Three Books on Neurodivergent Workplaces: What They Are, Why They Matter, and What the Research Shows

I have written three books on neurodivergent workplaces. I say that with a level of genuine surprise each time, because writing books is not something I planned. It is something that happened when I ran out of other ways to say what needed to be said.

The first, Unmasking Leadership, came out of my own late diagnosis as an AuDHD adult and the realisation that everything I had found hard about leading had a name. The second, Leading Beyond Labels, came out of sitting in a personality profiling workshop and understanding mid-session that I was gaming the test. The third, Am I the Asshole: The A to Z of Neuroinclusivity at Work, comes out on 28 May 2026, and it came out of nearly two decades of watching organisations mean well and still get it profoundly wrong.

Together, the three books form something I did not plan when I wrote the first one: a complete framework for understanding what genuinely neuroinclusive workplaces require. The why. The what not to do. And the how.

This post walks through all three. What each book argues, what the research shows, and what it means for you, whether you are a neurodivergent person navigating a workplace that was not built for your brain, or a leader, HR professional, or manager who wants to do better and has not yet found practical guidance that actually holds up.

What is Unmasking Leadership and who is it for?

Unmasking Leadership (ISBN: 978-0-473-76756-3) is the first book in the series and the most personal. It grew out of a moment in a leadership development programme where I raised my hand and asked whether neurodivergent people could lead, and the facilitator blinked at me as though I had asked something entirely unrelated to the topic.

The book begins with what I call the Leadership Lie: the idea, embedded in most leadership frameworks, that leadership is a fixed set of traits. Charisma. Verbal fluency. Emotional composure. Instant adaptability. These traits are not neutral. They are products of a very specific set of assumptions about what a capable person looks like, assumptions that were built without neurodivergent people in mind.

Unmasking Leadership traces the history of those assumptions, examines the research on why they persist, and then makes a practical argument for what neurodivergent leadership actually looks like and what organisations need to do to support it.

What does the research say about neurodivergent leadership?

The research is clear that neurodivergent leaders frequently meet or exceed performance expectations, yet their leadership potential is consistently underestimated because their communication, energy management, or social presentation differs from the standard. Austin and Pisano (2017) in the Harvard Business Review identified that traits common in neurodivergent populations, systems thinking, pattern recognition, hyperfocus, deep creativity, are precisely the traits modern organisations most urgently need. The problem is not the capability. It is the environment.

The book introduces two original frameworks developed from this research: the Safety Spectrum Baseline and the Neuro-Inclusive Leadership Compass. Both are practical rather than theoretical. They give organisations and neurodivergent leaders alike a working model for understanding what genuine psychological safety looks like, and what leadership can be when it is designed for human variation rather than performance of a script.

The masking research is particularly important here. Hull and colleagues (2017) defined masking, or camouflaging, as the deliberate use of compensatory behaviours to conceal or counteract autistic or ADHD traits. It is strongly associated with exhaustion, anxiety, and burnout over time. Cage and Troxell-Whitman (2019) found that sustained masking is one of the primary drivers of autistic burnout. In other words, the very behaviours organisations reward in their leaders are, for many neurodivergent people, the behaviours that are slowly destroying them.

“When leadership becomes performance, you can never fully rest. You are always scanning, always preparing, always managing perception. It can make you incredibly effective in the short term, but it slowly distances you from yourself, and from the people you lead.” — Unmasking Leadership, Ch. 02

Unmasking Leadership is available in hardcover, softcover, Kindle, and audiobook.

For organisations: The exhaustion your neurodivergent leaders feel is not a personal failing. It is a structural signal. The question to ask is not what is wrong with them, but what your leadership framework is costing them.

What is Leading Beyond Labels and what does it argue?

Leading Beyond Labels: Rethinking Personality, Performance, and Inclusion at Work (ISBN: 978-0-473-76853-9) is the second book, and the most research-dense. It starts with a specific moment: sitting in a personality profiling workshop and realising, halfway through filling out the questionnaire, that I was answering based on how I knew I was supposed to present, not based on who I actually was. Years of masking had taught me exactly how to sound balanced, sociable, and just the right amount of confident. The test was not measuring my personality. It was measuring how well I could perform neurotypicality.

