclusion, all the different terms together, what have you seen in terms of neurodiversity being included in that, or has it been more separate when you've talked to business leaders?

Kevin: Yeah. I think that there's actually, my sense of it is that there has been some progress over the last few years. And I think Understood has been part of that, in building the awareness around neurodiversity in the workplace. But I would say that in the context of DEI, neurodiveristy probably is not included often enough and there is still a need to think about it in the context of inclusion and diversity and equity, obviously, and so there's more to be done. But I would say that I feel like that conversation has really picked up a lot over the last few years in a meaningful way.

Nate: And you know, the research that we have shows that Gen Z, which now outnumbers boomers in the workforce, is identifying as around 53% neurodivergent, which is a huge percentage above what the stated facts are, around one in five or 20%, which means the future of work is neurodivergent workers and includes them. And that type of thinking will be brought to the workforce, whether or not people want to include it or not.

Kevin: And it's, I think it's like the subtext for a lot of discussions, but not raised explicitly enough in, for example, conversations around flexible working and hybrid working and the sort of conditions that people find they're able to do their best work in. And they're, they're the sort, of all things, you know, uniform conditions for everyone doesn't reflect the reality, as you said, and the self-identification of neurodivergence among Gen Z is actually part of a really important shift in workplaces where some of the things that people have haven't talked about are actually coming out into the forefront a bit more in ways that I think are productive.

Nate: And I think while we know Gen Z identifies and wears a lot of different intersectionality elements as a badge, there's still a lot of other workers at work and they don't feel comfortable disclosing and for a variety of reasons, whether it's retaliation, whether it is fear of the unknown or stigmas or whatnot. And so, you know, developing ways that help neurodivergent individuals and inserting that into the workplace, whether it be remote work, flexibility, or what I would call common opportunities, like AI taking notes, sending pre-reads, creating space for people to process things differently. That helps everybody.

And it was actually interesting. I was at a dinner the other night, and there was a senior HR leader at a major global corporation, and they were like, "Accommodations are hard." And the pushback on that is, accommodations is a legal word. How do we just use an everyday word to describe help that somebody needs to get their job done? And most accommodations cost under a hundred bucks, right? A monitor, a keyboard, sitting away from a noisy area, sitting near light, and not in a closed environment.

Kevin: And I think part of it's just a reframing of work that needs to be done. So many leaders of organizations think of their jobs as delivering performance, delivering results, delivering whatever financial targets that they're meant to. And I actually think if you flip that and say, "My job as a leader of an organization is to create the conditions for every single worker that we bring in to do their best work." And we know that if you can do that, the results will follow. That that's actually the key to long-term performance of organizations as opposed to short-term results.

That ties in very directly to what you're doing because the response to that, HR leaders, why would you not create the conditions for a worker to do their best work for you, which presumably has value in far excess of any specific accommodation or measure that you might be taking?

Nate: And the research we've done and others have done show that by engaging employees constructively, you know, you have the ability to solve more complex problems, you have the able to do things in a more rapid iterative way, and you have new retention opportunities. And so, there is a clear bottom line benefit to it because you reduce turnover, reduce the frictional cost of replacing employees, increase productivity, et cetera. But there's also revenue opportunities, right?

If you're in consultative business, solving really complex problems more efficiently and effectively, or even new marketing opportunities to target and engage the neurodiverse community. These are huge opportunities, because there's about a trillion dollars globally in market opportunity within this community. And people aren't tapping into that yet.

Kevin: Yeah, and that's not even to mention the diversity of thinking that you actually bring into your business, which we know from research actually leads to better results.

I'm just thinking about, you know, what you're saying about designing for marginalized populations and how that actually has benefits for everyone. And one of the things I think a lot about are the kind of tactical management practices, and one of practices that I think serves neurodivergent workers, like particularly well, is just actually clarity of communications. And this is saying, saying what you need, being concise, clear, specific, what do you need by when, and why.

And I actually think that that's an example where every single worker is served by managers who take that seriously. You don't use jargon, who don't, um, who aren't ambiguous about what they're looking for. And then if we all sort of got a reminder of that, something that serves neurodivergent workers, probably in a really important way, you would actually make things better off for everybody.

Nate: It's that structure, right? And not only do you offer that information verbally, when you're talking to somebody follow it up with a recap email so everybody is on the same page, right?

Kevin: Yeah.

Nate: And you've heard that a lot best practice after meetings who's sending the recap email. AI can do that for you now. But those are just little nuances. And I think the other areas that that are really important for leaders of organizations to understand is that there's opportunities to increase and improve how managers provide feedback to employees, right? Neurodivergent employees may need something slightly different, but how you deliver information, perhaps to a neurodivergent employee, may improve how you'd deliver information across the board.

