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January 21, 2007
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Dealing with social awkwardness at work: Insights from the autism community

Hannah Schufreider may seem an unlikely person to be teaching you how to manage your career. She is a 12-year-old autistic girl living in Haverhill. Her days are spent being a little bored in school, reading Manga comics, watching Hannah Montana on TV, and going to fencing class on the weekends. Sounds like a typical adolescent’s schedule.

But in one of those odd convergences of circumstances, Hannah’s successful strategies for dealing with her disability could be adapted by adults having trouble in their professional lives — particularly those who can’t seem to connect with others at work.

Think this is a bit much to swallow? The link between the two is socials skills. Is there always one person at the office who acts rudely during meetings? Do you shy away from interacting with colleagues because you’re not good at office politics?

Maybe that colleague, or you, have trouble reading social cues. Here’s where Hannah can help. People with autism usually have poor social skills. She has a form of it called Asperger’s syndrome, whose sufferers often have well-above-average intelligence but troubles with social interaction.

On the playground, other moms might see these kids and say something like, ‘Oh, how cute! He’s a little Einstein.’ At school, teachers at school may comment, “He doesn’t listen to anything anyone says. I don’t know how he is doing so well in my class.”

Autistic people behave in ways that are out of sync with other people. “I make terrible jokes because I copy stuff that I see on TV. I think it’s funny but my parents tell me it’s not funny,” says Hannah.

Most people are born with the ability to read nonverbal cues. Hannah cannot, so when people don’t laugh at her jokes, she doesn’t understand it was because they weren’t funny. Someone has to tell her.

A workplace corollary is when a colleague who makes a coworker the butt of a joke is clueless that the coworker has a fragile personality. Another example: you’ve worked months on a big project, and after talking about it for an hour, a colleague says, “forget it, that will never work.”

In these situations, a manager should take that person aside and explain what was inappropriate, says Beth Howell, vice president of human resources for EBSCO Publishing, a provider of print and electronic journal subscriptions.

People who miss social cues naturally have no idea they are missing them.

“Often employees don’t agree with the assessment. So the person speaking with them tries to give specific scenarios,” she says.

For example, instead of saying, “I feel you were too aggressive in that meeting,” Howell would say, “In the meeting on Friday when you said ‘X,’ did you notice there was not a lot of conversation after that point? I think you might have been a little too strong.”

Teaching people to read social cues is very, very difficult. So instead of trying to understand how to say things differently in a meeting, it might be more appropriate for these people to limit the time they spend in large meetings. Instead, they should concentrate on having one-on-one conversations or using e-mail.

People who are bad at reading nonverbal cues tend to fare worse when there are more people around, because there usually is that much more nonverbal communication going on.

Back to Hannah. She is most successful socially being in a smaller group of kids than in her regular, larger classroom. It’s easier for her to connect with one person and block out everyone else.

Writing is another good solution because the nonverbal affect isn’t present. For most people, this makes communication more difficult, and we add emoticons to make up for lost nuance. To someone who does not have strong social skills, written communication has a flat, straightforward affect, making a grave misunderstanding between the communicants less likely.

Hannah’s connection to the written word is almost life-saving in its intensity. When she has trouble in a given situation, she reads, and when she grows up she wants to be a writer. So take a tip from her — if you are on the receiving end of the ‘you’re-offending-people’ feedback, try communicating via e-mail instead.

A lot of people who have poor social skills say things like, “I don’t do office politics” or “I just want to be left alone.” But it’s very hard to maneuver through the workplace with this attitude.

The point is that people judge your work skills as incompetent if you are not likeable — no matter what your work skills are. It may not be fair, but it’s what people do. So if you want to keep your job, you need to do enough politicking at work to make people like you. Instead of saying you do not like being around people, try creating scenarios where you find people more tolerable. For example, Hannah seeks out certain people and groups she knows she’ll be more successful connecting with — such as at fencing class.

For those not succeeding with colleagues at work, the key is to figure out what environment would help them become more successful, as Hannah has. For someone with poor social skills, so much of their ability to function is dependent on the environment — no matter how small or severe the problem.

But perhaps the most important thing we can learn from treating kids with autism is that they are most likely to succeed if we help them use their strengths to work on, or compensate for, their weaknesses. We each have strengths and weaknesses, and we can each use this approach to make the difficult task of self-improvement a more positive experience.


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Comments

» Office politics is about being nice » Brazen Careerist

[…] Office politics is inescapable because it’s about dealing with the people. A small percentage of people are mentally unable to understand office politics. The rest of you need to get with the program. Because where there is a group of people — anywhere, even on the playground - there is politics. […]

» The one skill you need for three key areas of career growth » Brazen Careerist

[…] Another example is the new definition of what make a child a special needs student. Today many children who can read at age three are tagged as needing extra help in school because of signs of poorly developing social skills. Fifteen years ago those kids would have slipped through the system as eccentric geniuses. Today social skills are seen as so important to an education that they supersede IQ in terms of educational placement. […]

» The art of socialising « Blabber

[…] So help your kids to form intimate relationships with peers, and help yourself, too. In fact, as an adult you can learn how to compensate for lack of social skills by watching how schools are teaching the kids to do it. […]

