Making Neurodiversity Work at Work! Meet Organizational Psychologist Ludmila Praslova

Ludmila N. Praslova, Ph.D., SHRM-SCP uses her extensive experience with global, cultural, demographic, and ability diversity to help create inclusive and equitable workplaces. She is a Professor of Psychology and the founding Director of Graduate Programs in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at Vanguard University of Southern California. Prior to her academic career, she built and led successful intercultural relations programs in global organizations. Her current consulting is focused on supporting organizations in creating systemic inclusion informed by an understanding of neurodiversity. Her other areas of expertise include organizational culture assessment and change, workplace justice and civility, and training and training evaluation. She is a contributor to Fast Company, Harvard Business Review and SHRM blog, the editor of the upcoming book “Evidence-Based Organizational Practices for Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging and Equity” (Cambridge Scholars), and the editor of upcoming special issue of the Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research on Disability inclusion in the workplace: From “accommodation” to inclusive organizational design.

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Diversity at work includes different aspects such as race, gender but also neurodiversity.
• Autism Autism Doesn’t Hold People Back at Work. Discrimination Does. (HRB)
• The unemployment rate amongst college graduates with Autism in the US is 85 %! The discrimination might not be intentional but it is systemic!
• If you met one Autistic person, you have met one Autistic person.
• There is a misconception that autistic people are not empathic. However, autistic people might be so overwhelmed with empathy that they don’t have energy to express it or it might be too overwhelming to express.
• Autistic people might develop trauma patterns due to the way people react to them over and over again.
• Having an Autistic diagnosis can be empowering and helpful for self advocacy.
• Moral injury can happen at work and we need to address it! This might be more prevalent in neurodivergent people. Sign up for the newsletter to be updated on the results on the study!
• Even if you didn’t now things earlier, you know now and you can implement and change from this day forward! Your life experience is what it is and now you can move from this point forward!

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Connect and learn more about Ludmila and her work on LinkedIn | Twitter

Organizational Psychology at Vanguard University

Read her articles: Autism does’t hold people back at work. Discrimination does. - Harvard Business Review | Neurodiver

Would you like to work with me 1:1 as your gifted and 2e coach? Please send me an email at hello@giftedunleashed.com or find more information about my coaching offer on my website giftedunleashed.com/coaching

Transcript

Hello and welcome to unleash Monday, where we talk about the brain, especially the gifted brain and how does it affect our thinking and experience of the world differently. There are a lot of stereotypes and stigma around giftedness, and I'm here to challenge dos. I'm here to raise awareness and to have a conversation around this topic of what does it mean to be a gifted adult common experience among gifted folks is that they feel out of place.

They don't quite fit in. They are too sensitive, too intense, too emotional, too, over excitable and too deep thinkers about the world and about themselves. So if you have been called too much of about anything, then this show is for you. My name is Nadja. I'm too loud, too colorful, too bodily, too bossy. And I love to talk too much.

So welcome to my world. And I'm so happy you are here. Hello and happy Monday. I hope you had a wonderful weekend. I'm so excited. You are here and I'm sending you some love for this special Monday in the year. And today we have an amazing guest as every two weeks I invited Ludmila to join us for a conversation. And Ludmila has extensive experience in the field of diversity,

equity and inclusion, and she's a professor of psychology for organizational psychology. So she works at Vanguard university and has a professorship there and a consultancy and focused on supporting organization and creating systemic inclusion informed by an understanding of neurodiversity. She's also a contributor to fast company in Harvard business review and other amazing platforms where her passion is writing. And I will link everything we talk about into the show notes,

so you can go and read her amazing contributions. So without further ado, I just want to introduce you to Ludmila and she will share her own story and what she offers into neurodiverse space. So welcome. Ludmila Welcome, Ludmila. I'm so excited to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much. I look forward to talking To you.

