Article 4: Reading the Unspoken Rhythm - Team Leadership Across Neurotypes and Generations

Cover of "The Reason I Jump," a New York Times bestseller by Naoki Higashida, featuring the inner voice of a thirteen-year-old boy with autism. The image is adorned with butterflies and includes praise from Jon Stewart.

Part 4: Forged by Difference – Blog Series on Neurodivergent Leadership

Inspired by ‘The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida’

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What if your team is trying to communicate with you and you’re just not hearing it?

When Naoki Higashida wrote The Reason I Jump at age 13, he gave voice to what many leaders miss: that behavior is communication, and that not all communication speaks in words. For anyone leading teams with Millennials and Gen-Z today, especially those that include neurodiverse individuals, this insight isn’t just a practical fact, it’s a strategic necessity.

Modern workplaces are filled with different rhythms of thinking, processing, and expression. While Boomers and Gen-X leaders may have grown up expecting meetings, memos, and face time, today’s workforce often communicates through micro-signals, asynchronous updates, and nonlinear logic. That shift creates friction if you don’t learn to tune your ear to the unspoken.

Let me tell you about Johnny, a tenured front of house server in our hospitality team. We suspect Johnny is on the spectrum, though he’s never had a formal diagnosis. He loves sports stats, classic rock trivia, and quoting obscure films. His conversation style could be called . . . unconventional. Folks listen politely, often assuming his tangents aren’t relevant and referencing Johnny’s conversational style as a ‘stream of consciousness’.

For those of us who are autism parents and familiar with neurodiversity, we heard differently.  Buried in Johnny’s seemingly disjointed commentary were consistent signals about a mysirad of problems and opportunities that leadership could address in the kitchen, team morale, and even nuances of menu items customers did or didn’t like. Johnny wasn’t random, he was right. Most folks just didn’t know how to listen for the gold in the stream.

This happens all the time in today’s multigenerational and more neurodivergent teams:

• A quiet team member processes deeply and responds two hours later via Slack, but their insight could have saved the meeting.

• An employee declines social events, not out of disengagement, but because sensory overload drains their ability to contribute the next day.

• Someone who speaks in metaphors or anecdotes may be expressing pattern recognition we haven’t caught on to yet.

As leaders, especially across generations, we must learn to read the unspoken rhythms.

Three Practices for Building Your ‘Reading Unspoken Rhythms’ Muscle:

1. Recognizing diverse signals of engagement. Participation doesn’t always look like speaking up.

   
   

2. Allowing varied processing speeds. Insights don’t follow a strict clock.

   
   

3. Seeing stress before it becomes a crisis. Silence, sarcasm, or even over-enthusiasm can all be clues.

   
   

Higashida calls this the “listening eye”. It’s the ability to perceive someone’s inner communication even when it doesn’t follow expected norms. When I applied this to parenting my sons who are neurodivergent, I realized silence wasn’t defiance or lack of understanding, it was processing time. When I stopped rushing them and expecting answers at the moment of questioning, patience brought me their real thoughts on my questions.

Teams thrive when leaders learn to tune in to all the ways people communicate, especially the ones that don’t sound like us.

So, ask yourself: What communication patterns on your team might you be misreading? And what truths could they be trying to tell you?