Everyone can be a high performer - when leaders shape the right culture

Universal inclusion: neurodivergence-inspired culturesPersonal insights and reflections
Written By Lisa Colledge

Published on 8 September 2025 • Written by Dr Lisa Colledge

 

I am honored to be named Leadership Consultant of the Year in the Corporate LiveWire Innovation & Excellence Awards 2025.

These awards recognize leaders across industries and geographies who are raising the bar in service excellence, innovation, and impact. To be recognized on this global stage is a privilege, and a wonderful opportunity to remind ourselves why we need a new leadership playbook.

Why we need new leadership playbook

For a long time, I thought performance was an absolute. Someone was either a “high performer” or a “low performer.” Our systems reinforce that belief: you’re a straight A student, or you’re not; you are a high-potential employee, or you’re not.

But as I progressed in my career and built experience of working with people in different cultures, industries and functions, I began to realize how wrong that thinking was.

Now I believe that everyone has the potential to be a high performer, if they find themselves in the right circumstances for that potential to emerge.

That realization became sharper when I became a mum. I don’t know what paths my children will take, but I know that they will be different from mine. My daughter is naturally brilliant at things I need work hard to learn. And when we discovered that our son is autistic, with learning difficulties, it brought this gradual realization into focus. His contribution will necessarily be very different, and he is more dependent than most on having an environment that will enable him to make it.

That’s when I started to see the waste in our workplaces. Too often, we dismiss or downgrade people simply because their contribution isn’t a natural fit to the system around them.

Some things we can’t change:

  • My son is autistic - that won’t change.

  • My daughter is a visual learner - that preference won’t change.

  • I am a scientist - I make decisions based mainly on evidence, not instinct.

We can all stretch beyond our preferences, but we’ll always be strongest when working within them. And life throws challenges too: illness, caregiving, upheaval. We may not always be at our best, but we are still doing the best we can in that moment.

Here’s the critical piece of my realization: we can shape culture so that these circumstances exist, and high performance can emerge in everyone.

Culture usually just “forms” on its own, and then it gets stuck as leaders promote and recruit in their own image. But culture is a system created by people, and if we choose to, we can redesign it.

I discovered that, when you interpret behavior as everybody doing the best they can, and shape your working culture so it lifts people up rather than requiring them to fight it to be able to contribute, then unbelievable things happen.

That belief - that culture can unlock high performance for everyone - is what drives my work.

How I turned this into an innovative system

Seeing the waste in teams - talent left on the table, ideas not properly pursued, contributions dismissed - pushed me to ask: what if culture could be designed to bring out high performance in everyone?

I didn’t ask this as an academic exercise. I asked it while leading transformation in a toxic workplace, while co-chairing a disability-inclusion ERG, and while supporting my autistic son to be happy, functional, and able to grow. The evidence I studied, the teams I redesigned, and the experiments I tried at home all reinforced each other.

This is why my work resonates. It’s not theory. It’s grounded in science, proven in business, and lived every day. And at the heart of it is this conviction: we can shape culture so that every person’s best can emerge.

So what is this system? These are the five innovations that Corporate LiveWire recognized:

  • Innovation 1: universal inclusion over quotas.

  • Innovation 2: anticipatory culture over compliance.

  • Innovation 3: Neuro-Inspired Teams™ over individuals.

  • Innovation 4: freedom within a framework - Future-Ready Team Pathway™.

  • Innovation 5: operationalize the system with Golden Rules - my FIT Framework.

Innovation 1: universal inclusion over quotas.

Traditional approaches to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) rely on quotas or programs for specific groups. These may achieve representation, but they oversimplify human complexity, fail to set people up for success, and risk creating resentment by replacing one form of favouritism with another.

My approach is different. I use cognitive inclusion as the universal design of DEI. Every one of is has a neurostyle shaped by different combinations of five core cognitive traits. Some of us are at the extremes of these traits, and may receive a diagnosis of autism, ADHD, dyslexi or other neurodivergencea. When leaders design team systems for those cognitive extremes, they create cultures that lift everyone.

Cognitive inclusion is:

  • Universal: it benefits everyone, not just selected groups.

  • Scalable: it integrates neuro-inspired practices into culture.

  • Sustainable: it persists through leadership changes and adaptsas organizations evolve.

What you need to know: designing for the cognitive extremes unlocks performance for the whole.


👉 Read more: Rethinking Diversity at Work.

🎧 Want to listen instead? DEI and me: a journey from indifference to insight.

Innovation 2: culture over compliance

The traditional disability inclusion model – which also covers neurodivergence - is legally compliant.  If someone discloses a diagnosis, the business has a duty to provide a reasonable adjustment.

But in practice, this model is not scalable, sustainable, or attractive to leaders. It depends on disclosure by the most vulnerable, creates a patchwork of exceptions, and fails to deliver team-level performance.

My model flips this approach: design culture to anticipate cognitive differences from the start, so more people thrive by default. Compliance then becomes an occasional supplement, not the primary mechanism.

An employment-law expert contact emphasized that the legal duty to make reasonable adjustments can be triggered by impact, not only by a formal diagnosis. He told me that a proactive cultural approach is therefore not only more effective, but also a more faithful interpretation of the spirit of the law.

