You may have been told you're "just a really nice person". You're the one who says yes before checking your diary. Who apologises when someone else bumps into you. Who can sense a change in someone's mood from across the room and has already started adjusting before anyone has said a word. People describe this as kindness, and sometimes it is. But if saying no makes your stomach drop, if you rehearse messages for an hour to make sure they won't upset anyone, or if you feel st

Every organisation has one. The person who just gets it done. They reply quickly, they remember the thing from the meeting three weeks ago, they pick up what falls between the cracks and they never make a fuss about it. Managers love this person. Colleagues love this person. Frankly, the whole team would struggle to function without this person. Which is exactly why I'd be a little worried about them. One woman that comes to my mind as I write this blog was an operations mana

They meet their deadlines. Their work is good. They rarely complain. They might be the person who always volunteers, stays late when something needs finishing, remembers the detail everyone else missed and somehow manages to pull things out of the bag when the pressure is on. So why would you be worried about them? Because sometimes the employee who appears to be coping exceptionally well is using an exceptional amount of energy to make it look that way. This is something I t

Somewhere along the way, "neurodivergence is a superpower" became one of those phrases we're apparently supposed to nod enthusiastically at. And I understand where it came from. For a long time, conversations about ADHD and autism focused overwhelmingly on deficits: what someone couldn't do, what needed correcting, where they struggled or how they differed from the supposed norm. Moving towards a more strengths-based understanding was important. Neurodivergent people can be c

Resilience is one of those words that's almost impossible to argue with. Of course we want to be resilient. We want to be able to cope when life gets difficult, recover after setbacks and keep going when things don't quite work out as planned. The problem is that resilience has also become something of a workplace cure-all. If employees are exhausted, overwhelmed or struggling, the response is often to help them become more resilient: perhaps a wellbeing webinar, some mindful

I hadn't expected Jason Arday to be the subject of my first blog post. But his death raises uncomfortable questions about racism, autism, public shaming and whether accountability can lose sight of the human being.