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The Talent Pool Your Company Probably Overlooks
Robert Austin, a professor at Ivey Business School, and Gary Pisano, a professor at Harvard Business School, talk about the growing number of pioneering firms that are actively...
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Robert Austin, a professor at Ivey Business School, and Gary Pisano, a professor at Harvard Business School, talk about the growing number of pioneering firms that are actively identifying and hiring more employees with autism spectrum disorder and other forms of neurodiversity. Global companies such as SAP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are customizing their hiring and onboarding processes to enable highly-talented individuals, who might have eccentricities that keep them from passing a job interview — to succeed and deliver uncommon value. Austin and Pisano talk about the challenges, the lessons for managers and organizations, and the difference made in the lives of an underemployed population. Austin and Pisano are the co-authors of the article, “Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage” in the May-June 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review.
CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch in for Sarah Green Carmichael. There’s a parallel universe out there where the people applying for jobs at your organization are major contributors, helping it to grow, transform, and succeed. But in this universe, in reality, your hiring process is probably rejecting these candidates after the very first interview if they even make it that far.
Now there are always hires that you wish your company had made and others you wish that it hadn’t. But our guests on the show today say there is a population of highly-talented workers that your company is probably overlooking, and that it’s time for that to change. We’re talking about people with autism spectrum disorder and other conditions sometimes associated with higher-than-average abilities, like dyslexia, ADHD, and social anxiety disorders. One term for all of this is neurodiversity, people who can have eccentricities that can be challenging in a workplace, but also people who can bring singular skills to their work.
That’s something a growing number of pioneering firms around the world has been learning to manage. Here to help us see how these organizations are learning to unlock the potential of this often untapped workforce is Robert Austin—he’s a professor of information systems at Ivey Business School—and Gary Pisano, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. They wrote the article, “Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage.” It’s in the May June 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review. Rob and Gary, thanks so much for talking with the HBR IdeaCast.
ROBERT AUSTIN: Thanks for having us.
GARY PISANO: Great to be here.
CURT NICKISCH: What image do you think people in charge of talent, retention, and acquisition at companies– what image do you think they have of people from this population?
GARY PISANO: Have you seen the film The Accountant? Somebody kind of strange or worse, you know, Rain Man. I mean, I think those are the stereotypes, right? They are not going to blend, you know, socially—socially challenged and potentially difficult to communicate with.
And those are not necessarily inaccurate. Those are attributes of these conditions. But I think there are positive attributes. I think they tend to see the challenging attributes.
ROBERT AUSTIN: They have kind of a list of attributes you’re looking for. So they’re looking for team players, or they’re looking for people who make good eye contact. These are not particularly descriptive of many people who are neurodiverse. So they see things that kind of cause them to rule them out in job interviews and the like.
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. On the other hand, like, some of these films also show people who are highly competent and successful, right? So you’d think that human resource officers would be kind of after this hidden value.
GARY PISANO: Sure. The Accountant is maybe not the great example. Because he’s a pretty violent character. I’m not sure I want that individual in my organization.
ROBERT AUSTIN: He is very good at it accounting in the movie, though, right?
GARY PISANO: He’s extremely good at accounting, but yes.
ROBERT AUSTIN: Yeah, he finds things in the numbers that–
GARY PISANO: He does.
ROBERT AUSTIN: –people didn’t really want him to.
GARY PISANO: That’s right. But you’re right. I mean, many of these people, many people with kind of high-functioning autistic are extremely intelligent, and have capabilities in things like pattern recognition, and being able to spot things in details. And the ability to concentrate on some tasks, it’s just extraordinary ability.
I think they recognize that. They’re not ignorant of it at all. I think there’s all the other pieces that Rob mentioned that don’t fit their criteria. And so I think, historically, and in the vast majority of companies, that’s the kind of, well, we don’t—the challenge is employing these people. Potential costs, potential risks, in their mind I think, outweigh, OK, the benefits of it.
CURT NICKISCH: Until now. Some companies now are changing this. How is this coming about? Who’s doing this?
ROBERT AUSTIN: Many of the people that are being hired are being hired into job categories where there are scarcities. So there’s a general willingness in the job market to look at people you might not have looked at before, because otherwise a job might go unfilled.
