Jennie Brooks, host of the Unstoppable Together podcast, sits down with CEO of Specialisterne North America, Alan Kriss. Listen as they discuss employment challenges for neurodivergent employees, simple steps all of us can take to create a more equitable workplace, and Specialisterne’s recent partnership with Booz Allen to tap into this amazing talent pool.
Jennie Brooks:
Welcome to Booz Allen Hamilton's Unstoppable Together podcast, a series of stories that unite us and empower each of us to change the world. I'm Jennie Brooks with Booz Allen Hamilton, and I'm passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion. Please join me in conversation with a diverse group of thought leaders to explore what makes them, and all of us, unstoppable.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the unstoppable together podcast. I'm Jennie Brooks, and I'm excited today to speak with the CEO of Specialisterne in North America, Alan Kriss. Alan, welcome to the podcast.
Alan Kriss:
Oh, I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Jennie Brooks:
I look forward to our conversation. Can we start by your sharing with us a little bit about Specialisterne?
Alan Kriss:
I first got involved with Specialisterne when a colleague, or a friend actually, approached me because he had heard this fellow named Thorkil Sonne speaking on the radio, talking about this business that he'd started in 2004. It was a business that employed people with autism and put them to work doing consulting projects for other businesses, mostly IT consulting and that sort of thing. This fellow asked me, because at the time I was doing consulting helping people with startups, so he asked me if I'd help him to get this thing off the ground. I said, "Sure, that sounds really interesting."
We went out for a sushi lunch and we were supposed to give him ... The idea with a consultant is you give a person an hour and then you see if it turns into something interesting. Really, it was dinner time by the time we left the restaurant because we were still talking about it, it was such an interesting topic for me.
What made it so interesting was that I came from a business background, and as a business person, I saw a couple of really key things. One, it found a way to tap into a talent pool of people who were not well engaged in the employment market, it was a profitable organization, there was real value in that talent pool, and it also had solved some problems that I'd always seen in my career so far, which were related to inefficiencies, or inadequacies really, in the way HR functions and works, particularly in the way that it values and assesses and values people. This was an organization that seemed to be finding its way around this for an outlier group of people and it just seems so fascinating that you could make a business out of doing something like that.
Specialisterne does this work globally, so we're in dozens of countries around the world. We help employers to find talented people and to help to bring those people in a successful way, leverage them and their talents and build careers. Our goal is to help to employ a million people around the world. For us, that's kind of like a north star. What that really means to us is that we want to change the way the employment market values this talent pool and help to lead to engaging a broader diversity of people into the workforce.
Jennie Brooks:
Okay. How many people across the globe have autism? When you said it was an untapped part of the talent pool, how many people are we talking about?
Alan Kriss:
Well, it depends on the statistics that you actually follow and how well you can and confidently extrapolate. I guess the most recent statistics from the CDC in the US are that one in 44 8-year-olds are being diagnosed with autism. The numbers have, over the years, changed and grown, and there are a lot of different reasons for that. We're talking about autism specifically now. Specialisterne focuses on autism and other neurodivergence, so we can talk about that as well, but we're talking about hundreds of millions of people globally.
In the US, the estimates are that about 50,000 people with autism specifically graduate from college on an annual basis. The other important statistic in autism specifically is that about 80 to 85% of those people are unemployed or underemployed. The way you can think about that is that people are either not working or they're not working to the potential of their both ambition as well as their capabilities.
Jennie Brooks:
Wow.
Alan Kriss:
It's a huge undertapped talent pool. If you're a business person and you're in global fight for talent, that's a good thing.
Jennie Brooks:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). You used the term north star for your goal of one million. Where are you at on your way towards that goal today?
Alan Kriss:
I guess you'd say that we're in the early phases. We're looking for a transformational change and I think that we're seeing that happening in a few different ways. There's sort of a maturity that the market is going to take. When we first started doing this in 2004 and right through the first 10 years of that sort of thing, there was just a small recognition of the idea that you could build a business off of working with autistic individuals, particularly. There really wasn't a lot of talk about the concept of neurodiversity and all the other people who face similar employment barriers to people with autism. As we've gone along, it's become clear that most businesses that we work with really do recognize there's value in that talent pool and are interested in accessing that talent pool, but they don't know how.
I think the next phase is that businesses will start getting better at finding that talent pool and will start to make processes more inclusive in a way that will move towards really inclusive and systemic change, rather than special processes to hire special groups of people.
Jennie Brooks:
Okay. I'm fascinated by that. You're talking about processes and finding people in the talent pool and making the match and making the connections.