That observation became the seed of a full-length argument: that the personality testing frameworks organisations rely on to understand their people are, for neurodivergent employees, frequently measuring the mask rather than the person. And that when organisations use those measurements to make decisions about hiring, promotion, team placement, and leadership development, they are systematically disadvantaging the people whose masks are most practised.

What does the research say about personality testing and neurodivergent workers?

The global psychometric testing industry was valued at more than USD 6 billion in 2023 (Grand View Research, 2023). Despite this, the empirical foundation for many of the most popular frameworks is weak. Multiple studies have shown that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, for example, has poor test-retest reliability and limited predictive validity for job performance (Pittenger, 2005; Boyle, 1995). A 2018 meta-analysis found that commonly used personality tests including MBTI and DISC show little correlation with job performance or satisfaction (Furnham, 2011).

Leading Beyond Labels works through the major frameworks one by one. MBTI. The Enneagram. DISC. The Team Management Profile System. The Big Five, which has a substantially stronger research base than most of the others. StrengthsFinder and the positive psychology wave. Emotional intelligence testing. And the emerging digital and algorithmic systems like 16Personalities, Predictive Index, Hogan, and Insights Discovery.

For each framework, the book does two things. It examines what the peer-reviewed evidence actually says about the tool’s validity and reliability. And it maps the specific ways neurodivergent people, particularly autistic and ADHD adults, are disadvantaged when those frameworks are applied without understanding how masking, executive function, sensory processing, and social camouflaging interact with self-report questionnaires.

The book also examines the cult-like psychology of personality profiling systems, the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) bias built into most frameworks, the extroversion bias embedded in how results are interpreted, and the gender and cultural dimensions that compound disadvantage for women and people of colour who are also neurodivergent.

“Personality profiling thrives because it aligns with organisational mythology. It reassures leaders that human difference is manageable, that potential can be measured, and that failure to fit lies within the individual, not the system.” — Leading Beyond Labels, Ch. 01

The second half of the book is constructive. It makes a case for inclusive recruitment without personality testing, walks through the specific steps from job advertisement to offer letter, and argues for what Leading Without Labels actually looks like in practice: moving from fit to flow, from sorting people into categories to designing environments that allow cognitive diversity to function.

And yes, there is a personality quiz at the back. Specifically designed for AuDHD people. It is the only accurate one you will ever take.

For organisations: If you are spending money on personality profiling, this book will change how you see that investment. Not because all of these tools are useless, but because the way most organisations apply them is actively filtering out the cognitive diversity they claim to value.

What is Am I the Asshole: The A to Z of Neuroinclusivity at Work?

Am I the Asshole: The A to Z of Neuroinclusivity at Work (ISBN: 978-1-0671337-1-9, available 28 May 2026) is the practical book. It is the one I wish had existed when I first started trying to make workplaces work better for neurodivergent people. It covers the full employment lifecycle from position descriptions and recruitment processes through to onboarding, daily inclusion, feedback, performance management, and what happens when someone leaves. Every section is grounded in peer-reviewed research and written for real workplaces.

The title came from an honest place. Because when I look at how most organisations actually function, the patterns that repeat across recruitment, management, performance frameworks, and misconduct processes, the answer to the question is often yes. Not because people are bad. But because systems that were never designed for neurodivergent people keep producing outcomes that harm neurodivergent people. And at a certain point, not knowing is no longer a sufficient defence.

What does a genuinely neuroinclusive workplace actually look like?

The book starts with the legal foundation, because the law is the foundation everything else rests on, and because most of the managers and HR professionals I have worked with over the years have never actually read it. Part 1 walks through the legal framework across Commonwealth jurisdictions in plain language. In Aotearoa New Zealand, this means the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, the Human Rights Act 1993, and the Employment Relations Act 2000. It explains what each requires in the psychosocial space and connects those obligations to the specific conditions that research identifies as creating harm for neurodivergent employees.