Kevin: You know, listening to you, I feel like a lot of the focus has been on the bias that AI encodes, and that's really important. And then, other focus, which I think is important to talk about it as well, is how underrepresented groups are often left behind in these moments of technological change. And so, we're seeing that particularly in terms of gender, where women are just less active users of AI and there, uh, then men are. And, you know, the result is that there could actually be a gap in the opportunities over time as a result of that.

But I also think as I'm hearing you talk, like I think about the interfaces that we use, for example, the way in which meeting notes are brought in and transcripts and, um, in applications like Teams and now Google Meet, and we use a tool called Granola and I haven't actually seen anyone sort of explicitly, suggest or structure best practices around neurodivergent teams as part of their product design. And that feels like this is a moment where our own expectations for these products are actually not set. They're not encoded. They're kind of emerging.

And like, wouldn't it be really powerful if Microsoft or Google or Granola, you know, or one of the other startups actually took that really seriously and made that part of the product. That would be incredible. And maybe someone's working on that.

Nate: I believe there are some elements of that. Some of our partners are working on elements of that, but there may not be as overt, right? And it might be embedded, so it does help everybody, right? And I think some of it is not only can they work on it, but how do you position it to the market? How do you it to users of that product so they can capitalize on all the benefits of it, right? I think what oftentimes we have are meetings that are unprepared. That yield subpar outcomes or meetings that should be emails or emails that should have been a text, you know, like there's a lot of information from that overload that happens.

So, you know at Understood we have the five meeting principles before you go to a meeting these things must be checked, is there an agenda, owners, pre-read, et cetera. You know, make sure the meeting has a room, making sure that Gemini is set up. We have to use the Google Suite. That not only captures the transcript, but summarizes the notes. So, people who are either dyslexic or have ADHD or processing challenges can fully participate in the meeting to the best of their ability.

And the other thing, which is kind of interesting, and we do this in non-urgent situations, but we don't necessarily make snap decisions because sometimes people need to think about the discussion and come back the next morning, or whenever that might be, with something better than what you decided in the room, right? And a lot of decisions don't need to be made at Tuesday at 1 PM. They can wait until Wednesday morning at 10 AM.

Kevin: And do you say that explicitly in your meetings? Like, "We're not going to decide this, we are going to park this."

Nate: We do. A lot of times we just came out of a global strategy meeting and a lot of our outcomes where "These are great. Let's sit on them. Let's have a couple of days to think about it, to see if we, they still resonate with us."

Kevin: Yeah. I mean, what you just described are best practices or meetings. And as we know, people have too many meetings. There are actually more meetings since COVID. We know from Microsoft has done lots of research about how people are multitasking increasingly in meetings. And we know the emotional toll that actually having back-to-back meetings takes on you and not to mention the physical toll. So, what actually, what you described as your meeting practices should be universal actually.

Nate: We're actually crafting a playbook of how other companies can do some of these things on their own because these are not complex topics. They don't require you know embedding new technologies. It's leveraging what you already have to help all workers prepare for the future.

Have you been talking to any companies or teams that are doing a great job of beginning to think about or marinating on the idea of inclusion around neurodiversity?

Kevin: Yeah, I think what we find is that there are two situations. One is that, there are some formal programs and these are programs that have existed in finance and tech, I think are two industries that have been particularly involved in these programs. And these basically have involved in recruiting and placement of workers, creating roles that are better suited to workers who have different types of neurodiversity. And so, you know, classic ones are ones where people who are better suited for computer coding and, you know for, for different reasons, are like funneled into those jobs. And I think those programs are great because they unlock opportunities that didn't exist for people before.

So, those are, you knows, some of those companies that traditionally have been like Microsoft and JP Morgan Chase and EY and SAP, and other kind of big companies have actually had those formal programs. And then the second thing is in some ways more what you're talking about, which is just on a team level and on a workplace level, the present often because of a gen Z workers who are more willing and able to talk about their neurodiversity, that there are conversations about the practices of the team and maybe a smaller workplace and a smaller company.

And so, that latter category is kind of like scattered everywhere and not enough places. But I do think that there's been an unlock around some of the research and conversation around neurodiversity that Understood has definitely been part of. And also, as you mentioned, the generational shift that has brought that to the center of team and manager practices in a really productive way.

Nate: Yeah, and I think some research that we just did was really around the creative industry, right? And the creative actually at all levels, at all ages, over-indexes on neurodivergent employees. However, they are not able to be engaged fully to their best potential because of either what we call remnant thinking from different eras, overstructure, or inability to have the tools to do their job to their capability, right? And whether you're in an agency structure where that rigidity sometimes exists, but there's also a drive for margin, there's a drive utilization, there's your drive for creative ideas, right? Why are you stifling those who can do the best work in that area?

