By Rev Canon Jo McKee
Head of Leadership Development
‘Oh you’re having another whizzy moment…’
Someone who once supervised me often responded to the challenges I faced, particularly around short-term memory and spelling, with a lack of understanding. At times, their comments felt dismissive and belittling rather than supportive.
Instead of recognising or nurturing the gifts and strengths I brought, the focus seemed to fall on what I struggled with. Those difficulties were not explored with curiosity or care, but instead left me feeling exposed and, at times, led me to question whether I was called to be a leader. There wasn’t space to understand how my mind worked differently, only an implicit sense that I wasn’t quite measuring up.
Instead of recognising or nurturing the gifts and strengths I brought, the focus seemed to fall on what I struggled with. Those difficulties were not explored with curiosity or care, but instead left me feeling exposed and, at times, led me to question whether I was called to be a leader. There wasn’t space to understand how my mind worked differently, only an implicit sense that I wasn’t quite measuring up.
My story is not unusual. Roughly one in five people are neurodivergent, whether that means dyslexia, ADHD, autism, dyspraxia, or any number of co-occurring differences, and that figure is as true inside the church as outside it. The clergy workforce is no exception. Nor are our lay leaders, our ordinands, our curates, or the volunteers holding together children's work and pastoral care across our communities.
And yet, for all that the church speaks constantly about vocation, about calling, about the unique shape of each person, the Church has been remarkably slow to ask whether its systems of supervision, formation, and feedback are actually built for the people going through them. Or whether they are built for a narrow, unspoken norm, and everyone else is quietly struggling to adapt.
CIPD research consistently shows that the quality of line management accounts for as much as 80 per cent of an employee's engagement with their role. In church terms, this means that how a curate, a CYPF minister is supervised may shape not only their ministry in that context, but their resilience, their longevity, and their willingness to remain in ministry at all. That is a sobering statistic when set alongside the Church of England's visible anxiety about clergy retention.
The framing matters here. Neurodiversity is not primarily a problem to be managed. It is, as the CPAS Neurodiversity training carefully argues, a description of the fact that all brains process information differently, and that some brains differ from the majority in ways that carry both particular challenges and particular gifts. Dyslexics often bring creative problem-solving and lateral thinking. Those with ADHD frequently exhibit entrepreneurial energy, the ability to hold multiple things simultaneously, and a quality of empathic presence that can be genuinely extraordinary in pastoral work. Autistic clergy may offer precision, consistency, and a kind of principled honesty that congregations sometimes desperately need and rarely get.
The problem is not the wiring. The problem is the mismatch between the wiring and the assumptions baked into how we supervise, form, and give feedback.
Consider the standard feedback conversation. Most supervision models assume that verbal, in-the-moment exchange is the natural medium. For a dyslexic leader with slow processing speed, the "right" response often arrives two hours, or two days, after the meeting ended. For someone with ADHD, a supervision conversation without a clear structure risks becoming a spiral of anxiety rather than a space for growth. For an autistic supervisee, feedback delivered in ambiguous, tonally indirect language may be received as something entirely different from what was intended - not because they lack sensitivity, but because tone and implication carry far less information to them than words do, and ambiguous words are genuinely ambiguous.
None of this requires a specialist qualification. It requires curiosity, the willingness to ask, and the discipline of not assuming that one's own preferred mode of communication is the neutral one.
The framework set out in CPAS’s training offers a useful scaffold: grow in knowledge about neurodivergence; work with the named individual in front of you rather than a category; orientate together toward what reasonable adjustment actually looks like in practice; and have the willingness to hold the difficult conversations, including, sometimes, the conversation about whether the expected pathway is actually the right one.
That last point deserves its own sentence. Not every neurodivergent person is best served by the standard ministry route. Chaplaincy, sector ministry, specialist roles: these are not consolation prizes. They may be where some people are genuinely best placed to flourish. But that conversation requires a supervisor who knows their supervisee well enough, and is secure enough in themselves, to have it honestly.
Which is perhaps the deeper issue. Good supervision of neurodivergent people requires supervisors who have done enough of their own work, on self-awareness, on their own assumptions about what "normal" leadership looks like and to sit with difference without needing to fix it.
The Church that believes every human being is fearfully and wonderfully made cannot simultaneously operate supervision systems that only work for the neurotypical majority. That is not a radical claim. It is a straightforward one.
Questions for church leaders to sit with:
- When did you last ask a supervisee or volunteer how they prefer to receive feedback, and adjust what you did accordingly?
- Can you name the specific strengths that the neurodivergent people you lead bring to their ministry, or do you default to managing their limitations?
- What assumptions are you making about preparation, communication style, or meeting format that may be working for you but not for them?
- Is the pathway you're guiding someone along shaped by their calling, or by what the system finds easiest to accommodate?
- If you are neurodivergent yourself: have you named it to those who supervise and support you, and do you have what you need to lead sustainably?
- What would it mean for your church or team to have a genuine culture of tailored feedback, not as an exception for those who need it, but as the way you do things?