In a quiet suburban home as the clock inches past midnight, Sandra breaks a sleeping pill in half and brings it to her lips. But before she can swallow, her mind is already racing through the next day. She opens her calendar and scans the schedules of every colleague, calculating who will be in the office and what unexpected events might await. This nightly ritual—part preparation, part survival—is not a story about disengagement or lack of ambition. It is a story about hidden effort, the invisible work that many employees perform just to show up and contribute at a baseline level.
Written by Joppe Quaedvlieg based on a real discussion with ‘Sandra’ about her lived experience, and analyzed by leadership consultant Lisa Colledge, this scenario captures a problem that is far more common than most managers realize. The hidden effort Sandra expends—the mental rehearsal, the scenario modeling, the energy spent managing uncertainty—is energy she cannot invest in creative thinking, problem-solving, or high-quality contribution. Her story reveals a critical truth about inclusive leadership: raising the quality of contribution across a team often has less to do with setting higher standards and more to do with removing the unnecessary friction that drains people before they even begin their work.
Three practical lessons emerge from Sandra’s experience, each carrying direct implications for how work is coordinated, how teams are led, and how much performance organizations may be unintentionally leaving on the table.
Insight 1: Reducing Cognitive Load as a Leadership Discipline
Sandra is not resisting work. She is trying to reduce the unexpected so she can contribute at her best. Checking calendars, rehearsing conversations, and mentally modeling multiple scenarios are her strategies for managing uncertainty—a process that carries a high cognitive cost.
The concept of cognitive load, well established in cognitive psychology, refers to the total amount of mental effort being used in working memory. When this load is unnecessarily high, performance on complex tasks declines. In Sandra’s case, the unpredictability of a rescheduled meeting or a colleague’s absence triggers a cascade of mental calculations. She is not overreacting; she is processing ambiguity that could have been avoided.
Some uncertainty is inevitable in any dynamic organization. But when expectations, priorities, or ways of working remain unnecessarily unclear, organizations create additional cognitive load that affects everyone. Research into neurodiversity in the workplace has shown that this effect disproportionately impacts people whose neurological makeup processes uncertainty more intensely—including many autistic individuals, people with ADHD, and those with anxiety disorders. What managers might interpret as a lack of flexibility is often a biological response to unpredictability that feels overwhelming.
What managers can do
The first step is straightforward: reduce unnecessary uncertainty. This can be achieved through simple but deliberate practices. Sharing meeting agendas and expected contributions in advance allows people to prepare rather than react. Minimizing avoidable last-minute changes—or at least providing as much notice as possible—reduces the mental scrambling that Sandra experiences. Encouraging team members to ask for clarification rather than expecting them to guess creates a culture where ambiguity is surfaced and resolved, not silently endured.
A featured snippet worth remembering: When expectations, priorities, or ways of working remain unnecessarily unclear, organizations create additional cognitive load that affects everyone while disproportionately affecting people who naturally process uncertainty more intensely.
Reducing avoidable ambiguity allows people to invest more of their thinking in the work itself. This is not about coddling employees; it is about optimizing the conditions for high performance.
Insight 2: Performance Begins Before the Working Day Starts
Sandra’s working day begins long before she arrives at the office. The racing thoughts, the need for medication, the mental rehearsal of the day ahead—these are signs that her nervous system is already working hard before the day has properly begun. By the time work starts, a portion of her cognitive and emotional energy has already been spent.
This phenomenon is not unique to neurodivergent individuals. Many employees begin their day carrying an invisible load. They may be balancing caring responsibilities, navigating a long commute, worrying about a difficult client meeting, or recovering from a poor night’s sleep. The cumulative effect is the same: reduced concentration, faster fatigue, lower tolerance for interruptions, or behavior that colleagues mistakenly interpret as disengagement.
Leaders cannot remove all of these pressures, but they can recognize that people do not all arrive with the same reserves of energy. The assumption that everyone begins the day at a neutral or equal baseline is a persistent blind spot in management. It leads to practices that inadvertently penalize those who need more preparation, more predictability, or more recovery time.
What managers can do
The most effective intervention is proactive inquiry. Rather than waiting for employees to signal distress, managers can normalize conversations about how people work best. Practical questions include: When do you find work most draining? What conditions help you do your best work? Is there a small change that would make it easier for you to contribute consistently?
