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Beyond Awareness: A Global Conversation on Neurodiversity & Work In conversation with Atif Choudhury and employment lawyer Jenna Ide
What happens when workplace systems aren’t designed for neurodivergent people, and is the law finally starting to catch up? Atif Choudhury in conversation with employment lawyer Jenna Ide, known for her work on landmark neurodiversity and workplace discrimination cases, including the widely recognised Starbucks dyslexia case. Together, they explore the realities neurodivergent people still face in the workplace, why accessibility conversations often overlook invisible barriers, and whether changing employment legislation is finally pushing organisations toward meaningful inclusion. Contacts: [email protected] / www.callingallminds.com https://youtu.be/qWhO7T-_MXM?si=COVfV3amSYNd_nXr 10How to coach managers to give feedback that sticks
Several years ago, I ran a large-scale study where we surveyed 1,000 managers and 1,000 employees about their experience at work. Feedback was the single biggest disconnect between the two groups Managers were certain they were giving it, but their people said otherwise. My hypothesis was that managers were technically giving the feedback, but it just wasn’t landing: softening the language, saying the thing once, in one place, and assuming it stuck. The irony is Gallup found employees who regularly receive valuable feedback are 5x more likely to be engaged in their work, 57% less likely to be burned out, and 48% less likely to look for another job. If you lead a people team, here's a framework to hand to managers to help feedback land and strengthen the feedback-giving muscle: Come alongside before you get specific. Start from their success: "I've been thinking about how to help you in this role, can I share something?" Then narrow to the one thing that matters most. After you say it out loud, then put it in writing. Deliver the feedback face-to-face, then follow up with a Slack, Teams message or email naming the one thing you're working on together. Now it can't be missed, and they can tell you if you read the situation wrong. Be more direct than feels comfortable. The softer you make it, the less likely it lands. Say the real thing, plainly. That clarity is a form of respect. Give it close to the moment, but never while you're frustrated. The best feedback is timely. The worst is delivered hot. If you're worked up, wait until you're steady and grounded, then have the conversation. Catch what's going right, too. Keep a note on your phone. Every time someone does something you want to see more of, write it down. On Friday, send each of them a word about it. Telling people exactly what "great" looks like is the half of feedback most leaders skip. The leaders whose feedback consistently sticks all share one trait: they're nearly impossible to misunderstand. And the orgs where feedback is consistently given see higher engagement and less turnover. How are you coaching managers in your org to deliver feedback that sticks? 12What even is a manager anymore?
I keep reading about the destruction of the middle manager and the introduction of the 'player coach', and it's got me thinking. In a world where we're seeing leaders increasingly expected to own and run a significant individual contributor load, what even is a manager anymore? Case in point from Block and Coinbase recently. So what are these roles giving up (either completely, or to AI) that allows them to, in some cases: Increase their span of control massively (sometimes 15+ direct reports) Be strong on delivery, while leading a team Curious for this communities thoughts on how the role is evolving and the possible knock on effects we'll see as a result of it. Arguably there's never been a more important time for leaders in businesses, and yet we seem to be seeing them increasingly under threat. I'd love to hear from you! 62This one has hurt me before - thinking I was data led (but I was led up the wrong path)
Something that will hold back your credibility as a Head of People: using bad compensation data. Let me show you how to get it right. When your data is fragile, every offer turns into a debate: Is your sample size big enough? Are you comparing apples to apples on location and company stage? Can you show your work when someone asks for the source? Getting the right benchmark dataset isn’t glamorous. It’s about defining your non-negotiables — roles, regions, company size — and mapping vendors against them. It’s scoring coverage, integration features, and price. And yes, it means creating an audit trail you can defend. I’ve boiled that process down into a step-by-step cheat sheet. Follow it to shortlist vendors, validate their data overlap with your needs, and walk into every negotiation with confidence. Have you ever been caught off guard by bad comp data? Tell me what happened. And here's a (free) playbook I made with my friends at Pave to help you work through the right way to buy: https://explore.pave.com/Comp-Data-Upgrade.html?utm_source=FNDN&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=data-guide&utm_term=partner 11I'd kill your pay-for-performance system. Here's what I'd build in its place.