Alan Kriss:
Sure.
Jennie Brooks:
Let's step back for a second. You used the term neurodiversity, neurodivergent, I think you said earlier. Can you share with us exactly what that means?
Alan Kriss:
Yeah, sure. There are a lot of different types of diversity. You think about gender diversity and racial diversity or cultural diversity, there's so many different types of diversity. Diversity is a big topic nowadays. Some people think about diverse abilities. Oftentimes, disability gets overlooked in that conversation, as a talent pool for example.
There is this concept of neurodiversity. The concept of neurodiversity is that the human condition is characterized by people being differently wired, from a neurodevelopmental perspective or from a neurological perspective. There's a neurotypical type and then there are people who diverge from typical. Our society is based around the way that the typical has developed and interacts, but there are outliers, and the outliers are what we call, or what this movement calls, neurodivergent.
Neurodivergent individuals, there's so many different ways we've categorized and diagnosed people with things that we call conditions, such as autism, ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia. People have episodic conditions sometimes, so sometimes those fall into mental health. I think from a practical perspective, there are these ideas of neurodiversity and then there's neurotypical and neurodivergent and I think it's important to help people to understand what those words mean and that sort of thing, but in the end, from an employment perspective, it doesn't really matter. What we need are systems or processes that capture all people and bring them in and leverage their capabilities and strengths so that we can all work together.
Jennie Brooks:
Can you just walk us through a little bit of some of the key things for us to think about as you view that transformation, the 30,000-foot view, this transformation from candidate to employer?
Alan Kriss:
You said a few different things there. You asked about the candidate's perspective, and there's also the employer's perspective.
Jennie Brooks:
Yes.
Alan Kriss:
I think from the 30,000-foot view, the way I would approach that question is to say that there's a lot of bias in the systems that we use in talent management and a lot of is systemic bias. What we found is that we work with, as I said earlier, I used the word outliers, we work with outliers. Oftentimes, outliers break systems. When you fix the systems to manage and support the outliers, what you get are better systems that help and work better for everybody. What's really interesting in working with this talent pool is that we're constantly finding ways to break HR and make it work better.
If we bring it down a level, the most obvious example, or one of the best examples of universal design concept, is that people who use wheelchairs, they need built environments that allow them to access spaces better. We started building, when I was young, we built ramps for wheelchairs and so people could get into a building, but of course they couldn't access the washrooms. Now we build things flat. Everybody's better off though. People who use strollers, carts and shopping things are better off. People just don't have to worry about steps anymore.
In HR, it's the same thing. The bias that's in HR can be removed and we can have better ways of finding and assessing and selecting people that will lead to better employment outcomes. A more diverse population can come in and employers can find better matches for talent. We've seen the outcomes from the type of work that we do that lead to better productivity, lower turnover, more motivation, more innovation, and all those sorts of things.
Jennie Brooks:
Your organization comes in and partners with the employer.
Alan Kriss:
Correct. I'll give you a concrete example. The barrier, or the step in this case, in comparison to what we were saying before about physical barriers for people, the step oftentimes is a resume and the reliance on the resume. Different people take different paths, and oftentimes, for people who've taken an alternative path towards wherever they're getting to, the resume doesn't look so good and so a system might filter it out, never even get a chance to look at it, or a person might filter it out.
If you get past the resume process, then you get into an interview. Now, there's been research since the '50s and '60s that says that neither a resume nor an interview is an optimal method for predicting outcomes in job success.
Jennie Brooks:
Wow.
Alan Kriss:
There are much better tools that are out there, and yet we still rely on these types of systems. What we set out to do is to find a better way to assess and select talent so that we could actually get to the real core issue, which is, does this person have the talents and the capabilities and the motivation to do well in the job, and if so, then they're a good match, not what do they do well in a performative situation where they talk about what they can do. Instead, we create environments where people can comfortably show what they can do and prove that they have the capability to do that.
In our case, usually, we're doing that just for neurodivergent individuals, but it works for all individuals. Most people, when you ask them, do you think an interview is a good way to assess for talent, most people will say no. You ask most managers if they think that an interview is a really good way to assess somebody for talent and they'll say, "Well, no, not really."
Jennie Brooks:
Wow. Then when a candidate is hired, are there additional barriers for their continued growth and development, realizing their potential? I keep going back to what you said earlier about being underemployed. Are there other barriers that you work with employers to break down?