CURT NICKISCH: What fields are they?
ROBERT AUSTIN: Well, I think some of them have to do with these analytic capabilities that, you know, we were talking about The Accountant, some facility with numbers, with pattern recognition. Often, some of the early examples were people who were going to be very systematic in work that requires a lot of exacting attention, but is quite repetitive and hard for a lot of neurotypical people to keep their attention on over a long period of time.
CURT NICKISCH: And when you say neurotypical, you’re talking about people like–
ROBERT AUSTIN: That’s the terminology that the neurodiverse community likes to use for the rest of us, the people who are not diagnosed. We are neurotypical.
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah.
GARY PISANO: But while folks label—and sometimes neurodiverse people label themselves that way and it can be helpful—maybe one way to get at the problem from a management point of view is just: forget the category. Start thinking about the attributes. In some sense, we’re making that point in the article. But I think a deeper point is, look, over time, we want to get away from these labels and just recognize that people are all quite different. And there is extraordinary talents to be developed in lots of people.
CURT NICKISCH: Right. What other qualities of neurodiverse or people on the autism spectrum, what other qualities do they bring that seems to make them such a good match for, in large part, data analytics, IT services work?
ROBERT AUSTIN: SAP, for example, has deployed people in its program. And I believe that it’s now up to 20 different categories. And some of them were areas that they did not anticipate. So for example, they have a couple of people in very customer-facing roles.
People are very different even on the spectrum. And so some of them turn out to be quite personable, quite creative. I think the early experiments were around jobs that were really repetitive but very exacting, things like software testing.
Other areas where people have been deployed are things like going through cyber security intrusion detection logs, which is, one of the characteristics of these kinds of tasks is that there’s a lot of noise and very little signal. And most of us kind of go crazy looking at things like that.
It’s kind of like if you were doing an assembly line quality control thing on an eight-hour shift, and you were going to see 10,000 cans, and you were looking for the two that were dented, and you were going to knock it off the conveyor belt or something, most people would miss the two cans. A lot of the people who are in these software testing programs for some of these companies would not miss the two cans.
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. This is really fascinating. And it’s interesting how generally these seem to be high-demand technical fields. So you have to ask the question, why have companies come to this group so late, only just now?
GARY PISANO: At some level, companies are getting serious about talent and the talent war in finding people, especially in some of these fields, it’s very hard to get people. So I think that’s part of the motivation.
I, however, think the second part is, 10 years ago, I think people were a little bit ashamed. They didn’t talk about it. If somebody had a child who was autistic, they might shy away from it. I think the stuff is just far, in a healthy way, out in the open now. People are much more willing to talk about it. And people are willing to share their stories.
And I think it’s not viewed as a defect. I think people are becoming positive in a really healthy way about it, so they’re looking to help. And I think some of it was motivated by people who had some connection to it.
ROBERT AUSTIN: The origins of this movement, if you want to call it that, probably date back to 2004 when a gentleman named Thorkil Sonne—his third son, Lars, was diagnosed with autism. And he had what I would characterize as an unconventional response, Thorkil did.
He was working for a tech company. And he quit his job, mortgaged his house, and started a company to employ people on the autism spectrum. And that company, Specialisterne—which in Danish means the specialists. The specialists really did a lot of the hard work of working out how we hire people like this, how we create processes of recruiting and selection that don’t rely so heavily on one-on-one interviewing.
CURT NICKISCH: How does this work?
ROBERT AUSTIN: The idea is that you implement some sort of an interaction that’s not a high-pressure, one-on-one, you’re on the spot for half an hour like a job interview. The original name for the specialists was hangouts. So they do hangouts, which are like half a day. They involve casual interaction and more comfortable interaction between managers and potential job candidates.
And they go through a series of games slash exercises together. Then they go into a longer process, partly a selection process, and partly a training process. And so eventually, they would have them work in teams assembling various kinds of solutions to problems that they were given, like build a pill dispenser for someone that needs a pill dispensed every day.
Through the course of a process like that, you can actually see quite a lot about what people are capable of. Even if they don’t look you in the eye in an interview setting, you can see that they have quite a lot to offer.
