For managers: supporting ADHD, autistic and neurodivergent team members

Start here

After this chapter you'll know what this guide covers and how to use it.

This guide is for anyone managing a team that includes — or might include — people who are ADHD, autistic or otherwise neurodivergent. Most managers have had no training in this and are improvising with good intentions. This guide won't make you an expert; it'll get you past the most common stuck points.

It sits alongside our guides for employees and reasonable adjustments, which cover the legal detail and the employee's side of these same conversations in more depth. This guide is written for you specifically — the day-to-day judgement calls of managing well, not just the compliance minimum.

One honest note before you start: you don't need to know whether someone is neurodivergent to manage well by the practices in this guide. Most of what follows makes work better for everyone, disclosed or not, diagnosed or not — that's not an accident, it's the whole design principle behind chapter 06.

This guide is general information, not legal or HR advice — for anything specific to a live situation, see chapter 04 and the sources at the end.

Use the chapters in any order.

How do I support someone who's just disclosed?

After this chapter you'll know what to actually do in the days after someone tells you, and what not to do.

The short answer: listen, ask what would help rather than assuming, keep it confidential unless they say otherwise, and don't let the conversation become the only place this gets addressed. Disclosure is often the hardest part for the person doing it — what happens next either justifies that risk or confirms their worst expectation of it.

What's actually true

If someone tells you directly, the organisation is very likely treated as knowing from that point — even if you personally don't pass it on to HR. That means what you do with the information matters immediately, not once it's "official." And if they've told you in confidence and asked you not to share it further, that request generally has to be respected — which can genuinely limit what adjustments can be put in place until they're comfortable widening who knows, so it's worth being honest with them about that trade-off rather than promising you can act invisibly.

What helps

• Thank them for telling you, then ask rather than assume. "What's difficult at the moment, and what would help?" gets further than guessing based on what you've read or heard about ADHD or autism generally — the same label affects different people very differently.
• Ask what they want to happen next, explicitly. Some people want immediate practical changes; some want it noted quietly for the future; some just wanted you to know. Don't skip ahead to solutions before you know which one this is.
• Confirm confidentiality boundaries in the same conversation: who else, if anyone, can know, and how any adjustments will be explained to the team without naming the reason.
• Suggest occupational health or HR support as an option, not a hoop. Independent professional advice can genuinely help identify the right adjustments — but framed as extra support available if useful, not as the employee needing to prove something.
• Write down what was discussed and agreed, and share that written record with them, even if the conversation itself was informal. It protects you both and it removes the burden of either of you having to remember it correctly weeks later.
• Follow up. A single supportive conversation that's never mentioned again reads, over time, as it not having mattered. A brief check-in a few weeks later shows it did.

How do I ask for updates without it feeling like nagging?

After this chapter you'll know why chasing feels bad for everyone involved, and what to build instead.

The short answer: the discomfort of chasing isn't a sign you're managing badly — it's a sign the system is relying on you to manually extract information that should be visible without asking. Fix the visibility, and most of the chasing need disappears on its own.

What it's actually like for a lot of managers

Following up on the same thing twice, three times, feels bad in a specific way — you don't want to seem like you're nagging, you don't want the other person to feel watched, and each follow-up costs a small amount of social effort that adds up across a whole team. For managers who are themselves neurodivergent, this can carry extra weight: the guilt of asking again, the low-grade anxiety of not knowing how the ask will land, sometimes a sharp dread completely out of proportion to a two-line Slack message. None of that means you're bad at this. It means the current setup is making you do, socially and manually, something a system should be doing for you.

What's happening underneath it

Most team reporting relies on someone remembering to write a status update, which means someone else has to remember to ask when they don't. That's two points of failure for every single update, multiplied by every person on the team, every week. The chasing isn't the problem — it's the symptom of a structure with no default visibility.

What helps

• Separate "what's the status" from "how are you doing." The first should be answerable by looking, not asking — from a shared board, a tool, wherever work already lives. Save actual conversation for the second question, which is the one worth a manager's time.
• Build one visible source of truth rather than relying on memory to track who owes what. Once status is visible by default, most "just checking in" messages become unnecessary, and the ones that remain are genuinely about the person, not the task.
• When you do need to ask, ask about the work, not the person. "Where's this at?" invites a status. "Why hasn't this happened?" invites defensiveness — and for many ADHD and autistic team members specifically, it can trigger a much bigger reaction than the question warranted, because it reads as character judgement rather than a process check.
• Normalise flagging things early as a strength, not an admission. "Tell me if it's going to slip, before it slips" removes the shame from the conversation and gets you better information than silence followed by a missed deadline.
• If chasing is a source of dread for you personally, that's worth naming to yourself honestly — it's a sign to fix the system, not a sign to push through it by chasing more.

What am I legally required to do?

After this chapter you'll know your actual legal position as a manager, and where your responsibility sits versus HR's.

