Justice sensitivity can be a powerful force for good, but it can also leave neurodivergent professionals trapped in conflict. Sara-Louise Ackrill argues that acceptance, personal agency and knowing when to walk away can turn it into something more useful

My last employer, before I went self-employed full-time, told me there would never be a role in the organisation with “enough fight in it” for me. I was surprised he’d noticed something so personal about me; my day job at the time was in recruitment, hardly a role built for social justice.

But I had been the one to identify a victim of modern slavery and call the emergency services when we were recruiting kitchen staff for a country house hotel. The dressing-down I got from the CEO afterwards was angry and belittling. He was mostly upset about what people would think, seeing police walk around his call centre. More generally, I was trying to model transparency and kindness in a sector not known for its integrity, and to do business more sustainably. I’d introduced an Employee Assistance Programme to support anyone affected by addiction and domestic abuse in hospitality. This is a sector full of people with social problems and financial instability, yet one where admitting to any of it was, for 23 years, something I found to be taboo.

On paper, my actual job was to fill shifts, keep profits on target and get my team to do the same. I could do that well. It just wasn’t what got me out of bed in the mornings.

So I can speak as someone with a strong sense of justice sensitivity, but in my work now I also look at it from a company’s viewpoint and see where, operationally, it blocks communication and output. As a therapist and coach, I see many clients whose justice sensitivity is inhibiting them rather than serving them. We can harness justice sensitivity, but only once we understand it. We can also recognise that calling ourselves ‘justice sensitive’ can itself become a kind of defensive full stop that nobody can do anything with.

We can be good citizens, co-workers and bosses without being justice sensitive. Some people wear it like a badge, the way people-pleasers tend to think their people-pleasing makes them nice. But until we deal with our own triggers, justice sensitivity is hard to turn into something useful, because being justice sensitive doesn’t make the world more just, or help anyone, on its own.

So if you’re so justice sensitive that injustice feels like it’s everywhere and you’ve gone apathetic, or someone on your team is being experienced as obstructive in the name of it, what can you do?

Start by looking at what injustice actually is, as a team. Agree a working definition and use it as your benchmark. Injustice is subjective and contextual. You’ll certainly learn a lot about each other while discussing it.

We also tend to assume injustice where we’re overfamiliar with each other. However long we’ve known someone, however closely we work with them, we only ever see one layer. We’re icebergs talking to icebergs, each assuming what lies beneath the other’s surface. When we perceive injustice, we can go off track fast, burning nervous-system resources on it.

We learn as children that people have good bits and bad bits, then forget it as adults. We can’t see people as wholly one or the other without setting ourselves up to fail. A lot of people split: that sales prospect who now reads as a loser to the sales executive, because of how he votes, becomes someone the sales executive can no longer bring himself to speak to. But we can’t afford that black-and-white thinking if we have bills to pay. Putting people on pedestals, or writing them off entirely, is too common, and we can learn to be more even-handed with people who aren’t like us.

Our self-worth doesn’t need to rest on righting life’s wrongs. I’ve always believed that being kind and straight with people improves my own small corner of the world. Adults need to find their own solutions and develop their own resources; jumping in to fix people isn’t responsible and can deprive them of agency. Plus, it’s often about our own intolerance of discomfort.

We can remove ourselves from situations, people and jobs. We are not stuck children, tolerating what we find intolerable. I see a lot of people convinced they’d never find another job, so they tell themselves they’re stuck somewhere that clearly sets them off. Usually, we can dismantle that assumption and free them up to take control of their career. If somewhere is fundamentally opposed to who you are, you may need support to move towards somewhere more empowering. You’ve probably been told you’re too much, too needy or hard to accommodate for some reason, and it’s hard to imagine anywhere would welcome you with open arms. But if you can find enough in yourself to appreciate, others generally will too.

In neurodiversity circles – and I’m neurodivergent, working mostly in neurodiversity – justice sensitivity comes up constantly. For some, it’s the very thing that first got them questioning whether they were neurodivergent. But we aren’t agenda-less beings ourselves and nor do we have to accept being paralysed by the world’s injustices as a fixed state. Neurodivergent people can experience social rejection and workplace friction intensely, but none of that means we can’t learn to connect better with colleagues and meet our own social and professional needs. We too can learn to view human nature, the fact that people operate inside systems and structures and that everyday friction is normal, with more equanimity.

A mindset shift costs nothing. If we don’t expect people to grate on us, offend us or occasionally behave badly, we’re not being realistic; expecting it disproportionately often would be cynicism, not realism. Justice won’t always be done, and often it won’t look like it’s being done, measured against our individual agenda. That’s where a shared vision helps: a more neutral baseline, separate from whatever we haven’t yet healed from, that we can use instead in our teams.

As for that director who told me no role would ever have enough fight in it for me – he wasn’t wrong. I just hadn’t considered until then that the fight in me didn’t need fixing. It needed a different job.

Sara-Louise Ackrill is a neurodivergent therapist, entrepreneur, and workplace consultant. Founding CEO of Wired Differently and co-founder of Start Differently, a non-profit, Sara-Louise supports neurodivergent individuals personally in employment and as entrepreneurs. Recognised as a ‘Top UK Neurodiversity Evangelist’ and one of Small Business Britain’s #IAlso100 2024 entrepreneurs, Sara specialises in workplace inclusion, neurodiversity awareness, and domestic abuse awareness in the workplace advocacy. She is currently developing wNDerful, an app for neurodivergent people, and strives to create inclusive spaces through psychoeducation and compassion.

READ MORE: Workplace neuroinclusion is failing before support even begins. New research reveals that seven-in-10 neurodivergent employees do not disclose their neurodiversity at work. Workplace inclusion specialist Sara-Louise Ackrill says fears over stigma and career damage are keeping many silent, while those who do speak up are too often given inadequate or unsuitable support.

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