“As a manager, what’s the best moment to have a conversation with a neurodivergent team member about how to support them?” someone asked me after a presentation this week.
He answered his own question before I could reply: “Probably during onboarding, right?”
I nodded. The best time to make a neurodivergent team member feel safe and supported – or any team member, for that matter – is from day one.
That may sound obvious, but it’s not. What I’ve seen time and again is that the right kind of conversations only take place when things start going off track, three or six months into the job, or worse, when performance review time hits.
By then, mutual trust has started to break down. Frustration has crept in. A manager may wonder why their team member is struggling, while that team member feels increasingly unsafe and misunderstood. Neurodivergence has become a problem to manage, rather than a difference to embrace.
It doesn’t have to be this way, if managers invest in creating psychological safety from day one.
Why psychological safety should be an onboarding priority
We’ve all been there. The first weeks in a job tend to be stressful for anyone. New people. New processes. New rules to decode. We want to put our best foot forward and leave a good impression.
But above all, we want to feel safe. We want to know that our new workplace is a place where we will be accepted for who we are, and where we can share our perspectives freely, without repercussions.
From the moment we join a team or organization, our internal safety radar is activated. And as soon as something feels off, we become more vigilant.
If someone shuts down an alternative perspective during a meeting, that tells us we’d better stay quiet. If someone implies we ask too many questions, we start second-guessing ourselves. And if we get a snarky comment for skipping team lunch (as I’ve experienced myself on more than one occasion), we learn that violating social conventions comes at a cost.
Research confirms how formative these early days are. Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, probably today’s most well-known voice in the field, found that new hires can lose the willingness to speak up within their first few months, unless their manager actively creates psychological safety. They start fresh and open, but gradually start holding back ideas, concerns, and questions.
Finding safety after a lifetime of feeling judged
In my experience, the pattern that Edmondson describes may be even more pronounced for neurodivergent employees.
Many of us have spent our lives feeling judged for our differences, often from a young age. We may be highly attuned to signs of rejection or exclusion. On top of that, decoding unwritten social rules can take us more effort than others, leaving us constantly vigilant and fearful we might be getting it wrong.
In other words, our baseline of psychological safety tends to be lower to begin with, which can make us more likely to self-censor out of self-protection.
This makes it all the more important that managers invest time in creating a safe space where questions are welcomed and individual differences are respected.
Yet, sadly, too many neurodivergent employees still don’t experience that kind of support. In the 2024 CIPD Neuroinclusion at Work study, just over half (54%) of employees said their manager welcomes different styles of thinking, processing information, learning, and communication.
But when managers get it right, the benefits can be significant – not just in terms of inclusion and well-being, but also for talent retention and performance.
A 2024 BCG report found that when leaders build strong psychological safety, team members are less likely to leave the organization and feel more enabled to reach their full potential. We simply do better work when we don’t have to constantly watch our back, and we’re more willing to take on new learning opportunities as well.
So what can leaders and managers do from day one to make people feel safe, particularly those who need it the most?
Through my work with the neurodiversity community, I’ve found that five behaviors help set the right tone from the start.
How to create psychological safety from day one
1. Proactively ask about needs and work preferences
A big part of feeling safe in a team is knowing that we don’t have to hide our own needs. If we need a little more time to reflect before we respond, there should be no shame in asking for it. If we need a quiet moment in a focus booth, we should take it without having to worry about being considered “anti-social.”
Managers can normalize different needs by proactively asking about them when someone new joins their team. That could be as simple as asking: how do you prefer to communicate? What kind of sensory environment works best for you?
You won’t always be able to accommodate every need in every moment. But the mere act of asking expresses care. It signals you genuinely want to understand what another person needs to do their best work. That alone can make a massive difference to psychological safety.
2. Explain the “hidden curriculum”
One of the most unnerving aspects of navigating a new job is figuring out what is and isn’t socially acceptable. Can I set my Teams or Slack to “Do Not Disturb” for an hour when I need to focus? Will it be frowned upon if I skip team lunch?
There’s typically a whole tangle of unwritten rules that shapes the culture of a team, or what is also referred to as the “hidden curriculum” of work.
Inclusive managers make this hidden curriculum visible. They clarify team norms and are open to reconsidering those norms when they don’t work for everyone. For example, they might explain that the team usually has lunch together on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But they could also make it clear that if a team member prefers to take a solitary walk instead, that’s fine too. Removing the guesswork strengthens psychological safety.
3. Offer buddies or mentors as “social translators”
Another effective way to help new hires navigate the hidden curriculum is by pairing them with a buddy or mentor who can act as a “social translator.”
It’s the kind of support I wish I’d had when I was younger, when I often felt lost in translation as my autistic brain tried to make sense of the world around me. When you feel alone in that struggle, you don’t feel safe. That changes when you have someone beside you to help you decode what happened in a meeting or why someone said what they said.
In the neurodiversity network I led for three years, we set up a mentorship program that matched neurodivergent employees with neurodivergent peers. Judging by people’s feedback, it was one of our most impactful initiatives. There’s something incredibly reassuring about having someone to turn to who “gets” you – someone who understands your way of thinking and working, and who has faced some of the same challenges themselves.
4. Encourage a culture of asking questions
Neurodivergent team members might ask lots of questions when they take on a new role. For some, this is because it’s hard to get started on a task without knowing all the details. Others might want to fully understand the “why” behind a process before they can commit to it. And “that’s just the way we do things here” is hardly ever a satisfactory answer!
Sometimes those questions can feel like a disruption, especially when there’s time pressure. But the moment people feel their questions aren’t welcome, psychological safety starts to erode – and they might no longer speak up when it’s needed most, for example when there’s a serious quality issue that could put the organization or its customers at risk.
Always welcome questions, even when the timing feels inconvenient.
5. Provide regular feedback (and don’t forget to reinforce strengths)
Creating psychological safety doesn’t mean withholding feedback. On the contrary, it means being open and clear about how people are performing from an early stage. While feedback can feel uncomfortable in the moment, it creates clarity, and clarity builds safety. Insecurity creeps in when we’re left guessing how we’re doing.
Positive validation is just as important as addressing areas of development, and even more so for neurodivergent team members who struggle with low self-esteem. I can’t overstate how much it has helped me to have had managers who brought my attention back to my strengths whenever I started talking myself down after making a mistake. We all need someone who believes in us when we don’t fully believe in ourselves yet.
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