» Writing without typos is totally outdated » Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk

[…] Many people with dyslexia are very smart. Most kids who win spelling bees have many signs of Asperger’s syndrome (see the documentary on this, which I love). This means that many amazing spellers actually have brains that are developing intellectual skills (in this case, spelling skills) at the expense of social skills. […]

» Girl’s guide to getting the guy at work » Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk

[…] is full of knowledge workers, who are paid because they do a good job of synthesizing information the missed cues will probably be even […]

17 Comments »

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve learned more from the social skills classes that my autistic boys attend that I have by my own on the planet for more than 40 years.
Cheers

As I read more of your columns, I understand that it is not what I lack that holds me back, but that I beleive I lack it.

excellent writing on an excellent topic that everyone can take something from.

It’s always tough confronting people at meetings to ‘defend’ someone, especially when the person on the offense is ‘cocky’ or overly-outspoken. it’s an excellent challenge to people in leadership roles to discuss times like this with members of their team.. much like a teacher would with a group of obnoxious 9 year olds :)

* * * * *

Steve,Great point. This is not just a social skills issue. This is a team building issue, it’s a diversity issue, it is an issue about humanity. Managers need to help people to process what’s going on in terms of the larger group dynamic. Theoretically, the direct reports are doign the work, and the manager is looking at the big picture. And when it comes to social skills problems, a team effort can be the difference between helping someone succeed or letting them fail.

Mangement how-tos, like the Harveard Business Review — recommend firing someone who has no social skills, no matter how good they are at doing their job. I wish this weren’t the case. I wish the world were a more accommodating place.

Steve’s comment shows this possibility.

 –Penelope

Great article Penelope, I have a nephew Stuart who is aged 9, he is dealing with Asperger’s syndrome,so I can understand fully what you are talking about..and congrats on the Yahoooooooooo..well done lass

Gordon

I enjoyed your article immensely. I think the insight about leveraging one’s strengths.

My one quibble is that I don’t see Harvard Business Review as being one of the “management how tos” that advocate the primacy of technical skills over social skills.

HBR published Daniel Goleman’s groundbreaking “What Makes A Leader?” that propelled people into an understanding of Emotional Intelligence. Many people now understand that EQ is a more reliable indicator of career success than the preence of technical skills.

I learned alot from this article. Thank you.

Dale

From what I noticed, “office politics” tend to mainly comprise of lower level employees trying to kiss up to their supervisors or bosses.

I think Autistic Children/Adults have alot to share in their experinces with society.

* * * * * *

Hey, Asa.

I have found that the toughest game of office politics is at the top of an organization, where everyone is great at it. In order to get to the top of a big company, you need to know how to understand what people want, even if they don’t say it, and how to give it to them the right way, even if they ask for it to be delivered the wrong way. Office politics when it’s played best is incredibly fine-tuned empathy and compassion for even the people who annoy you.

Maybe the reason it looks like the people at the bottom are the only one’s doing it is because they are the ones doing it in a clumsy, in-your-face way: Practice, practice, practice.

-Penelope

Hello Penelope:

I was responding to your comment about “Management How Tos”

Your blog machinery hates me. I thought I posted a link to an article by Norman Doidge about Shadow Syndromes in which he claims that techies have a mild case of autism.

Their attention moves to slowly to pick up social cues but because it moves so slow allows them to see more detail than the average joe.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/doidge012201.asp

* * * * *

Really liked this article. Thanks.

-P

I enjoyed the article but I have to disagree with the statement: ‘The point is that people judge your work skills as incompetent if you are not likeable — no matter what your work skills are.’

I think this varies a lot depending on the environment. I work in an engineering organization where (at least at the low/mid levels) having the right answer is paramount to anything else. There are quite a few people who can be very difficult to deal with. They go unchecked because they are among the best in the company at what they do. Their ability is never questioned and they are consistently called into projects that demand quality. The bottom line seems to be: A lot is tolerated if you can produce the goods. I find this consistent in a lot of companies with engineers.

* * * * * * *
Joe, current management research shows that companys suffer  more than they benefit from keeping around a genius who is difficult to deal with. Bob Sutton, professor at Stanford, has a bunch of this research in his new book The No Asshole Rule. The people who always have the right answer always think they are the exception. But they are not. In order to maintain a highly productive workplace, everyone needs to be nice to eachother, not just the dumb people.

–Penelope

Good Post, I agree that children on the autism spectrum need to be taught to ephasize their strengths and to compensate for their weaknesses. My parents did a great job with this with me and I think that is one of the reasons I am doing so well as an adult today.

‘The point is that people judge your work skills as incompetent if you are not likeable — no matter what your work skills are.’

Tell you what. When the company is losing a million dollars for every hour the corporate network is down, I’ll just let the much more likeable, but totally clueless and incompetent co worker fix it himself.

We’ll see how much of the company is left when he gets it done.

Thanks for making it acceptable for management to discriminate against us Aspies, for as long as the companies manage to survive the rule of the likeable but incompetent.

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Penelope Trunk is a columnist at the Boston Globe. She has launched three startups and endured an IPO, a merger and a bankruptcy. more >

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