Serial entrepreneur and openly neurodivergent Ronnie Cane started a sports clothing business from his bedroom as a teenager then built a successful marketing firm that he exited in just three years.
Today, he leads a global directory for neurodiversity services and has a published book about neurodiversity under his belt. A fan of independent working styles, he explains to Business Advice readers how empowering employees with personalised performance can get the best out of them.
The blockers to personalised performance
When trying to support neurodivergent people, there’s a lot of insecurity and fear from a management and founder perspective of doing anything differently.
The typical model of business, of workplace, of management, that is usually followed means any deviation is seen as not as predictable, not as safe, and not as reliable from a business sense, from a management sense.
So, when I talk about personalised performance, that would be seen as a risky deviation, but it doesn’t have to be.
There’s this conversation about line managers being nice, which is all well and good, and I think that everyone should be nice, but what happens in workplaces is that everyone’s treated the same because because standardisation is part of the game.
To engage personalised performance, you need to look into what someone might need outside of what the standardisation is. Doing something as simple as that is the way to have that individual feel more buy-in, other than it just being a job.
Personalised performance is a way to secure that buy-in among staff, including neurodivergent ones.
Work on personalised performance
The only way to work on personalised performance is to find out what is best for the individual, (which the individual should have already found out for themselves,) then empowering them to be able to do that.
Empowerment is the key to personalised performance. But that doesn’t come from platitudes or having a World Autism Day or putting a poster up on your company wall. That’s not empowerment. What that is, is feeling as if you’re participating in something that you’re better off participating in than seemingly not.
Overcome your management fear
There’s this fear that if you genuinely empower the individual, if you genuinely do that. personalised performance, you will be taken advantage of, and that person will slack off.
The idea is that people will put something so their laptop mouse moves and it looks like they’re online. Sure, it does happen, and you do have people like that, but then they’re not the right people that you should be employing in your business.
As a founder or leader generally, you should have the confidence to go and employ someone that’s better than that. That’s genuine meritocracy. You have to trust the capabilities of management to actually make the right decisions.
Serial entrepreneur and openly neurodivergent Ronnie Cane started a sports clothing business from his bedroom as a teenager then built a successful marketing firm that he exited in just three years.
Today, he leads a global directory for neurodiversity services and has a published book about neurodiversity under his belt. A fan of independent working styles, he explains to Business Advice readers how empowering employees with personalised performance can get the best out of them.