GARY PISANO: This is actually saying, let’s simulate the work environment. Let’s put you and do not this kind of artificial one-on-one with questions. And good rehearsing helps people a lot with interviews. But let’s do the projects. Let’s work on some projects. Let’s see how you work.
So it’s a try out. Because think about what you do as a sport try out. You do the sport. They have you hit the ball or whatever it is. They watch you do the activity. And then they make assessments.
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. Why doesn’t all hiring happen that way?
ROBERT AUSTIN: That’s one of the things that companies are getting as insights out of this, is that maybe there are things that we’re doing in response to these specific challenges that might make sense for our business at large.
CURT NICKISCH: What are the hiring rates like at these places? Or what have companies experienced with these programs? How’s it working out?
ROBERT AUSTIN: Remarkably, the first batch of candidates at SAP found—they were people with master’s degrees in electrical engineering who had graduated with honors. One of them had a patent. But for one reason or another, usually they had had some difficulty in the hiring process.
So you find somebody with a double master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science who has a patent, but when you talk to him he doesn’t look you in the eye.
GARY PISANO: Or wears headsets.
ROBERT AUSTIN: Yeah, or he has to wear headsets to be effective, or the guy who had to have his shoelaces really tight for him to concentrate.
CURT NICKISCH: Gotcha. If you’re in the middle of an interview and you reach down and tie your shoes again and again, that’s–
ROBERT AUSTIN: Yeah, and he had to do it about every 10 minutes. So in a half hour interview, he’s going to lean over two or three times to tighten his shoelaces. That’s probably going to seem weird, right?
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah.
GARY PISANO: I mean, the beauty of this population is they’re not very good at gaming the interview process, which is, in some sense, a good thing. But as I said before, kind of half joking, but people do rehearse interviews. People get polished at interviews. And it makes it very hard, I think, to select.
These folks tend not to be very strategic when it comes to social interactions. And that’s actually, in some sense, a good thing. But then you got to change your hiring process to recognize, actually, this is a really good population to be interviewing because you’re going to learn an awful lot. You’re going to kind of get the unvarnished truth.
Eventually, we need to go to is just kind of different hiring processes that enable companies to identify, and recruit, and develop talent that could really help them. Very often, they don’t self-label for a good reason. And by the way, some people might not be fully aware that they–
ROBERT AUSTIN: Yeah, a lot of people aren’t diagnosed.
GARY PISANO: They’re not diagnosed.
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, wow. Rob, you have an example of those people with university degrees and a patent. And why is it so easy for universities to open the doors to this population and find ways for them to advance, but companies can’t let them get past an interview?
ROBERT AUSTIN: Yeah, in addition to the tech industry, universities are a place where people who are neurodiverse end up sometimes.
GARY PISANO: Yeah, absolutely. You think about even professors–
ROBERT AUSTIN: Yup.
CURT NICKISCH: Sure.
GARY PISANO: –who would not probably get a job, would not fit into a corporate research lab, say, or a corporate position, but who are extraordinarily successful at academics. But there’s things about them that would be maybe not acceptable in a corporate setting.
CURT NICKISCH: Right or wrong.
GARY PISANO: Right or wrong. And yet they can thrive in academia, because there’s a little more tolerance.
CURT NICKISCH: Well, maybe HR departments should hire some university admissions officers.
GARY PISANO: Sure, potentially. I mean, we don’t want to be too critical. I understand the corporate HR function. It’s challenging. And I think HR departments are starting to change. I think they’re growing, and they’re evolving.
They are risk averse. They tend to be risk averse. They do think about policies that prevent liability or prevent disruptions in the workplace. And they can restrain innovation in an organization, that is, organizational innovation.
They should be enabling it. I think that’s what a good HR leader does, they think about innovative workforce practices. And like any form of innovation, there is experimentation, learning, and risk, mistakes. And you get better over time.
CURT NICKISCH: You gave some examples in the article of, for instance, one neurodiverse worker saying to a colleague, you’re terrible at your job. On the other hand, you also talk about some amazing successes. One employee at SAP came up with a technical fix that saved the company an estimated $40 million.
ROBERT AUSTIN: Yeah, he was part of a team that did that.
CURT NICKISCH: OK.