I don't love traditional pay-for-performance. It's the dominant playbook in most companies. Managers grade individuals against a rubric, ratings get calibrated across the org, and merit increases land on top of base salary. It looks fair, it feels objective, and it lets HR point at a process whenever someone's unhappy with their number. In a startup, it often works against you. Here are the three reasons I've stopped reaching for it. 1. Individual awards miss the invisible work, and they inadvertently reward competition. The best teams I've worked with are deeply collaborative. They unblock the person next to them, they share context, they pick each other up when something falls over. None of that shows up cleanly on an individual scorecard. The moment you tie pay to individually-attributed outcomes, you start incentivising the wrong behaviours. You over-reward the loudest person in the standup and the one who knows how to optimise for visibility over impact. You often underpay the glue people. And the glue people are the ones holding your culture together. 2. Once it's compounded into base salary, you can't unwind it. This is the part the playbook can fall apart on. Someone has a stellar year, you give them a 12% merit increase. The next year they're solid but not exceptional (because there's natural mean-reversion in performance, like everything else), so you give them 5%. A year on, the role has changed, the bar has moved, or maybe they've checked out. Now you're paying top-of-band compensation for middle-of-band output. There's no graceful way back. Base salary compounds, performance doesn't, and the system you built to reward performance has now locked in a cost you can't trim. 3. The overhead is mismatched to startup life. Building criteria, training managers on calibration, running review cycles, defending ratings, documenting outcomes. It's a serious operational investment. It only pays off if the goals you're measuring against stay roughly stable. Startups aren't stable. We're clamouring for product-market fit, the strategy shifts on the data, teams reshape every quarter, and the goal posts are forever on the move. By the time you've calibrated H1, the strategy has already moved on. You're auditing performance against a target that no longer exists. That's a lot of overhead for outcomes that age out before the cycle closes. So what do I do instead. Three alternatives I love, and use. 1. Pay performance as bonuses, not merit increases. If you want to reward great performance, do it with a bonus. Cash in hand. Tied to the period it's recognising, and gone after that. It still rewards the work, and it still motivates the right behaviour. What it doesn't do is compound. You don't have to live with last year's decision forever, and when the performance bar moves, your cost base doesn't have to move with it. That alone is worth a rethink. 2. Decide your entire workforce is high-performing, and pay them like it. This one takes nerve. Set your base salary bands at a higher percentile across the board (say 75th rather than 50th), and only hire people you believe deserve to be paid at that level. You replace the entire "who deserves more this year" conversation with a much sharper one: "do we still want this person on the team?" It simplifies comp. It raises the bar at the door. It removes most of the political theatre around comp reviews, and it sends a strong signal about the kind of place you're building. The trade-off is real. If someone stops performing, you have to have the hard conversation rather than letting them drift quietly into a lower band on the org chart. I'd argue that's exactly the kind of trade-off a startup needs. 3. Share the upside through profit or revenue share. If you want everyone to feel ownership of the outcome, build a mechanism where they actually share in the outcome. A pool that grows with the business and gets distributed when the business wins. Everyone rowing in the same direction, no one carving out individual recognition from a finite pie. One thing I'd push hard on here. Don't distribute it as a percentage of salary. That re-creates the compounding problem from earlier, and it means your highest earners get the biggest absolute share, which often isn't reflective of where the value was actually created. Normalise the payout against role level. The scope of the seat is what's earning the share, and the reward should match the scope of the seat. Paycheck size is a separate story. A senior IC and a senior manager at the same level have both moved the business. Pay them accordingly. Pay-for-performance isn't a bad idea. It's just usually implemented in a way that's expensive, divisive, and impossible to unwind. In a startup, you can do better with fewer moving parts. Pay people well at the door, reward great periods with money you can take back, share the upside when the business wins, and stop pretending a calibration spreadsheet can hold the line on performance. None of it compounds, and none of it locks you in. That's the whole system. 23This opinion would be too unpopular for LinkedIn, so you're getting it here first.
It's ok to pay at the 25th percentile. Target percentile is just the point in the market where you decide to anchor offers for a role. But it should be chosen because it's a strategy decision, not a vibe. Most comp issues I see come from mismatched expectations. Someone sets a 25th percentile budget and then gets frustrated when the 75th percentile candidate takes another offer. The number wasn't wrong. The expectations were. Here's a simple way to think about it. 75th percentile and above Use this when the role is business-critical, great talent is scarce, or speed matters more than saving cash. Think founding engineers, your first VP, a comp-critical senior hire you can't afford to miss. You'll fill faster, but you'll burn more cash and create internal equity pressure if peers sit lower. 25th to 75th percentile This is where most roles should live once you're past about 50 people. You're still paying fairly, but you're competing on learning, scope, flexibility, and team. You'll lose some candidates on pure cash. That's fine, as long as you can actually deliver on the growth story you're selling candidates. Below 25th percentile Be brutally honest with yourself here. This works if the role is clearly a junior or stepping-stone position and the upside (learning, brand, network, equity) is real. If the upside is wishful thinking, you're just underpaying and hoping nobody notices (they will). Your job is to reset hiring managers who assume 75th percentile talent on a 25th percentile budget. Choose the band together and be specific about what it buys. What to do with this Bucket your current roles into these three bands. For each one, check whether the pay matches the story you tell candidates and the reality of the role. If it doesn't, fix the mismatch before you blame "the market". You don't need to pay top of market for every role. You do need to be honest about where you sit and what that buys you. 24What are your equity horror stories?