I'm super excited that my network and my contacts are growing in this neuro diversity space, and I followed you through your LinkedIn page and you have such a vast resource there and you share so many amazing articles, but before we talk about those for the listeners today, do you want to share who you are? Like, how did you get into this topic of neurodiversity and just introduce yourself a little bit?

Sure. I caught a few things in my life, but they all mostly related to diversity in some shape or form. So I have been in my professor position for a while and I'm professor of industrial organizational psychology at a university of Southern California, but I actually started as my first job in global diversity. And then it was a long time ago, actually,

when I was still in college, I started working in a global diversity and a large multicultural. Not-for-profits just trying to create an environment where different kinds of people could collaborate. And what was interesting that despite the fact there was a really long time ago. I think what we're doing something pretty pretty far ahead of its time, because we're really aiming for culture add rather than culture sheet or the Searchie culture.

So we didn't want to have one dominant culture within an organization, really wanted to have something that is very fluid, very flexible, where people are able to, you know, use words from several different languages in the one sentence and different kinds of traditions would all be celebrated. So it was really a lot of fun and it was a really nice way to enter into diversity space because it was very inclusive and very focused on appreciating differences.

In general, people did not talk about culture add until pretty recently. And so that was actually pretty unique to be doing all organization that doesn't do culture sheet, that's treats people of their individuality and cultures and personality and do culture add where people can bring a lot of uniqueness that really enriched the environment. So that was my first angle on diversity, but that after that,

I got my PhD in industrial organizational psychology. My dissertation on my thesis were also on cross-cultural global level of diversity, but then I also started looking at all the other aspects like gender and disability. And that only probably a in the last couple of years, I started thinking more specifically about neuro diversity. And so it kind of went from global level diversity to a very deep individual,

psychological level of diversity. And was it definitely very personal because I was trying to figure out some of the things about myself and how different people function. And then I came across some ratings about autistic women. And even though I do all the foundational psychology core says, would just think functioning is described is so oriented to five year old boys that anyone who doesn't cheat in that category would not even recognize themselves.

And then when I started looking specifically at how autistic women function, I kind of had an old likable moment. And so that is how I started looking at neuro diversity and specifically, because I'm an industrial organizational psychologist, then I found those completely horrendous employment numbers with the age of 5% of autistic college graduates, unemployed. That just kind of sent me on a crusade.

May I ask a question here, because you know, you just mentioned this. We have this stereotype in society about five old boys being autistic. And I hear a lot of women that say, Hey, I got identified autistic as an adult. And I had no idea struggling through life. Wha why hasn't anybody seen this told me I really want to help women,

especially, or adults in general to really get a connection to this topic. And maybe there's somebody listening that I was like, oh, wow. This also applies to me. Maybe this is where I can find some answers for myself. What were the things that you read about autistic women? What was things that you could say, wow, this applies to me and makes me different from the majority of,

of women. There's something I was just thinking about earlier today because people always still think her skin, why do I have to be so sensitive? And you know this, oh, just exterior time have of course, you know, there's no empathy, no emotionality. So I always thought maybe they just kind of strange combination of different things that don't fit together actually.

But if you look at tracers, then a lot of what you, people are actually hyper empathetic specifically of just equipment have very significant concern about people and relationships and trying to make it work and not always working in the way other people would expect. But it's definitely one thing that I like facts. I like analyzing things, but I'm also very, very kind of emotional responsive to things,

which was definitely one of the things that either autistic people, women, or rapport that is very different from what is traditionally portrayed. Mm. You mentioned the stereotype of autistic people, not having empathy. And especially you just mentioned, right? It's the opposite, but it's the, sometimes it's shown differently or it's also self protection to not inside your, your empathic,

but it doesn't portray. Or how, how do we need to understand this discrepancy of this prejudice? And what's actually going on Again, it's all going to talk live to everyone as well. No, you met one autistic person. You met one autistic person. And, but we also know that some literature completely portrays that there's a trade-off between systemizing mind and being able to emotionally connect.

