How Learning About the Integrative Cognitive Profiling Framework Has Helped Me Become a Better Manager
Key Takeaways
- Employees often carry the burden of adapting to their manager's style, which adds mental load and reduces performance.
- Managers should take responsibility for communication and adapt to their each of their team member's cognitive preferences.
- Small, consistent changes in how you communicate can unlock better results, trust, and staff retention.
- Understanding how individuals process information helps create a culture of belonging that fuels performance.
- Adaptability is not a soft skill, it's a performance tool that strengthens leadership and team outcomes.
- Aspiedent helps organisations understand how people think and process information—so managers can support performance more effectively. Contact us to discuss how this could help your team.
Editor’s note: This blog post is a reflection from James Lovatt, who supports the work of Aspiedent alongside his full-time role managing a small sales team. His perspective highlights how applying our Integrative Cognitive Profiling Framework can improve management practice and team performance—even outside of autism-specific settings.
Understanding the Problem
In many workplaces, employees are expected to adapt to their manager’s communication style. This is rarely questioned. After all, managers are busy, and adapting downward seems inefficient. But what if that assumption is costing performance?
I have had the privilege of working with Dr Elizabeth Guest, who created the Integrative Cognitive Profiling Framework to help autistic adults and children thrive in environments that do not always align with how they think and learn. Alongside my support for Elizabeth, I also work full-time in sales and manage a small team. Through this work, I began to see how these ideas apply far beyond autism-specific contexts, and into the heart of team performance.
The Shift in Perspective
Having worked under many managers myself, I often found that I was expected to adapt to their communication preferences. The thinking seemed to be that managers were busy and important, and it seemed only fair that I did the adjusting. But the result was that it added a mental load, created confusion, and made me feel like I was always behind even when I was doing good work.
This is common and it is a management blind spot. We employ people because of the value they bring. They perform vital functions. So if they are not operating at their best, it is not enough to say “they just need to try harder”. Managers need to ask: what are we doing to make performance easier for them?
Ultimately, when we employ people, we want them to be able to perform at their best. We employ them because they have skills a business needs to gain an edge and they will perform a key function which is often at the coal face of the business. Their performance affects everything. As a manager, team performance is your responsibility so the focus should always be on how to provide the team with performance rather than facilitate your own ease and comfort.
Why Adaptability Is the Manager’s Responsibility
Why should a manager have to adjust to those who work under them?
The answer is simple: your success as a manager depends on your team’s performance. And people cannot perform at their best when they are constantly having to adapt to communication styles in a way that does not compliment their cognitive preferences.
As a manager, if you can understand your team as cognitive individuals and adapt to best connect with those individual cognitive preferences, then you will inevitably get better performance, and that will in turn facilitate your own ease and comfort.
The Integrative Cognitive Profiling Framework helped me realise that cognitive preferences vary. If you learn how your team members process information and tailor your communication accordingly, performance improves, and with it, so does your own effectiveness as a manager.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Adaptability is like a muscle, the more you use it, the easier it becomes. Use it regularly and it becomes second nature. By making it your responsibility to adapt to others, rather than expecting your team to, it strengthens your leadership and builds trust.
This does not require a psychology degree. It starts with simple questions:
What helps each team member focus?
What kind of instructions do they respond to best?
What derails their concentration?
When do they do their best work, and why?
This is not as hard as it sounds. What it requires is consistency and curiosity. Avoid assumptions. Show a genuine interest in your team members —not just in what they do, but in how they do it. Dig a little deeper and you will also find the things that they find challenging, and what causes stress and anxiety, so you can learn to mitigate these factors.
The Result: A Sense of Belonging That Drives Performance
The ultimate outcome? You will begin to see your team members as individuals, and in turn, people stop feeling like cogs in a machine. They feel seen and like they belong. And when people feel like they belong, they will give you more than you could ever demand.
From a business perspective, this leads to better performance, lower staff turnover, fewer sick days, and stronger team culture.