These conversations often reveal improvements that strengthen the whole team’s performance. A change that benefits one person—such as sending written briefs before meetings—often benefits everyone by creating more clarity and reducing cognitive overhead. The key is to approach these discussions as a normal part of leadership, not as a special accommodation reserved for people who are struggling.
Insight 3: Sustainable Contribution Requires Designing for Strength, Not Masking
Sandra has learned how to cope. She succeeds by constantly adapting, anticipating, and often masking her natural way of working. While this approach can sustain performance for a time, it usually comes at a cost to energy, creativity, and long-term wellbeing. Coping is not the same as thriving.
The concept of masking is well documented in neurodiversity research. It refers to the conscious or unconscious effort to suppress or hide aspects of one’s natural behavior in order to fit into a dominant culture. For neurodivergent individuals, this might mean forcing eye contact during conversations, suppressing stimming behaviors, or pretending to follow a fast-paced conversation that is overwhelming. The energy required for such masking is significant, and it depletes the cognitive resources needed for higher-order thinking and original contribution.
When people spend significant energy masking how they naturally think, communicate, or solve problems, organizations lose some of the originality and insight those people were hired to bring. The very diversity of thought that inclusive hiring aims to capture is systematically filtered out by work environments that reward conformity over authentic contribution.
What managers can do
The goal is to design teams where different people can contribute their strengths without carrying unnecessary hidden effort. Individual reasonable adjustments may still be needed—such as providing quiet workspaces or flexible deadlines—but these should sit within a wider team culture that already reduces avoidable friction.
Practical steps include valuing thoughtful contributions, not only quick responses. Many workplaces implicitly reward speed and extemporaneous speaking, which disadvantages people who need time to process before contributing. Offering different ways for people to participate—including written input, asynchronous contributions, or prepared remarks—ensures that a broader range of cognitive styles can be heard. Making conversations about how people work best a normal part of leadership, rather than something reserved for performance improvement plans, normalizes the idea that optimal performance requires different conditions for different people.
The goal is to design teams where different people can contribute their strengths without carrying unnecessary hidden effort.
Why Inclusion Is Not Just About Accommodation
Sandra’s story reminds us that inclusive leadership is not primarily about accommodating individuals after problems arise. It is about proactively designing work so that people can contribute more of what they are capable of. This perspective shifts the frame from a reactive model of accommodations to a proactive model of design.
The distinction is important. An accommodation approach assumes that the default way of working is correct and that exceptions must be made for those who cannot fit it. A design approach asks whether the default way of working is actually optimal for anyone. Clearer expectations, more predictable communication, and open conversations about how people work best do not lower standards. They raise the quality of contribution across the whole team by removing the hidden burden that, for many, quietly reduces performance.
This principle applies far beyond neuroinclusion. Sandra’s experience highlights lessons for how we design team performance systems more broadly. When organizations reduce unnecessary ambiguity, recognize that people begin work with different energy reserves, and create conditions for sustainable contribution, they unlock potential that was previously consumed by invisible effort. The result is not just a more inclusive workplace; it is a more effective one.
Actionable Insights for Leaders
The following three insights summarize the practical implications of Sandra’s experience for any manager seeking to raise the quality of contribution across their team.
First, reduce unnecessary uncertainty by sharing agendas in advance, minimizing avoidable last-minute changes, and encouraging clarification rather than expecting people to guess. This simple discipline reduces cognitive load for everyone and prevents the spiral of mental preparation that drains energy before work begins.
Second, recognize that people work best in different ways. Proactively learn which conditions help people contribute at their best and make reasonable efforts to create those conditions. Effective inquiry is not a one-time exercise; it should be an ongoing part of how leaders understand their teams.
Third, design a team culture that allows people to contribute their strengths in different ways. This includes offering flexible methods of participation, normalizing conversations about ways of working, and rewarding substance over style. When people can contribute without masking or excessive adaptation, the team benefits from their full cognitive capacity.
Sandra’s nightly ritual—the fractured sleep, the calendar scanning, the replaying of possible scenarios—is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of a system that imposes hidden effort on people who could otherwise contribute at higher levels. For leaders willing to look, these hidden costs represent one of the largest untapped opportunities for improving team performance. The work of inclusive leadership is simply the work of removing them.