But a lot of it is misunderstanding list. Certain percentage of autistic people with pro and more women definitely are very much emotionally attuned and concerned about other people. And that actually research shows that we pool it a lot of effort to trying to understand and processing emotion and connecting with people. So in some cases it is actually overwhelming. So you are so flooded with empathy that you freeze.

And also sometimes we were taught to not show it because when we do show our emotion, people say it's too much and inappropriate. So after you have been taught for years and years, that there's too much just, I don't want to deal with this. Where are you coming from tone down. Then you also learn to kind of clamp down and not sure what you feel,

but it is also physiological when you are Zelle or WellMed with empathy, you literally used so much of your energy that you don't even have the energy to express it because just feeling it takes so much. But then also there's another thing we're talking about more and more about complex PTSD and the research is a fairy early, but we do know that many autistic people because of how they're treated,

especially if you're not identified, your parents just think you're weird and need to be corrected or you're identified and sent into ABA. And that doesn't help very much. You kind of develop trauma patterns, which could also prevent you from expressing emotion. Like if you have a freeze, for example, response, a, you just try to become invisible. Or if you have a fraud or response,

you may not necessarily verbally express what you feel, but you just kind of keep bending over backwards for other people, which they may not necessarily also interpret as intended. So it's pretty complicated because I think in addition to all of us being different and hyper empathy, not being identified or discussed until very recently, I think well-meaning parents do things that according people and general advice for how to communicate with LG stick people that permeates society is actually pretty damaging as well.

Still when you bring in biological wiring differences and layers and layers of trauma from different contexts, you will end up with all kinds of variations of their individual patterns, all for reacting. So when you learned about your own autism, just recently, may I ask how, how does it, how did it make you feel? How, how, what was your reaction?

Was it a shock? Was it kind of a liberation empowering or a mix of all the emotions? Well, I figured it out at the very end of 2019. So I was pretty certain after I kind of looked at some of the literature on when men and get it some thought I was pretty sure, but then when I got diagnosed, it was already,

there was already upon damn eggs. It was the late spring of 2020, which was kind of an interesting time because there wasn't much direction going on there then zoom, but it was definitely more of the confirmation and relieve that I was not imagining things that were in there. And at this point I've also kind of had enough interaction in those six months or so with autistic culture.

It was actually very liberating because I didn't feel like I can speak on behalf of the culture, participate in it. And so I know the self-diagnostic diagnosis is accepted, but I kind of felt maybe because I'm a psychologist that, and the scientism that I had liked to have data, or I say things, it definitely was actually liberating because it was like,

okay, now I can go engage very significant layer. And I guess with your background, you probably already had the vocabulary, but it probably also helped you advocate for yourself and for others, even more, as you said, now, you, you know, you can speak on behalf, Right? Because things are definitely not pursued in the same way.

And because of just the community has been heard by saying different community speaking broadly, the just speaking as a, as an academic is just not the same. I will be able to speak, talk academics, but it will not necessarily be perceived by everyone in the community. But on the other hand, if I'm just the person from the community to speaking to academics,

I don't get sometimes the desired respect. So actually being both being both is very beneficial when you really want to communicate the message and communicate it to very different audiences. So business audience, and academic audience, but also very closely working with the community and on behalf of the community, it's very helpful to kind of legitimately be in both identities. Hmm. And as I briefly mentioned already in the beginning,

you started, or you already been writing, but then you really started writing from your own perspective right on. And do you want to share a little bit about your, your writing journey and how that came to be and the topics you're covering? Oh my gosh. Well, you have seven hours. It's an open question. Share the most important things you want to share with us Liked writing.

And I actually was a journalist and doing a lot of creative writing the way back when, again, in college and early twenties and actually older through childhood, I was always a writer, but then I went to graduate school in the states ahead to write an IPE style. And so I had to switch the language and the style. And so for 20 years I didn't doing anything creative and that wasn't in a very formal and non-personal language.