And especially if you think about AI and the implementation of that on creativity, the differentiation point is gonna be those individual people who have the relationships. And number two, the creative ingenuity. To place on top of AI to humanize it a little bit more at this point in time.

Kevin: That resonates a lot. And the situation of AI right now, at least, is that it's really good at producing results that are quite uniform. So, they're not amazingly creative and, but they're actually very quite competent. And the differentiator is actually the human being who is able to use it in ways that are creative and different and not probably like not what you would call like standard, like the way that the way to use the tools. And so, what you're saying about the creative industry is, is I think really insightful that their big opportunity is to create the conditions for neurodiverse workforces to do the best work amplified by AI, because AI is kind of in a good way and in a bad way is kind of leveling everything is like kind of good.

Nate: I think there's other, if you think about the global perspective, the EU law that's now or will be soon in effect around accessibility, and there are global companies that are going to have to address the accessibility angle of this as well. The opportunity that that unlocks is something I actually want to discuss with you because what we've seen is the opportunity for accessibility and inclusion has been decentralized. Not necessarily held in one position, that kind of hub and spoke model. It's been fit within each operating unit, which one could argue is the way it should have been done from the beginning versus a bolt-on.

Have you seen any of the evolution of DE&I being really pushed back into the operating essence of the company versus being a standalone vertical that is kind of an add-on?

Kevin: Yeah. 100%. And I think that there are good reasons and bad reasons for that. The bad reason is just the sort of political pushback on DEI. And so, the result is that organizations have basically, so many organizations have gotten rid of their kind of standalone chief diversity officer position and those kind of units within the organization. But what I hear everywhere from leaders of organizations is that it's not an option for them to not have diverse, inclusive workplaces. And part of it is that their clients, for example, for services agencies, require them to provide the best talent to them.

And that's not possible to do if you're not tapping the entire pool of human talent, if it's just a subset of it. So what I hear from chief people officers and others very clearly is, they're still doing this work. But it is much more embedded in parts of the organization, including specifically in learning and development and recruiting and some of the areas that are kind of HR practices are having more, or I guess they always had that responsibility, but the responsibility has been returned to them in a really clear way as some of the standalone DEI units and companies have been dissolved.

Nate: It definitely feels like we're in a different type of cycle, but regardless of the cycle, I think more and more today, and what I hear from leaders, and I would love your opinion on this is leaders are being asked to step up and speak out, right? And leaders are very hesitant to step out and speak up, regardless of its no diversity or anything right now. How do you see that manifesting in terms of the future employee-employer bond that will have to exist moving forward?

Kevin: Well, the flip side of that is the reluctance of leaders to speak out and the expectation of workers actually across generations, that leaders have something to say about issues that they feel are important or their values or that sort of thing. So, there is actually a disconnect between the two. And I have two other quick thoughts. One is, I just yesterday was speaking with Alan Murray, who's at the Wall Street Journal. He wrote, he's written a bunch of books and he's the journalist, I think, who's most connected to the C-suite of America.

And he, I asked him about this question, like, what is around communication around purpose among leaders in the U.S. or corporate leaders. And he said his view from talking to a lot of the CEOs directly is that there were two groups of them. One of them, one group that actually did the work and believed that having real purpose and that is things like ESG and DEI embedded in their business, made their business better, and they did the work to actually figure that out.

Nate: It's not easy work.

Kevin: No, but they but under this sort of pressure of particularly over the last decade where investors and others were looking for that, they actually did the word there was some percentage of CEOs who were more performative in that and so there was we all know there was you know greenwashing and other and other things where the CEOs weren't really bought in and Alan's view is that the CEOs who actually did the work, the companies that did the work are actually sticking to it. And the performative CEOs weren't actually really doing the work anyway, and they're, you know, they're definitely not doing it now.

Nate: They may be held accountable to those standards at some point in time.

Kevin: Yeah.

Nate: I think that doing the work and showing up time and time again builds connectivity with your team. And it's probably embedded in your values. The companies that have done that work and really truly believed in, as you said, are seeing value of it not only within employees, but shareholder value. We saw the lawsuit against Target and some of the Target challenges they're having now. There's definitely some backlash, but if you're doing the work, do you need to talk about the work?

Kevin: Well, so there I have two thoughts on that. One is that, you know, a lot of, like the biggest leadership mistake that I'm seeing right now is that leaders are not communicating into uncertainty. And this is around things, actually, like AI and the impact on jobs. And what we know is that when leaders don't communicate into moments of uncertainty, people create their own narratives. And the narratives are probably often darker and more anxiety-creating than what the leaders might be able to say in that moment. So, that's clearly one of the things that leaders of organizations need to be doing.

