Helen Jeffries

When did you discover that you were autistic? What was that like?

I was diagnosed 6 years ago and had gradually come to the realisation a couple of years before that. I’d had a horrible time at school and in my early career being bullied. This is so common, it is hard to find an autistic person who hasn't been bullied, we seem to attract bullying behaviour somehow. My first realisation that I was autistic happened when an autistic friend noticed me insisting I put skimmed milk in my team because I couldn’t bear the taste of other kinds of milk. She said to me ‘you do realise that hypersensitivity to taste is a symptom of autism, don't you?’ And I said ‘no’. The sensory aspects of autism are really little known, and I mention it because it was how I came to realise.  

There is such a strong gender expectation that women should be smiley, sociable and make everyone feel comfortable and autism makes these things difficult for me. As a female, my experience has been the stress and the mental health damage of hiding autism rather than expressing it. Because I failed at the “coded female” sociable behaviours, I thought I must be lazy and just needed to try hard enough. I internalised a huge amount of guilt: it was my fault I was different, and if I could sort myself out I these things wouldn't happen. So when I got the formal diagnosis it was a huge relief because it meant all these things were not my fault. It was an immense liberation. My mental health had been quite badly affected by continually hiding who I was but I think it's gradually recovering now. So my diagnosis gives me permission to be me- occasionally.

What did you learn in your first leadership role about leadership and yourself?

All the things I learned in my early leadership roles were of course skewed because I didn’t know I was autistic. I thought I was being a rotten leader because I was getting things wrong, when I just needed to adapt myself a bit. For example I had lots of feedback that I was secretive and wasn’t taking people on a journey. Later, I realised people were expecting to hear me talk through a neurotypical thought process and they thought I had a thought process that I was hiding. Whereas, in fact, I was just doing the best I could with the brain that I’ve got. The way my brain works is that all the information goes in, nothing happens for a while and then the solution comes out in a lump. You can see that might look like me being secretive. The only way I can actually “take people on a thought-process journey” is to have the solution come out of my brain in a lump and then work out what the neurotypical thought process would have been and fake going on that process with the team. However no-one’s going to manage a deceit that complex effectively.  I much prefer to explain that my brain is just different – when I can.

What do you do now?

Now I’m further on in my career I have the confidence to explain that my brain just works differently to other peoples’. Which is the only real solution because although I can “fake neurotypical” fairly well it's never going to be authentic leadership. As I’ve become more open I realise it's a huge privilege being in the Senior Civil Service as people think the things that I do that are different can be inspirational leadership. If I did the exact same things at a lower grade it might be seen as me being a nuisance. So there’s a different perception of you at different levels of seniority.

How has being autistic contributed to your career's success (and where has it been difficult?) 

As an autistic person working with people is a bit like speaking in a second language. If we were to go and live on the continent of Europe and speak another language all day we’d get very good at it. It would never be our native language, but we might be better at the grammar and syntax because we’d learnt the language intellectually rather than picking it up from conversation. Someone who’s speaks English fluently as a second language is often more precise and correct than native speakers because they are more rules based. In a similar way, sometimes I am actually better at speaking “"people” than neurotypical people around me because I have to do everything by thinking and don't fall into the Thinking Fast and Slow [Daniel Kahneman] trap of making assumptions based on instinct. 

And because I have to concentrate so hard, I tend to notice changes in people as well. So if a member of my team looks a bit down or different in some way I am likely to notice it. I am quite good at picking up that something isn't right but I don't make assumptions about it because I know that I can't, whereas a neurotypical leader might think ‘oh its probably…’ and get it wrong. So there are some advantages, but the main disadvantage is being so exhausted all the time..

Another strength is that because I don't think like everyone else it's quite easy for me to think outside the box and come up with new solutions. For example, I found it quite easy to dive into working on Brexit when after years of working in Europe lots of people were thrown by it.  In a neurotypical thought process you have lots of barriers of what are acceptable solutions, so you only see a narrow range, whereas I see a huge range and then work out what the barriers should have been. This meant I could see some wider options. 

Actually it's similar in any sort of crisis or fast moving work. It's useful being autistic because you're truthful, factual and blunt.  In slower moving work you have to talk around issues much more but if the figurative house is on fire you don’t have to spend 20 mins talking about everyone’s feelings before acting. Crisis work has certainly suited me. 