So I kind of went back to my earlier way of writing, which is much more advocacy and personal. That was, that was just in itself a tremendous gift because that's something I always loved, but I haven't done it in a very long time. So then I guess once I started, I can still, I actually enjoy the process of writing that sometimes people,

you know, they're just like, oh, okay, I have to write if I could, if I could live by and writing, I would I, yeah, but it's most enjoyable thing. Really. It's hard to sometimes, you know, getting published is not good for yourself esteem because people tear you down all the time and you get all kinds of unpleasant shit back.

But once you kind of start writing for people and it starts resonating, and then people say, my gosh, that's exactly what we need. Why nobody else is saying those things. You're the only one who is saying those things or, oh my gosh. Like for the first time I feel heard and understood, well, that definitely gives propels you. And that's what happened with my latest piece,

which was not actually on neuro-diversity, but it was on moral injury. And then after that, I did a piece on moral injury in the workplace and neuro diversity. So when you get that kind of response that people say, oh my gosh, now I have the vocabulary to talk about things that's happened to me. It's definitely very motivating in addition to just enjoyment of writing period,

but writing more personal things like my Harvard business review article, that was probably the hardest, I think it was harder than my dissertation shot, which was 200 times shorter, but that was a very hard piece to write actually because the balance personnel and intellectual and keeping it professional and keeping it with the focus on business audience that was a task and a half.

And I also was very determined not to write inspiration, poor, very aware that sometimes people take the stories like, you know, autistic people and then have a journalist will turn it in a way that it's really for other people to just kind of feel stuff. And I was very determined not to do it. So making it personal without making it inspiration for that was literally so many rewrites way more than two months to write an article,

you can write a book for that amount of time. It's a beautiful article. And I'm going to link obviously the article in the show notes. So people can just click on the link and read that piece. But do you want to share a little bit about the topic you covered and is Harvard? Yeah. It's Harvard business review article is specifically about autistic people in the workplace and all the toppings that come with those horrendous unemployment numbers and how we got there.

So you don't get this kind of unemployment numbers among people who want to work in a capable to work of working without talking about discrimination, because it is not intentional. People did not set up selection procedures to discriminate against autistic people, but that's what those selection procedures do. Because very often you just need to be able to talk to people and be chatty and pleasant.

And that's the major factor for hiring regardless of what your job actually is. So if you are the kind of autistic people who really struggles with, you know, chatting with strangers or chatting about things that they don't see how they really relate to the actual job, because it's small talk rather than what they are being hired for, or hopefully hope to get hired for that's really doesn't work very well.

So one of the points I've been always making, just create valid selection. When other ones saying we're preferential selection, we're not asking for preferential selection, create something valid. Let's people, their skills with a task that actually is relevant to the job they're doing. Yeah. If their job is making small talk with strangers, fine select them on that, because then it's relevant.

If their job is not making small talk with strangers, then just let them demonstrate when whatever is relevant to the job. So that's one of the things, and I was like, talk about it for way too long. But in that article, I do talk a little bit about my personal experiences and, and I actually can do small talk for a short time during the interviews on my favorite thing,

but it's not something I'm capable off, but we on a, you are Ian, you get in addition to access issues that there are plenty of success issues in the workplace as well because the promotion and other kind of benefits like training, all of us could be influenced by the fact that workplaces are designed by people who are kind of opposite to the typical autistic person.

They're usually designed by confident, gregarious, extroverted people. All those systems really don't work very well. Well, there were strengths, which is sit down concentrate for the full day, create amazing piece of whore, but as far as promoting ourselves or teaching our work that, or even taking credit or even saying, you know what, I did this work,

I know the force who is claiming it. We're not totally good at that. So very often we are kind of invisible performers who don't get credit or reward for our work because we do the work and other people are much better at self promotion. So, so there's all kinds of things about workplaces that really favor certain kinds of individuals. Now I had some people complain that a pandemic actually put it in the other way and not performers are actually can show that they were doing things.

