“Neurodiversity is not a taboo subject”

John Harle CMgr FCMI began his career in an ambulance. From 2003, he wore the bottle-green uniform of an emergency paramedic. Call-outs to road accidents, domestic incidents and industrial sites may feel miles away from his work these days in management, but many of the skills he gained then remain vital.

“The thing I’m probably best known for is managing when a crisis hits,” says John. “I’m usually the calmest person in the room, thinking quickly and making clear decisions. You learn that very quickly as a paramedic. You don’t have a choice. But if you’d given me a deadline six months away, I wouldn’t have known what to do with it.”

Managing and coping

John followed a winding road to leadership that also took him into adult social care, where he ended up co-developing a rapid response team working to prevent hospital admissions across a borough in Hertfordshire, before working in several clinical and operational leadership roles back in the NHS. Today, John is director of nursing and therapies at the Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust. And the reason why he sometimes struggles to process distant deadlines has become much clearer.

Two years ago, John was examining his young son’s behavioural patterns for a potential ADHD diagnosis. Going through the list of common signs, he and his wife soon realised they were describing not just their son, but John too. He would often react against the way certain things ‘had’ to be done; find himself overwhelmed by background noise in the office; and lose his place in meetings, fixating so hard on something that had been said that he didn’t know the room had moved on. He’d even been told several times to find his voice in those sessions.

In order to understand the process his son was about to go through, John had an assessment and was diagnosed himself.

“When I told one close colleague about my diagnosis, she laughed and jokingly said she’d just thought I wasn’t listening,” he says. “She’d always found it amazing that I could appear to have not heard something in a meeting, only to offer an insightful or helpful opinion on the subject two minutes later.”

Overcoming blocks

At the time, John was studying for a CMI Level 7 Senior Leader Apprenticeship, at what is now Hult International Business School, and was desperately struggling to complete his dissertation. The diagnosis helped him make sense of why he’d become so stuck.