ROBERT AUSTIN: But yeah, it was about four or five people. And the people on the team give him a lot of credit. Well, one of the things that I think companies are discovering– and SAP talks about this a lot– that if you’re going to compete based on innovation, you need things to jolt you. You need to encounter things that aren’t the same things you were used to encountering.
And so sometimes, having somebody who’s overly honest in the work setting, or somebody who sees things very differently– I think we use the example in the article about, a team went into an organization and they were not very happy. The team wasn’t very happy with how the organization went into crisis mode every time they launched something.
And so they pushed the issue. Why does it have to be crisis mode? And the company came around to thinking, well, you’re right. We’ve gotten too used to this. We need to do better.
CURT NICKISCH: That’s where the perfectionist or the intolerance for to mitigate that or let things slide really, really paid off.
GARY PISANO: And the unvarnished honesty. So people spend a lot of time, I find, in corporations, larger companies, figuring out the right way to couch things and communicate in order to not create a political stir. A lot of energy goes into that. I think there’s a tendency in this population to not do that. So they give the unvarnished—that’s what so nice that people find challenging of interacting with them, that they get the unvarnished truth. It’s not a bad thing, actually.
ROBERT AUSTIN: No, not at all. There’s an executive, VR Ferose at SAP, who he was the managing director of SAP Labs in India where they first started experimenting with these ideas. And Ferose, when he gives a talk about this stuff, he often leads with that advantage, that these folks are honest about things we need to hear.
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. What are companies discovering as they figure out how to bring people into the organization? How do you mix up the teams to get the most benefit out of that honesty and that innovation potential? What are they learning?
ROBERT AUSTIN: Well, there’s a lot of experimentation. SAP is putting people into positions within their own company. So they tend to put people into different places here and there. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, though, is—they’ve created these pods, partly because this is how they’ve created a service offering to their clients.
So the people who are in what HPE calls its Dandelion Program are actually being placed into client organizations. And these pods are a way of kind of wrapping a little support ecosystem around them. Now it doesn’t enter—it sounds like it might have high overhead. But actually, HPE reports that their Dandelion software testing teams are, they believe, about 30% more productive than non-Dandelion testing teams.
CURT NICKISCH: Wow.
ROBERT AUSTIN: So 30%, that’s real money.
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. You talked about business models shaping this. And I wonder if differently structured organizations, if that makes a difference?
GARY PISANO: Well, there’s a paradox. Because on the one hand, these organizations to do these kind of programs have to be quite flexible and innovative in their approach. But on the other hand, these programs require structure. And the individuals actually require structure.
ROBERT AUSTIN: Right. And support.
CURT NICKISCH: And support. We’ve heard that word.
GARY PISANO: So it can’t be just like a kind of a free-for-all, like we bring you in and anything goes here. You do what you want. That’ll be bad for those folks. We used to think what organizations, some aren’t very structured. Some aren’t very flexible. These actually require elements of both.
ROBERT AUSTIN: I just had a phone call this morning with Hart Schaffner in Marx that makes men’s suits. And they’re going at it in a very different way. They’ve been focused on how to employ people further down the spectrum, in terms of not everybody is super high functioning. And depending on what they’re trying to bring about, they create this support structure in different ways.
CURT NICKISCH: One of the things that struck me in the article was the number of people who’ve been working in these programs, how much they talked about how much this has made them better managers. Why is that?
GARY PISANO: When an organization is somewhat homogeneous in terms of the way people think, the way they behave, the way they act, managing is a lot easier. I think that’s what we should—we’ve tended to homogenize organizations. And we lose a lot with homogenization. We lose a ton.
You gain a lot as you get more diverse in lots of ways. But it’s more challenging. And I think as managers have had to deal with these challenges, they’ve become better managers. They’ve enjoyed mastering those challenges. And I think it positions them to deal with other forms of diversity and kind of complex problems.
CURT NICKISCH: That’s really interesting. What’s an example of that?
ROBERT AUSTIN: This is one of the things that we heard people talk about a lot, is that, with this population, I have to think about them as individuals. Because they each come with particular accommodations that I have to make or I can’t maximize their ability to contribute. Maybe I can’t even activate their abilities to contribute without doing that.
But if you then turn and apply that philosophy to your other employees, you may find that you can make them more effective as well. So we talked to one executive who emphasized this a lot. He said, there’s no doubt that it’s made me a better manager.