And it's much harder to just randomly take credit in the virtual environment though, that people don't try, but we'll see what happens in a post pandemic workplace. But my idea is that let's focus on outcomes. Let's focus on what we're actually need to produce. And let's put people into positions that are best suited to their talents. If are talent is chatting,

was people fantastic do that. If your talent is focusing for four hours, fantastic do that. Unfortunately, the way managed jobs are designed, no they're not designed for any real healing. They're designed for this kind of average person who is capable of doing a little bit of everything who really doesn't exist. So then you have extroverts self-referring because they hate all those introverted pieces on their plate.

And then you have introverts suffering because they have all those extroverted pieces of on their plates and harmonizations are just too region to even let people train those things. So I think when you do have conversations with organizations about allowing people work with their strengths. So again, it's not just, okay, I'll just, if people aren't getting hired, let's find a way to use them,

which is a horrible way to, to talk about it in response to one of my articles that actually had to create say, but you never told us how to utilize them. Well, that's because that was not my point. I want you to think about any kind of humans as, how do we utilize them? It's how do we include them and allow them to live their lives to the best of their abilities.

So yeah, a lot of mindset issues to deal with. Thank you for sharing saying already a little bit, what employers can do to especially lower the hurdle, but what would you say now for people neurodivergent people or autistic people in the workforce? And I know you, you mentioned this in your article, that's why I'm asking you to share it here,

like to take matters into your own hands. How can they improve their quality of life at work and how can they kind of, if you cannot change your environment, how can you change yourself? Or how can you change within your own means? Well, again, preferably I would love people to be in environments that work for them and looking for a job that is more inclusive organization that is more inclusive as the first step.

Of course we don't have as many always opportunities, but there are several ways to, if you are able to find a workplace that is generally open to some formal job crafting, you could show your zone good at this particular piece, that it will benefit your organization to give you more on that piece and a less of things where you do not Excel, because really it is in their best interests to have people working with their strengths.

So you could do this kind of job crafting when you are already in a job that kind of feeds you in January. And you figured out your overall industry from there, you could engage in job crafting and negotiating and just showing this is my portfolio of work. How do we create a situation where I do more of that? And sometimes more progressive organizations could allow you to trade with coworkers.

Another thing is to maybe engaging with people outside. So let's say people in your workplace just don't want, don't see you because they kind of see the quirkiness and they don't see how good you are. Sometimes getting external validation is helpful, or for people who don't see you, because we know that content is not who we're judged at. So if you can judge on your content without your presentation and put yourself in the situations where you are evaluated on your work products,

that usually is going to work to your advantage. And there's probably other things in the article. Yeah, we got a link that as well, so everything we're mentioning and you will share your LinkedIn contact as well. So everything will be in the show notes, but time is running out. But I have to ask you about the moral injury at work,

because this is such a important topic to talk about. Do you want to say a few words about this? What, what is it and how does it affect neurodivergent people differently, maybe Ride, which is exactly my newest piece from this week in general, moral injury was first identified in veterans. And it just seemed that there was something more, not just PTSD and not just experiencing something that made you fear for your life.

So mortality, danger of death, but people would also report a just I can't. I did it. And I feel so horrible about doing this. And why would people force me into doing those things? Like why would somebody force me into harming civilians? So that is where they deal of moral injury came from with John and Shay. And then after that,

it was Reese. It was studied in healthcare doctors and nurses. And one of my colleagues on that callus actually did a study on nurses who were pushed into doing things that went against their conscience. So that made me think about how it's going to apply to other workplace situations and other occupations. And there is research on teachers in journalism, different kinds of first respondents.

So they will have done this research, but talking about people in general and a variety of occupations event, you know, selling things when they know they're terrible quality, but you're just, you just feel like in order to feed your family, you have to push those things that are actually bad and convince vulnerable people to buy them over time. This kind of moral distress can add up to moral injury.

