Neuroinclusion Doesn't Start With the Accommodation Request. That's Where It Usually Fails.
Validation is the leadership discipline that builds neuroinclusion before anyone has to ask for it.
Why validation is a leadership discipline, and what to build before anyone has to ask.
By Lynn Cirillo
Ask most organizations how they support neurodivergent employees, and you'll hear about the accommodation process. There's a policy. There's a form. In the United States, there's the interactive process that disability law expects employers to engage in. All of that matters, and none of it should be dismissed.
But after more than three decades in corporate America and executive leadership, including years as an Executive Vice President with responsibility for people, technology, and systems, and a lifetime of living with ADHD, OCD, and dyslexia, I've come to believe something many organizations get backward. When neuroinclusion is built around the moment someone discloses and asks, the system has already failed most of the people it was meant to serve. The real work happens before the request. And the discipline that makes it work is one leaders rarely name: validation.
The Accommodation Paradox
Consider what we're asking of people when the formal request is the front door.
Many neurodivergent professionals, especially high performers, have spent years proving one thing: I can do this. To receive support, they're suddenly asked to prove the opposite: This is difficult for me. Those can feel like competing identities. If your professional reputation rests on competence, admitting difficulty can feel dangerous.
The fear usually isn't "What if they say no?" It's "What if they never see me the same way again?" Will I still get the challenging assignments? Will every mistake be attributed to my diagnosis? Will I become "the ADHD employee"?
For most of my career, I didn't ask for anything. I built my own workarounds and called it figuring things out. That worked, in the narrow sense that the work got done. It also meant the systems I built stayed invisible to the organizations I worked for and often to me.
What Leaders and HR Get Wrong
They treat "just ask" as a low bar. For many people, it's an enormous request. Someone may have compensated for so long that they've never had language for what's hard. They may know exactly what they need until they're sitting across from someone with authority, and then the words disappear. For some, difficulty planning, organizing, or advocating is part of the very thing they need support with.
They mistake communication style for credibility. One person overexplains because they're desperate to be understood. Another sounds flat and factual while describing something genuinely distressing. Another gets emotional despite rehearsing. None of those tells you whether the need is real.
They confuse fairness with sameness. Nobody tells a colleague that if they were truly capable of reading the sign, they wouldn't need glasses. We've normalized that kind of access. Written instructions, processing time, or reduced sensory noise are no different in principle. They just aren't visible.
They trust the policy over the culture. An organization can have a well-written accommodation policy and still have managers who make asking feel risky. The policy tells employees what the organization says. Behavior tells them what it means. People watch what happened to the last person who asked, and they learn accordingly. When someone hesitates, that hesitation is often learned caution, not a lack of need.
The Before-the-Request Model
Here's the four-part framework I'd offer any leader, HR team, or board that wants neuroinclusion to work in practice, not just on paper.
1. Validate: believe the experience before you demand the proof. Validation is not agreeing to every proposed solution. It's taking seriously that something is hard for this person and getting curious instead of skeptical. "I believe you that this isn't working. Let's understand it." Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety describes environments where people believe they can raise concerns or admit difficulty without being punished or humiliated. Validation is how that safety becomes real in a single conversation. Without it, you won't get accurate information, and without accurate information, there's no real accountability on either side.
2. Locate: find the functional need beneath the request. If someone says, "I need to work from home," the conversation can stall on location. The better question is what the barrier is. Sensory overload? Constant interruptions? The commute? Concentration? Once you understand the function, there may be several workable solutions. The objective is access, not attachment to the first idea, and that cuts both ways: it isn't a license to negotiate someone endlessly away from something that works. And if the person says, "I don't know what I need. I just know I'm drowning," that's not a failed request. It's the start of an investigation. What part is hard? When? What changes it? Can we test something?
3. Sort: know which conversation you're having. Not everything that helps needs to be a formal accommodation. There are preferences, like music while working alone. There are strategies a person manages on their own. There's ordinary flexibility a manager can offer within everyday discretion, such as following every meeting with written action items for the whole team. And there are situations that require a formal process with qualified HR, legal, or medical guidance. Treating everything as the formal tier makes support slow and stigmatizing. Treating nothing as formal puts people's rights at risk. Leaders need to know the difference.
4. Protect: guard privacy, and guard the person from their label. When a coworker asks, "Why do they get to?", the answer is never someone's diagnosis. A simple response works: "I don't discuss another employee's private information, but I'm happy to talk about your own work environment or needs." And once someone discloses, don't let the disclosure become their new identity or the explanation for everything they do.
Design So Fewer People Have to Ask
The most powerful neuroinclusion happens when nobody has to disclose anything. The curb-cut effect is the familiar idea that a design meant for some, like the ramps cut into sidewalks for wheelchair users, turns out to help nearly everyone. Workplace practices behave the same way.
- Send agendas before complex meetings.
- Put important instructions and decisions in writing.
- Demonstrate complicated processes rather than only describing them.
- Make it normal to ask questions without it reading as incompetence.
- Offer flexibility openly, not as a quiet perk for the people a manager happens to like.
- Stop rewarding people for destroying themselves to appear endlessly available.
None of that requires knowing anyone's diagnosis. It's simply good leadership, and it means the formal process becomes the backstop rather than the front door.
For the Person Who Has Been Trying Not to Need It
If you've spent years being told everyone struggles with this or quietly building systems nobody saw, I want this to land as validation: you are not imagining the difficulty, and needing something different is not a verdict on your capability. By the time most people finally ask, they've already spent a long time trying not to need it.
When you're ready, a clear request answers four things. What am I experiencing? How does it affect my work? What would help? What outcome am I trying to protect? And don't dilute it. Many of us bury the actual request under six apologetic sentences, then wonder why it isn't taken seriously. "I retain multi-step instructions more accurately in writing. For complex assignments, I'd like the action items documented" is courteous, specific, and complete. No self-insult required.
Questions Leaders and Boards Should Ask
- What happened to the last person on this team who asked for something different, and who saw it?
- Is flexibility here a practice or a privilege?
- When someone tells me something is hard, do I get curious, or do I ask for proof?
- Which of our everyday practices would make a formal request unnecessary?
- Do our managers know the difference between a preference, a strategy, ordinary flexibility, and a formal accommodation?
Different Was Never Less
Neuroinclusion is not about lowering the bar. It's about removing difficulty that has nothing to do with the bar. The leaders who get this right won't be the ones with the best policy. They'll be the ones whose people never had to prove they were struggling before someone got curious.
Validation first. Then the work. That order matters.
I explore ADHD, OCD, dyslexia, autism, masking, and the conversations that make support possible in Grounded in How I'm Wired, Book 5 in my Musings of a Recovering Executive series. Each chapter pairs my own stories with Guidance Tools, Communication Tools, and questions for neurodivergent readers and the people who lead, love, and work beside them. You can learn more at https://MusingsOfaRecoveringExecutive.com/books/grounded-in-how-im-wired/.
About the Author
Lynn Cirillo is an author, leadership mentor, and founder of Grounded Leadership LLC, based in Cheyenne, Wyoming. A former Executive Vice President who oversaw people, technology, data, research, systems, and organizational change, she spent more than three decades in corporate America and executive leadership. She lives with ADHD, OCD, and dyslexia and writes the Musings of a Recovering Executive series about leadership, identity, boundaries, reinvention, and neurodiversity. Learn more at https://MusingsOfaRecoveringExecutive.com/.