The short answer: under the Equality Act 2010, your organisation has a legal duty to make reasonable adjustments for employees who are disabled — many ADHD, autistic and other neurodivergent people are covered, whether or not they think of themselves as disabled. As the manager, you're very often the first point of contact for this duty in practice, even if HR owns the policy.

What's actually true

• The duty exists once your employer knows, or could reasonably be expected to know — and if someone tells you directly as their manager, the organisation is very likely treated as knowing, even without a formal HR process.
• The duty applies whether or not the employee formally requests anything — it doesn't only start when someone asks. In practice, though, most adjustments happen because someone raised it, which is why chapter 02 matters.
• What counts as reasonable depends on cost, practicality and the size and resources of the organisation — it's genuinely context-dependent, not a fixed checklist.
• You are not expected to have the medical knowledge to work out the right adjustments alone. You're expected to make a genuine effort to find out — including, where useful, involving occupational health or HR for their input, not because you've failed but because their input can be genuinely valuable in getting it right.
• If a specific request isn't reasonable for the organisation to grant, that doesn't end the duty — you still need to look for another way to reduce the disadvantage.
• Failing to make reasonable adjustments where the duty applies can be a form of disability discrimination and can result in an employment tribunal claim. This isn't meant to be alarming — the vast majority of adjustment conversations never get anywhere near a tribunal — but it's why documenting what's discussed and agreed (chapter 02) is a genuine protection, not just good practice.

Where your responsibility sits

As a manager, your job is usually to have the conversation, make reasonable day-to-day changes within your control, and know when to loop in HR or occupational health for anything bigger, more formal, or outside your authority to agree alone. You're not expected to be the whole system — you're expected to be a competent, humane first point of contact within it.

For the full legal detail — Access to Work, the definition of disability, what to do if a request is refused — see our reasonable adjustments guide →, which covers this from both the employee's and employer's side in depth.

If you're building the policy this duty sits on top of — not just handling one conversation — our guide for HR and People teams goes up a level to that.

How do I run meetings and communication that work for everyone?

After this chapter you'll know a small set of practical changes that help ADHD and autistic team members — and nearly everyone else too.

The short answer: written follow-ups, agendas in advance, and never relying on someone's in-the-moment verbal recall. None of this is ADHD- or autism-specific in application — it's just better management practice that happens to remove a disadvantage some people face more acutely than others.

What helps

• Send an agenda before any meeting that isn't purely social — even three bullet points. It lets people prepare rather than process cold, which matters far more for some brains than others but helps almost everyone.
• Write up decisions and actions after the meeting, briefly, and share them. Don't rely on everyone having heard and retained the same thing the same way.
• Give notice before changing plans, priorities or deadlines where you can. Sudden changes are a bigger cost for some people than they look like from the outside.
• Offer async or written alternatives to put-on-the-spot verbal answers. "Take a moment and reply in writing" often gets a better answer than an instant verbal one — for anyone, but especially for people who process language more slowly in real time under pressure.
• Ask, don't assume, about things like camera-on expectations, meeting length and preferred communication style. What helps genuinely differs person to person, including among people with the same diagnosis.

What does "reasonable" actually mean in practice?

After this chapter you'll know why the best adjustments usually aren't special cases at all.

The short answer: "reasonable" is doing real legal work — cost, practicality, size of the organisation — but in practice, most of what helps a neurodivergent team member is cheap, simple, and better for the whole team anyway. The goal isn't finding the minimum you're obligated to do. It's changing your default enough that fewer people ever have to ask.

Why this matters for you specifically

A huge amount of the fear around asking for an adjustment is the fear of being marked out as different — treated as someone who needs special handling. You can defuse a lot of that fear before anyone even asks, simply by making the good defaults (chapter 05's practices, visible progress from chapter 03) standard for your whole team rather than something granted case by case. When an adjustment is universal, nobody has to explain themselves to get it, and the people who genuinely need it aren't the only ones asking.

This is also, honestly, the easiest version of this guide to act on: you don't need a disclosure, a diagnosis, or a formal process to run better meetings or build a visible progress system. You can start today, for everyone, and the individual conversations in chapters 02 and 04 become smaller because so much is already in place.

Sources and about this guide

Who wrote this, what it's based on and when it was last checked.

This guide is written by the team at Humble, which includes people with ADHD. It draws on our own workplace research and on the official sources below, verified 10 July 2026.

• ACAS, Reasonable adjustments at work
• ACAS, guidance on reasonable adjustments for mental health (manager conduct and confidentiality)
• Equality and Human Rights Commission, statutory Code of Practice on employment
• Humble ADHD workplace research, 2026 (internal)

Last reviewed: 10 July 2026. We re-review this guide every six months.

This guide is general information, not legal or HR advice. For anything specific to your situation, see our reasonable adjustments guide or contact ACAS or a qualified adviser.

Found something wrong, or missing? Email us — we read everything.