What you need to know: sustainable inclusion is anticipatory - design it into culture, don’t bolt it on with forms.

👉 Read more: Stop waiting for a diagnosis.

Innovation 3: Neuro-Inspired Teams™, not just individuals

In the old-school leadership playbook, performance is treated as an individual trait. Someone is labelled a “high performer” or a “low performer.” That mindset might have worked in a less connected, more hierarchical world, but in today’s world, facing complex global problems, it’s outdated.

Performance emerges at the team level.

  • McKinsey research demonstrates that teama are the true unit of success.  Individual superstars don’t guarantee results – and can even damage them.

  • Studies confirm that it isn’t demographic diversity (such as gender, ethnicity, or age) that drives the best problem-solving teams. It’s cognitive diversity - when combined with the culture that enables it.

When leaders design the team as a system - valuing cognitive diversity, ensuring psychological safety, and embedding curiosity and respect - they create the circumstances where high performance emerges collectively. Engagement, performance, innovation, and resilience are properties of the collective. And when you get the team right, individuals flourish too.


What you need to know: the team is the system that drives results.

👉 Read more: Need to adapt? Secrets of the best team problem solving.

🎧 Want to listen instead? The hidden cost of rock stars.

Innovation 4: Future-Ready Team Pathway™

Too many organizations leave neurodivergence inclusion to ERGs. These groups bring passion, expertise, and community, but they are unsustainable, fragmented and unfair as the engine of cultural change.

As innovation I have applied is to move beyond piecemeal programs to a leadership-led pathway that is rigorous and practical. That’s why I developed the Future-Ready Team Pathway™ - a seven-step roadmap that embeds neuro-inclusive best practices in evidence-based change management.

The Pathway activates change with design, connects neurostyles for impact, and evolves with confidence so that friction between different cognitive approaches becomes fuel for performance. And crucially, it de-risks cultural change by focusing on role modelling, co-design, upskilling, and small visible steps.

In short, it gives leaders a way to shape culture intentionally, so that the right circumstances for high performance can emerge, and persist.

What you need to know: culture change sticks when it’s leadership-led, systemic, and reinforced daily by team norms.

👉 Read more: How to build a neurodiversity-inclusive organization.

🎧 Want to listen instead? De-risking cultural change.

Innovation 5: The FIT Framework – my Golden Rules

Every leader asks: “How do I turn inclusion from an aspiration into something that benefits my team members and results every day?”

That’s why I created the FIT Framework: Fair, Intentional, Team-Minded. It isn’t just another checklist. It’s a set of Golden Rules: simple, portable anchors that leaders and teams can apply in real time, in the flow of daily work, to operationalize the four innovations we’ve just discussed.

My FIT Framework distils the principles of neuro-inspired working culture into three simple, memorable anchors:

  • Fair: your team culture doesn’t favour or penalize any one cognitive style but allows all participants to focus their energy on impact rather than managing distractions.

  • Intentional: assume cognitive diversity, including neurodivergence, is always present, and design proactively for neuro-inclusion rather than waiting for disclosure.

  • Team-Minded: every member of the team, with whichever function, seniority and experiencve, shares responsibility for reinforcing inclusion through clear guidance.

When teams make fairness explicit, design intentionally, and keep the team at the centre, they stop wasting energy on misunderstandings and politics. Instead, they create the conditions where every person’s best work can come through.

What you need to know: the Golden FIT Rules are your operational compass. They’re how leaders and teams live inclusion every day, and how neuro-inspired culture sustainably generates high performance.

👉 Learn more in this example of FIT in operation: Maximizing creativity in brainstorming.

🎧 Listen to the FIT rules in action: My ADHD team lead is unbearable during deadlines.

Why this recognition matters to me

This award is especially meaningful to me because it is international and cross-sector. Corporate LiveWire honors organizations from small and medium-sized enterprise (SMEs) to multinationals, across technology, finance, research, healthcare, and beyond.

That breadth reflects my mission to partner with far-sighted tech leaders navigating AI disruption; with regulated industries balancing compliance with innovation; and with research organizations tackling humanity’s most complex and challenging problems.

And in each case, the lesson is the same: when leaders intentionally shape culture, they create the circumstances where high performance emerges.

What comes next

Awards are milestones, not finish lines. They’re sparks of energy - wonderful moments to celebrate, and then keep building, iterating, and sharing smarter ways to lead.

To mark both this recognition and the 50th episode of my podcast Culture by Neurodesign, I’m launching a series of free presentations that distil these insights into short, practical sessions for any leader ready to co-create their new team playbook. You can register for a place on my Neuro-Inspired channel here; don’t worry if you can’t join live – all registrants  receive a link to the recordings.

And finally, thank you to Corporate LiveWire, for recognizing that leadership consulting is evolving. To my colleagues, clients, and community, for the nomination, and for the trust and conversations that shape my work. And most of all, to the bold leaders who dare to step away from the old leadership playbook, and co-create the new one cultures where everyone can find the circumstances they need to thrive.

Ready to take action?

Awards and milestones are great moments to celebrate, but the real impact comes when we apply the ideas. Here are three next steps you can choose from:





Lisa Colledge
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When students get neurodiversity, they’ll take it to work (podcast)