This connection is the most important argument in the book, and it deserves to be stated plainly. The psychosocial hazards that health and safety law already requires organisations to manage, role ambiguity, high demands with low control, poor management support, unpredictable environments, inconsistent feedback, and exposure to interpersonal mistreatment, are almost identical to the conditions that neurodivergent employees consistently identify as making workplaces unsafe for them. This is not a coincidence. It means the legal obligation already exists. The gap is not in the law and it is not in the research. It sits in the space between what organisations are required to do and what they actually do.

“Conservative estimates suggest that between fifteen and twenty percent of the population is neurodivergent in some way. In any organisation of meaningful size, neurodiverse employees are not a minority group to be accommodated as an afterthought. They are a significant proportion of the workforce, and the conditions that make workplaces unsafe for them make those workplaces worse for everyone.” — Am I the Asshole?, Introduction

Part 2 of the book covers the science: brain biology, profiles of difference across autism, ADHD, and AuDHD, communication and the double empathy problem, masking and autistic burnout, rejection sensitive dysphoria, interoception, and what good accommodation practice actually looks like in evidence-based terms.

Part 3 is the full practical guide. It covers every stage of the employment lifecycle in detail, from writing the position description and designing accessible application processes, through interview design, psychometric testing in recruitment, making the offer, onboarding, embedding day-to-day inclusion, social and communication norms, feedback and performance management, change and ambiguity, mentoring and development, wellbeing programmes, policy and organisational infrastructure, physical safety and PPE, and what happens when people leave.

Every chapter in Part 3 includes the research base, the legal context, and worked practical examples. The book includes example interview questions, example feedback letters, example position description language, and a full chapter on safety, PPE, and inductions, because almost nobody else is writing about the specific ways that physical safety systems fail neurodivergent workers.

Part 4 introduces the B.R.A.I.N. framework: Belonging, Respect, Inclusion, Awareness, Neurodiversity. It is a practical implementation model for organisations that want to move from awareness to action at every level of the employment relationship.

For organisations: If your current approach to neurodiversity is a policy document nobody reads and a training module nobody remembers, this book replaces it with something that actually works. It closes the gap between good intentions and practical knowledge across every stage of the employment lifecycle.

Why these three books belong together

Unmasking Leadership starts with identity. It is the book about what it means to lead when your brain works differently, and what organisations need to understand if they want to support rather than exhaust their neurodivergent leaders. That is the foundation.

Leading Beyond Labels challenges the tools. Even organisations with genuine good intentions will undermine their inclusion efforts if they are using frameworks that sort people into categories and make assumptions about performance, fit, and potential based on instruments that were not designed for cognitive diversity. You cannot build genuinely inclusive systems on tools that were never built for genuine human variation.

Am I the Asshole is the practical implementation layer. Given what we know about neurodivergent brains, about masking, about the legal framework, about what the research actually shows, what does a genuinely neuroinclusive workplace actually do? In every system, at every stage of the employment relationship.

Together, they cover the why, the what not to do, and the how.

References

Austin, R. D., & Pisano, G. P. (2017). Neurodiversity as a competitive advantage. Harvard Business Review, 95(3), 96–103.

Boyle, G. J. (1995). Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI): Some psychometric limitations. Australian Psychologist, 30(1), 71–74.

Cage, E., & Troxell-Whitman, Z. (2019). Understanding the reasons, contexts and costs of camouflaging for autistic adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 49(5), 1899–1911.

Furnham, A., & Jackson, C. J. (2011). Practitioner reactions to work-related personality tests. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 26(7), 549–565.

Grand View Research. (2023). Psychometric testing market size report, 2023–2030.

Hull, L., Mandy, W., Lai, M.-C., Baron-Cohen, S., Allison, C., Smith, P., & Petrides, K. V. (2017). Development and validation of the camouflaging autistic traits questionnaire (CAT-Q). Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 49(3), 819–833.

Pittenger, D. J. (2005). Cautionary comments regarding the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 57(3), 210–221.