It's also important to be managed by people who don't need someone who can guess what they mean or instinctively do what they would do. Some fast-moving teams work by everyone being the same. For the sake of getting things done, there is a group of people who think identically so that they don't even need to talk to each other, making this more efficient. There is not room for diversity of thought, and that doesn't work for me. When I think of all the occasions when people try to tip me a hint that I haven't picked up it’s pretty worrying! Now I say: “I think you are hinting at something but I haven't gathered at what it is?” to check. 

You have written about how an autism diagnosis shouldn’t mean people step back from leadership roles. It would be great to hear more about you as a leader.

[Trigger warning – references to suicide] 

Even before I knew I was autistic, what always mattered to me was treating people right. I mentored someone autistic in a different organisation who was being managed out because his managers wanted him to need fewer reasonable adjustments, which of course wasn’t possible.  Their success metric for him in his job was “how well is he pretending not to be autistic?” which was ruining his mental health.   Eventually he attempted suicide – thank heavens he was prevented, and is now doing much better.  But that incident lit the fire, really! 

Sadly autistic people are much more likely to kill ourselves than neurotypical people – not because autism makes you suicidal as such, but because living in a world not designed for you where you’re pressured to hide who you actually are can be too much to bear.  This is not OK. Autistic people are a large minority of maybe 1 in 50 people, but our life expectancy seems to be much less than non-autistic people. We may have difficulty communicating with medical professionals and so go undiagnosed, we struggle to pass interviews and we frequently get bullied at work. We’re an oppressed minority really. So my values are that I am doing everything I can to change that. If you look at the progress of inclusion of other groups, these movements go through stages from: 

• ”the minority doesn’t exist”; to 
• being prepared to accept occasional individuals from the minority but not the group as a whole; to 
• “members of this group are acceptable as long as they don’t have power”; to 
• backlash; but then hopefully 
• acceptance and equality. 

I think we are at the second stage with autism. I fear people are saying to themselves “Helen’s all right but autistic people in general aren't.” We are on the cusp of acceptance but the world isn’t yet happy for us to have influence.  

I guess my whole thinking is how to persuade people to go on a journey with autistic people to true acceptance. That's my strategy for changing people's minds. It comes down to the three strategic pillars of the Civil Service Neurodiversity Network which are to: 

• get people to know how many autistic people there are (educate);
• get the basics of management done right for autistic people (enable); and 
• identify and publicise senior role models (empower). 

And if you get things right for autistic people, you get them right for everyone else. We autistics tend to be like canaries in a coal mine for bad management atmospheres:  we suffer first and most from bad management, but will be quick to benefit from good management.

What would change if organisations (such as the civil service) really embraced the value of different minds and different approaches?

The civil service reflects the society it serves, which is quite right.  Unfortunately, society doesn’t yet embrace all forms of different minds, and so by extension neither does the civil service.  If we really embraced autistic people as equals, we'd have a lot more autistic people in work. We would unleash an awful lot of talent. It would also be great in hard economic terms. Nationally we've got low unemployment at present, so getting jobs filled by autistic people would be really positive. It’s a shame to have people on benefits who can and would like to work. I'm putting this in terms of hard economics because I'm being cynical and pragmatic. But yeah, if we can have fewer suicide attempts by desperate autistics, that'd be nice as well.

Your blog the Autistic Civil Servant is great at myth busting on autism. What are the key messages that you would like to share with autistic people aspiring to leadership positions?

My key message to autistic civil servants would be not to forget about some kinds of evidence.  We are usually very good at dealing with facts and evidence, but a slip that we can easily make is to forget that people’s reactions and emotions are also part of the evidence.  For example, it’s important to take account of the political situation as one of the facts and you can’t just ignore it.   Autistic people can do leadership jobs and many of us are already doing them.  We’re getting more visible and the myth that autistic people can’t be leaders is gradually being chipped away. 

My message to neurotypical people managing autistic people would be that it's really important to listen and not make assumptions.  It makes sense to judge autistic people slowly rather than on your instincts so you can set aside your prejudices. If I said: “don't judge autistic people”, then that would be making us less than human – you have to be able to judge us, but don’t just go on your gut reaction that we’re “a bit weird”.