Alan Kriss:
Absolutely. There are a few. One example is how people are onboarded. Oftentimes, when you start a new job, there's little, if any, structure whatsoever. What we've found is that the candidates that work with do really well with structure. It turns out that everybody does well with structure. When you show up to your new job, if your manager's not there, nobody's expecting you to show up, you're not really sure what you're supposed to do, what your goals are, you're not sure where you're supposed to sit. All of these things can be uncomfortable and can lead to what we call tethered starts. Many employees start their jobs this way, but they don't need to. What we find is that if we help hiring managers or team leads to put a plan in place for a person to onboard in an effective way, that plan can become useful for all following employees to onboard as well, and then it leads to fewer tethered starts for everybody.
Whereas, you really tend, in most jobs, not to be trying to weed out people who don't do well on their own all the time. Many jobs are ones where, once a person gets comfortable, they can be really successful. We don't want to weed them out before they get comfortable, but oftentimes, without structure, they don't get that far.
Other examples would be managers just learning to become better managers. The practice of management is something that we've left behind in a lot of places. We often promote people who are good at doing a job into a position of managing other people to do that job. The practice of management is meeting each individual where they are and leveraging the strengths that they have, managing that amongst the group of strengths that you have, and trying to lead to the best outcome for the group of people that you have by lifting everybody up based on their strengths, rather than leaning on people's weaknesses. If you lean on weaknesses, things break. If you lean on strengths, things get stronger.
Those are some examples. When a person starts, we will provide some support to help both the manager and the individual who's starting to develop a strong communication and working relationship and to build trust between the two. Rather than thinking about the new person as needing help to get into the job, we think of them both as needing help to learn to work well with one another and to build upon that relationship going forward.
Jennie Brooks:
Okay. I can see how a sushi lunch turned into a sushi dinner and how you got to where you are now, because it's fascinating. I love if you lean into weakness, things break, if you lean into strengths, things grow stronger. We really believe in the power of sharing stories as a means to connect with one another, but I still find that people sometimes shy away from sharing that they may have an invisible disability. What words of advice or what thoughts do you have for individual employees who might be working across a project team alongside neurodivergent employees? How do they approach the work or the conversation?
Alan Kriss:
Yeah, that's a really good question. What you're touching on is partially a concept of disclosure and some other topics we should get to as well. The first point to keep in mind is that it's really up to an individual to decide what they want to say about themselves and how comfortable they are saying it and to whom they're going to say it. In our program, that's made clear and so it's never up to the business or the manager to say that so and so employees are neurodivergent. You probably do and are working with some neurodivergent colleagues right now, and they may or may not feel comfortable. I think comfort is the number one word that I would use, which is when a person is comfortable in the environment they're in, they're more likely to share things about themselves that will help others to know how to be productive in working with them. Some people call that safe spaces, which is something that you might have heard of or talked about as well.
Jennie Brooks:
Yes.
Alan Kriss:
We provide education and awareness sessions, as well as we have an e-learning platform that helps with this as well, that helps employees to better understand diversity and to better empathize with those around them who may be experiencing the workplace or social or physical environments differently. What we're trying to do is to create empathy amongst people so that people understand the perspective of the other and lead to really outcomes, even if people aren't sharing particular things about themselves.
What we're trying to do, and I can give you some examples if you like of the type of empathetic understanding that we're helping people to gain, but really what we're trying to do is to help people to understand that their colleagues are there for a reason, they're there to help to build or solve or design or finish or whatever else it is, and that we need to find each other's strengths and focus on those strengths, and again, lean on those strengths so that we can be productive together.
Jennie Brooks:
Alan, at the end of every podcast we leave our guests some free space to share their final words with those listening. What would you like people to leave us with today?
Alan Kriss:
I think that the thing that I would leave people with is that it's important to give people an opportunity to show themselves. We're far too quick to judge. What I learned, and what I learn over and over and over again, is that the person who I meet on day one and the person who I'm assessing in whatever assessment that I'm doing is not really going to be the person who I'm going to end up with working with. I think we can say that for most people and we can say it more so for neurodivergent individuals. Give people a chance to show you what their capabilities are and focus on people's strengths, leverage their strengths, and you'll get much better productivity and much better outcomes and much better relationships. That's what I would say.
Jennie Brooks:
Thank you, Alan. We're so grateful for the work you're doing and the partnership that we have with you. We look forward to celebrating with you and you meet that north star.
Alan Kriss:
Thank you, thanks for working with us.
Jennie Brooks:
Thanks for listening. Visit careers.boozallen.com to learn how you can be unstoppable with Booz Allen. Be the future, work with us. The world can't wait.