The second thing is that where a lot of companies have landed, and there may actually be good aspects about this, is to communicate around societal issues that impact their employees directly. And so, we saw, for example, some companies communicate around trans rights and voting rights, and reproductive rights. And they frame that in the context of their employees. So, you may be like a retailer or a company that doesn't actually have a specific business interface with some of these issues, but leaders actually like kind of where a lot of them landed is like, "OK, I'm gonna say that I know my company has trans employees and I'm going to communicate about the impact for them and take measures that actually support them."

And so I think that that, you know, that's an interesting prospect, going back to the issue of neurodiversity, where we have neurodiversity being more visible, neurodivorgence being more visible in organizations, which in some ways actually might make it easier for leaders of the organizations to publicly express their support because the way that they can frame it is "I believe in supporting neurodiverse people or groups because my workplace is a group with...

Nate: Is 50%.

Kevin: Yeah, exactly.

Nate: Half of my workforce or half of my users or half of my consumers or...

Kevin: I don't think we see that enough? I don't know. Do you see that enough?

Nate: I don't, and I think leaders have an opportunity. This is, you know, my own personal view relative to how they're operating in response to crises, to really be clear, overt and lean in and have a point of view. Oftentimes, when you run and hide, there are opportunities that are missed, and there are revenue and other implications to that action relative to different markets.

Kevin: And to that point, your customers are watching, and your employees are watching. And so if you actually don't say anything, people notice that and that can be worse than actually saying something or saying something partway.

Nate: But going again, back to neurodivergence and how people communicate, like leaders being clear, overt, and having simple communications helps everybody, but it also particularly helps the company. And I think leaders are often short-sighted in that.

Kevin: That's interesting. You know, a common use that I hear of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools is to actually review, people basically get feedback on their communications. So, drafts of things like "Make this less angry," you know, the language in this email response. And then in, I know one CEO who takes transcripts of his meetings and puts them in Claude or ChatGPT and says like "Am I being conflict avoidant" and "Am I being..."

And so, actually just hearing you, one of the opportunities probably is for people to be more explicitly using these tools to say "In that meeting, was I as clear as I could be and straightforward and precise in how I was communicating in this message to my entire organization, which we know includes neurodivergent workers, am I communicating in ways that are actually very clear to them as well?"

And, you know, maybe that's one thing to be excited about with generative AI, because it gives that capability to more people who might otherwise have found it complicated to actually communicate in that way or get that kind of feedback.

Nate: Yeah. I mean, I think as a neurodivergent leader of an organization, I often put my emails to the org through ChatGPT, because I don't sometimes can't diagnose or understand tone. So, people are like, "Why are you yelling at me?" I'm like, "I'm not yelling. I just sent you an email replying to your request." And so, it made me think about things differently, but rather than me catching it, I have AI also helped me to identify that.

Kevin: That's a great example. I, you know, I spoke to, it reminds me, I spoke with Sal Khan of Khan Academy, probably it was probably last year. And he was saying like one of his biggest challenges as a leader is he thinks that he's expressed some idea, and then he observes that his team as it sort of telephones through the organization, actually has a totally different idea. And so, part of his job as a leader is to continually to make sure that his communication, and the organization's understanding of it is, is fully in sync.

And so, what you're, you know, what you just, I think it relates to what you are describing because he, he talks about the use of, you know, AI is one way to kind of identify areas. We all have these, you know, we all have these areas where we're not fully sensitive to how we're communicating and how it's being received. And maybe that's like one of the best takeaways from what we've been talking about is just being attuned to that and actually taking advantage of the tools and adopting the practices that are best suited to neurodiverse groups of people to address that.

Nate: It helps everybody.

Kevin: Yeah.

Nate: Well, thank you very much, Kevin, for joining us today. I appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule.

Kevin: Thank you so much for the conversation, Nathan. It was great, and I'm really excited to follow your work. Thank you so much.

Nate: Thanks for tuning in to "Minds at Work." I hope today's conversation inspired you to think differently about what's possible and how we approach our work as business leaders. If you wanna know more about our guest today or the work we're doing here at Understood.org, please check out the show notes. For those looking for resources to better advocate for themselves and others, please visit U.org/work.

"Minds at Work" is brought to you by Understood.org. Understood.org is a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. To help us continue and expand our work, please donate at Understood.org/give.

The show is produced by Julie Subrin and Alison Hoachlander. Mixing is by Justin D. Wright. Samiah Adams is our supervising producer. Briana Berry is our production director and Neil Drumming is the editorial director. Our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Seth Melnick, and I'm your host, Nathan Friedman. Please join us next time. We'll continue exploring how difference can spark connection and shape a more inclusive, creative future of business.