High Performing, Highly Masked, Completely Exhausted: The Neurodivergent Employees You May Be Missing

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 think organisations need to understand better when we talk about neurodiversity at work. We are becoming more familiar with ADHD, autism and reasonable adjustments, which is positive. But we still tend to notice difficulty when it becomes visible: performance drops, deadlines are missed, somebody goes off sick, conflict develops or an employee says they are struggling.

By that point, we may have missed months — sometimes years — of somebody working extraordinarily hard to appear fine.

As a coach and counsellor, I work with neurodivergent adults in demanding professional environments. Some are highly academic, senior, talented and outwardly very successful. What repeatedly strikes me is the gap that can exist between how competent somebody appears and what it is costing them to maintain that competence.

That gap matters to employers, because performance that cannot be sustained is not really high performance. It is performance with an expiry date.

The employee you see and the effort you don't

Masking, sometimes called camouflaging, broadly describes suppressing or modifying natural behaviours in order to fit expected social or professional norms. An autistic employee might consciously monitor eye contact, facial expression or conversational timing. Someone with ADHD might work extremely hard to conceal forgetfulness or organisational difficulties, arrive excessively early because they are terrified of being late, or spend far longer preparing for meetings than anybody around them realises.

Not everybody masks in the same way, and not every neurodivergent person masks. But ACAS now specifically recognises workplace masking and notes that it can leave neurodivergent workers feeling exhausted, isolated and unable to be themselves. Research on autistic camouflaging also continues to associate higher levels of camouflaging with greater stress and poorer psychological wellbeing.

Pearn Kandola's 2024 Neurodiversity At Work Report, which surveyed over 600 neurodivergent workers in the UK, found that 63% had masked at work in this way, and 42% felt too uncomfortable to ask for the adjustments that might have made masking less necessary in the first place. That is not a small or unusual experience. It is closer to the default.

The interesting thing from an organisational perspective is that masking can look remarkably like success.

A manager sees somebody who is always prepared. They may not see the two hours of over-preparation that happened the night before.

They see an employee who contributes confidently in a meeting. They don't see the recovery time afterwards because the noise, interruptions, social processing and pressure to respond quickly have been exhausting.

They see someone who always says yes. They may not know that saying no feels psychologically far more threatening to that person than taking on another piece of work they don't realistically have capacity for.

They see the finished presentation. They don't see the perfectionism, panic or 17 versions that preceded it.

From a purely performance-management perspective, everything may look green. The nervous system may have an entirely different dashboard.

Good performance doesn't automatically mean the environment is working

One of the mistakes organisations can make is assuming that if somebody is producing good work, no intervention is needed.

I'd challenge that.

If an employee is delivering excellent results but routinely working longer than everyone else to achieve them, recovering from the working week all weekend, becoming increasingly anxious, sacrificing breaks, avoiding asking for help or using most of their energy simply managing the environment, the organisation may be benefiting from good performance without understanding its true cost.

Eventually that cost tends to show up somewhere.

It might appear as burnout, sickness absence, withdrawal, irritability, declining confidence or somebody who simply leaves. Sometimes the organisation is surprised because they were "doing so well".

The signs were there. They just weren't appearing in the quarterly performance figures.

This is also why conversations about neurodiversity need to move beyond identifying individual deficits. Sometimes the question isn't "What does this employee struggle with?" but "What about the way this work is designed is creating unnecessary cognitive load?"

Consider a workplace where priorities change constantly but nobody explicitly says which piece of work should now move down the list. Meetings happen without agendas. Important instructions are given verbally and change several times. Employees are expected to respond to Teams messages, emails and interruptions while completing focused work. Managers describe expectations using phrases such as "just use your judgement" and then become frustrated when somebody's judgement differs from theirs.

Some people will navigate that environment relatively easily. Others will spend enormous amounts of mental energy trying to decode it.

Clearer communication, written priorities, predictable processes, protected focus time or flexibility around working environment are not necessarily ways of lowering standards. Often they make the standard easier to meet.

ACAS advises employers to consider adjustments such as changes to communication, working arrangements and environments, and notes that a lack of appropriate support can affect both performance and sickness absence. UK employers also have legal duties to make reasonable adjustments where a disabled worker would otherwise be substantially disadvantaged.

There is, of course, a legal case for getting this right.

I think there is an equally compelling business case.

Don't make disclosure the price of good management

Another problem is that organisations often rely on the employee to identify themselves.