I'm writing a piece (dropping next week) that walks through three companies that actually got equity right for their people. Different approaches, different stages, but each one fixed something that's genuinely broken about how most startups do equity. While researching it, one stat floored me: 76% of all stock options go unexercised. Not because people don't want ownership. Because the system is stacked against them in various ways: People don't understand what they hold, Can't afford to exercise, or Just flat out don't believe it'll ever be worth anything. There's been some brutal stories over the years. Even I have bought options, with my own hard earned money, and am never sure if I'll ever see it again or how the company is even doing as a signal of it's likelihood. But I want to hear yours. Whether you were on the receiving end of an equity program that let you down, or you were the one trying to administer a program you knew wasn't working, I want to know: Where did it go wrong? What would you change if you could redesign it? Did you ever have to explain to someone that their equity was worth less than they thought? How did that go? Just the reality of what happened and what it felt like. The piece coming out next week covers some genuinely different approaches. But I think the failure stories are just as important for understanding why this stuff matters. Drop your experience below. Even a one-liner helps. 23I want to hear what you’re using AI for! (But first, here’s what I’m doing)
I get it. It’s tiring constantly hearing about AI. But if we’re not shaping it, it’s shaping us and our profession. I'd prefer to be on the former. And I know it’s hard to go first on these things. So let me share a little about how I’ve used AI recently, and then I’d love to hear what you’re using it for. What’s My Equity Worth? https://whats-my-equity-worth.lovable.app This was one of my first vibe coded products and was essentially a simple POC to help answer the question of "how can companies better articulate the worth of someone's equity?". Whether to a prospect/candidate, or an employee, companies generally suck at making their equity valuable. So this was to help with that. Medium: Lovable Time: Maybe 2-3 hours of prompting/watching it build. Salary Level Builder https://compcurve-salary-band-designer-994103479301.us-west1.run.app This one I really enjoyed making because I think the concept is novel. AI salaries continue to skyrocket and I talk to companies all the time that basically break their ranges with each hire. The challenge this then poses is the flow on effect to the rest of the people in those roles in the same/lower/higher levels. So with this tool you can enter the salary you paid your latest hire, and it will plot the midpoints for salaries at every other level. Helpful for preventing band compression or salary inversion etc. Medium: Google AI Studio (tried something new here, Lovable is probably better though tbh) Time: Maybe 2-3 hours of prompting/watching it build. Board Report Builder This one I can't link to, but as a solopreneur I run a monthly board meeting (less formal than it sounds) so that I take the time to see how i went last month against my goals and re-align on anything that might need it. What this looks like in practice is this. I write my board reports in Notion using a template. Claude co-work connects to Notion, ClickUp (where I store my projects/CRM) — these are through MCP — and can access my browser for Xero (accounting) and Beehiiv (newsletter) or other sites. It generates a new monthly board report and compiles all business development, marketing (like subscribers or followers etc.) data into the relevant template. I then go through and can review the data (double checking it) and input my thoughts/sentiment on top of that. It's taken a ~1-2 hour process down to about 30-45 minutes now, which is modest but super helpful. Plus Claude Cowork now lets you schedule this stuff which is super helpful, so I turned the directions into a skill and it now does this each month. Very specific to my work as a consultant, but obvious parallels to HR reporting here. Ok, that's three from me - what have you got? And it doesn't need to be super advanced! Even a recent prompt that helped you learn something new, or do something different. The more we talk about this stuff the more we learn from one another! 37People Proud Podcast: Lost In Translation
HR and Finance are often working toward the same goals, but speaking very different languages. 🎤 In this episode of the People Proud podcast from HiBob, we explore what it really takes to move from misalignment to true partnership. From shared data and workforce planning to clearer communication at the leadership table, this conversation unpacks how aligning people strategy with financial strategy drives smarter, more sustainable growth. 🔗 Listen to “Lost in Translation” featuring Joe Garafalo + Limor Raz and rethink how your organization connects talent and business outcomes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVmlkyjFY60 21Simple, low-friction Performance Assessment
Hi Team! I am seeing a big shift towards simple, low-lift, and frictionless (data lead, AI-supported) performance assessments... the dream we've all been dreaming! I'm wondering if any of you have any tips, watch outs, or processes you would be open to sharing with the community around how you build, adapted, or changed your Performance Assessment process to be quicker, lower friction, and more data-lead? We've been doing some interesting things at Talentful, and are leaning more and more on data-connections, automated scoring, and then leaning on calibration as the mean management "time sink" but I'd love to hear more ideas to get the ol' noggin' goin'! 87
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