And we talked about empathy and neurodivergent people, there's also some research that shows that neuro diversion, people are sensitive to injustice more than average people and committed to doing the right thing more than average people. The, so that kind of makes you think perhaps neuro diversion, people are more likely to talk heatedly, feel moral injury. Yeah, definitely. If you look at a lot of qualitative data that we're looking through and the stories that people are sharing,

there is absolutely a pattern that men and women are divergent. People allow jobs, just Coon, do what that was expected to have them specifically because that just couldn't bring themselves to override their values. So sometimes they say, well, autistic people are rigid, but another side of it is actually very hard to make us do things that go against our values.

Some people go with rigidity or people can call it a, you know, come meet me to the right thing. So, so far the qualitative phase of the research I've been doing dental and this shows that there is a pattern, but my hope is to also do the quantitative part, which is why both in the fast company article the on moral injury in general and specialist or an article on moral injury and or diversity that they're so linked to sign up for the next stage of the study,

because I definitely would like to look more into this. Thank you so much for sharing because yeah, it's, it's really interesting. And it's also thinks I believe some things that I haven't thought about, but now when you talk about this, it makes total sense and it just, the data validates what I've been experiencing. So I'm really interested and curious to see your further research on this.

So if people would like to connect or learn more about you, where can people find you on the online space? Well, the easiest way to find is my LinkedIn profile. It a lacrosse lava. It's pretty easy to Google. It's probably going to come up. Ian from there, men of my articles are linked. My university program is also linked.

So you can find our graduate program, a master science and industrial organizational psychology. It's all linked under my contact. Also the consulting group that I work with focus leader is also linked there. So my LinkedIn page is kind of a hub for all the different thing that I'm trying to do, which, which is all about, you know, creating better workplaces.

It's just, you do it through writing. You do it through consulting and training in organizations, and then you do it by training other people who hopefully will go and help organizations create as much fairness and inclusion as humanly possible. So I will link your profile under initial notes. So people can just click and find you and connect and follow you and see the next articles coming out.

So is there anything else that you would like to share? Something that you wish people knew or something you wish you knew earlier? There's a lot of things that don't wish, but I think one thing I w I would say that it's never too late, because I was just actually earlier this morning talking to a group of women of certain age, and sometimes we'll start feeling like,

oh my gosh, like there's so much to do and Zola time, but overall, it's, it's a very positive way to think about life that, okay. So we'll wish we knew something earlier and we can say, well, I wasn't informed above this, but it's, it doesn't have to define what you do from now on. And honestly, if I had been identified as a child,

obviously, where I grew up there weren't too many resources, but knowing my parents, they probably would have put me into ABA. And I don't know if that would have been any better, what transpired. So just I'll be a lot of people feel like, oh my gosh, I wish I were identified earlier, but it depends on how society treats you.

There are situations when you identified early on, you are accepted in to the, you are toward the, you don't have to drastically change yourself. But in many cases, people who are identified early were pushed very hard to change themselves and be who they are. So that's definitely not something to regret and, and whatever your laugh experience is, it is what it is.

So I just try to use it in all the different examples for how can people and organizations and do better things. Thank you. Thank you. Beautiful words. And I couldn't have said it better. Thank you for sharing and thank you for being here and we'll stay in contact that I'm looking forward for your next article. Thank you so much. It's been absolute delight to meet you.

Bye. What a wonderful conversation. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did, and such an amazing stories, such an amazing resource. And I hope you will click on the links and read her amazing articles. And I'm really curious to hear your thoughts. So you're also welcome to share your thoughts and email me@helloatunleashmonday.com. You can also subscribe to the various sporadic newsletter at unleashmonday.com.

You'll also find a link there to the amazing community for gifted and twice exceptional women. I'm inviting you to join us. It's a very amazing space to share and learn and grow together. And if you want to support this podcast, then please like subscribe and leave a written review on apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. And that will help the algorithm,

show it to other people and just make it more accessible for others. So I'm reading all your reviews. So thank so much for your time words and thank you for your time for being here and wishing you a wonderful day. See you in two weeks.