"We're very supportive. They only have to tell us what they need."

That sounds reasonable until you consider what disclosure can feel like from the other side.

An employee may worry about being perceived as difficult, less capable or less promotable. They may have spent their entire career concealing the very things you are now asking them to disclose. They may not have a formal diagnosis. They may have been diagnosed only recently and still be working out what actually helps them. Or they may simply have learnt through experience that being the "easy employee" is safer.

In ACAS's own polling of UK line managers, 72% pointed to employees not disclosing the need for a reasonable adjustment as the barrier, and 59% said they simply didn't have the knowledge to make one, even once a need was raised.

This is where inclusive workplace design becomes useful.

A manager doesn't need to know somebody's diagnostic history to give clear expectations. Meeting agendas don't harm neurotypical staff. Giving people time to process complex information before demanding an answer is rarely catastrophic for business. Allowing employees to clarify priorities, providing written follow-up after important conversations and having sensible flexibility around how focused work gets done can improve working conditions for plenty of people.

Universal good practice does not replace individual reasonable adjustments, but it can reduce the number of hoops somebody has to jump through simply to work effectively. ACAS makes the same distinction in its current neuroinclusion guidance.

In other words, don't wait for somebody to hand you a diagnostic report before communicating well.

The conversation managers need to become better at having

None of this means managers should tiptoe around neurodivergent employees or avoid performance conversations. Neurodiversity isn't a get-out-of-accountability-free card, and I don't think treating neurodivergent adults as though they are too fragile to receive feedback is particularly inclusive either.

Good management means being able to hold support and accountability together.

If something isn't working, say so clearly. Explain what needs to change rather than relying on hints or hoping somebody will infer it. Ask what might be getting in the way. Be curious about whether the problem is skill, clarity, capacity, environment, confidence, communication or something else entirely.

That is a very different conversation from assuming lack of effort.

It is also where psychologically informed leadership matters. Behaviour does not occur in a vacuum. A person who looks defensive may be frightened of getting something wrong. Somebody who overworks may have built their sense of safety around being indispensable. An employee who never asks questions may not be confident; they may have learnt that revealing uncertainty is risky.

Understanding that context does not mean excusing poor performance. It gives you better information with which to address it.

There is a difference between lowering expectations and removing unnecessary barriers to meeting them.

Good leaders know the difference.

Sustainable performance should be the goal

I think organisations need to become much more curious about the word sustainable.

Not simply: Is this person performing?

But: Can they continue performing like this without sacrificing their health, confidence or life outside work to do it?

That question matters particularly for neurodivergent employees, but it applies much more widely. The employee who regularly saves the day may eventually become the employee whose departure leaves everybody wondering what went wrong.

Sometimes nothing suddenly went wrong.

They simply stopped being able to absorb the cost.

This is also why coaching can be valuable before somebody reaches crisis point. Neurodivergent and psychologically informed coaching can create a confidential space to look at working patterns, executive functioning, communication, confidence, boundaries, leadership identity and what sustainable performance actually looks like for that individual. It can also help people identify what support or reasonable adjustments would allow them to perform at their best rather than continually compensating in silence.

But organisations have a role too. Coaching should not become a sophisticated way of teaching employees how to tolerate environments that remain unnecessarily difficult.

Sometimes the individual needs new strategies.

Sometimes the manager needs a different conversation.

And sometimes the system needs to change.

In practice, this often means working directly with people managers and leadership teams — not a generic awareness session, but time spent on exactly this gap: how to notice when "coping well" might be costing more than it looks, how to have direct performance conversations without assuming a lack of effort, and how to build communication and workload practices that reduce the need for masking in the first place.

The organisations that understand the difference are far more likely to keep talented people long enough to benefit from what they can actually do.

Perhaps the question for leaders isn't simply "Who are our high performers?"

It is whether you know what being a high performer is costing them — and whether your workplace is making that cost higher than it needs to be.

---

I'm Emma, a BACP-accredited counsellor, EMDR practitioner and trained coach. I provide psychologically informed coaching for professionals, with particular interests in neurodivergence, disability, chronic illness, confidence, burnout, boundaries and sustainable performance.

My approach brings together coaching psychology, therapeutic understanding and lived experience of disability and chronic illness. I work with individuals and organisations to help people perform well without assuming that sustainable performance has to come at the expense of their wellbeing.

For enquiries about individual or organisational coaching, workshops or neurodiversity-informed support, you can contact me through my website.