On his drive in to work every day, he calls one of his employees every day. And he talks to them about the company, and what’s going on with the company, and what they think the issues are, what they think the future ought to be. And he works his way through every single one of his employees.
And it probably takes two or three years. But then when he finishes, he starts over again. And that’s a pretty individual orientation. As Gary said, it’s a lot of work to do that.
GARY PISANO: I think the other example is thinking about patterns of communication. Because some of these folks have challenges with how they communicate, or they don’t communicate, or they communicate too bluntly, I think it’s forced the managers to think about how the patterns of communication are working in their particular organization, and their particular group, or their department.
And any time you can be more reflective about how people should be communicating, that’s beneficial, whether you have the neurodiverse workforce, neurotypical. I mean, it just doesn’t matter. That’s a valuable skill to have as a manager and a leader is to really understand and think about the right ways in which people can communicate.
CURT NICKISCH: We’ve talked about how this is a work in process. There’s a lot of learning going on in a lot of different types of companies in different parts of the world. I just wonder, yeah, how you see this developing from here?
ROBERT AUSTIN: You know, according to the CDC, the incidence of autism in the population is 1 in 88.
CURT NICKISCH: This is the US Centers for Disease Control, right?
ROBERT AUSTIN: Yup exactly. If we had add in other neurodiverse conditions, that makes the number even bigger. So there’s a lot of people who are neurodiverse in the population. Boy, there’s a huge population out there. And at best, we’re talking about thousands of people who we’ve affected so far.
CURT NICKISCH: From that point of view, there’s clearly a lot of untapped value. But we’re also talking about a lot of lives that would be affected by this and are given more meaning in their work and careers too.
ROBERT AUSTIN: Yup. One of the things Anka Wittenberg said to me is—the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer for SAP—boy, do we have a lot of good stories. We would like to have a lot more numbers that show net benefit. Because it’s inherently challenging to quantify some of the benefits from these programs.
CURT NICKISCH: Gary?
GARY PISANO: There was a fantastic article in The Boston Globe, interview with a very famous biologist, George Church. He’s arguably one of the best biologists of the century. And he talked about how he is narcoleptic and how it’s actually helped him. It was just a great example of neurodiversity as a positive.
And in an organization who has some doubt about this, would you like to have a person like that with that kind of horsepower in your organization? Or would you have wanted to filter them out in the first round of human resource interviews if they dozed off in the middle? I’m not saying everybody has got that kind of mind. He’s a very, very special individual.
The neurodiversity is kind of part and parcel of what makes them particularly spectacular thinkers. So it’s not a liability. It’s kind of part—I think the term, a feature, not a bug—and so getting organizations to recognize that. And it’s heartbreaking to think about all these individuals who are being underemployed or unemployed.
That’s just bad for the economy. And it’s just bad socially. It’s just bad– somebody in their mid-to-late 20s who is just extremely intelligent and yet can’t find a job in an economy that is short of skills of this type. I’m hoping companies will sort of see this as win-win. This is not corporate social responsibility.
And I think, hopefully—and we’ll be expanding to understanding other forms of neurodiversity. I think we’re right at the beginning of understanding that from both the scientific and biological point of view. But what Rob and I can speak to is not that so much as the kind of organizational and management points of view.
CURT NICKISCH: What’s the biggest misconception about neurodiverse people that you’d like to clear up?
GARY PISANO: That they can’t work in organizations, that they’re brilliant. But I don’t need a lone wolf. I need a team player. They’re never going to fit into a team. That’s, I think, a big misconception. I think these company programs to date have demonstrated enough examples where people have come into these organizations and are operating incredibly well in teams.
ROBERT AUSTIN: And interacting with customers too.
GARY PISANO: Yeah.
CURT NICKISCH: Well, Rob and Gary, it’s been a real pleasure. Thanks so much for talking on the HBR IdeaCast.
GARY PISANO: Thank you very much for having us.
ROBERT AUSTIN: Thanks for having us.
CURT NICKISCH: That’s Robert Austin of Ivey Business School and Gary Pisano of Harvard Business School. They wrote the article “Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage.” It’s in the May-June 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review and at HBR.org. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Curt Nickisch.