Bringing neurodivergent talent onto a team is one decision. Managing those employees well, week after week, is a separate job, and recent surveys suggest many companies haven’t prepared their managers for it.
A February 2026 YouGov poll commissioned by Acas, the British workplace advisory service, found that just 32% of employees believe their organization effectively trains managers to make adjustments for neurodivergent colleagues. A Harris Poll survey released by Understood.org in May 2026 found that 70% of neurodivergent U.S. employees don’t know what accommodations they’re entitled to, and 60% don’t know whom to ask.
Justin Nelson, J.P. Morgan Private Bank’s Managing Director and Head of the Asset Management and Financial Principals Coverage Team in Connecticut, has clear views on what happens after the offer letter is signed. Nelson joined the Private Bank in 1998 and now leads a team of 20 professionals. In a 2026 interview, the same conversation in which he urged employers to reconsider how they recruit neurodivergent candidates, he turned to the harder follow-up: what managers should do once those employees are on the team.
His answer comes down to one change: stop handing out open-ended goals.
Justin Nelson on Trading Open-Ended Goals for Defined Tasks
Most professional roles run on autonomy. A manager sets a target, and the employee figures out the route.
“I feel like most employees are autonomous,” Nelson said. “You’re like, ‘Hey, these are all the goals you have.’ Some people meet those goals, some people don’t. I think it has to be a lot more defined.”
He illustrates the point with a sales target. Ask an experienced banker like Nelson to bring in 10 new clients this year, and he’ll build a prospect list, draft an outreach plan, set meetings and work to close. Every one of those steps is implied. For many employees on the autism spectrum, Nelson said, the implied steps are the problem. Seen from that employee’s seat, Nelson said, the full assignment can feel like “climbing up a monster hill. I can see what’s right in front of me.”
The fix is to make each step explicit. Nelson’s version starts small. First comes a single request: find market data on a specific group of prospects so the team can build a database. The research might be divided between two team members, who then pool what they find. Only then does the group move on to designing the outreach plan.
“It is really breaking stuff out into those steps as opposed to just being like, ‘Yeah, you go ahead and do that,’” he said.
He compares the approach to the two-week sprints common at technology companies, where each contributor knows exactly what they’re responsible for before the next checkpoint. “It’s probably a lot more project management as opposed to an amorphous goal,” Nelson said.
How the JP Morgan Executive Measures Progress
Defined tasks also change how a manager keeps score. Nelson is skeptical of headcount as a yardstick. Hiring a lot of people, he said, doesn’t guarantee they’ll be good.
For neurodivergent team members, he’d track output at a granular level: how much got done in a day, how many tasks were assigned and how quickly each one was completed. Quality of work still counts. So does a person at a higher level who sees the whole project. “You need to have someone up above who’s integrating that,” the JP Morgan executive said, so the individual pieces add up to the larger goal.
Nelson also said remote work and screen-based interaction can be easier for some neurodivergent employees than a full day in the office, where there may be “only a limited amount” of in-person interaction a person can handle. Feedback rarely arrives unprompted, either.
“They’re usually not the people who are going to give you the most feedback unless you pull it out of them,” he said.
So managers have to ask. Seventy percent of neurodivergent workers in the Understood.org survey said they worry that disclosing their condition could hurt them at work.
Why Confidence Shows Up in the Results
Some large employers have built formal infrastructure for this work, and JPMorgan Chase, the Private Bank’s parent company, is one of them. Its Autism at Work program began in 2015 as a pilot with a handful of employees in Delaware and, by late 2023, covered more than 40 roles across nine countries, according to the firm. The program is backed by a playbook on recruiting and interviewing neurodivergent candidates and an instructor-led workshop on the supports available to employees.
That gap led Justin Nelson to BroadFutures, a nonprofit that runs internship programs for neurodivergent young adults and provides neurodiversity training to partner employers. He has been introducing the organization to contacts and clients, encouraging them to consider its candidates, who he said “can be amazing, amazing employees if managed in the right way.”
People on the spectrum often don’t fit neatly into societal norms, Nelson said. Once they feel appreciated and build confidence at work, “you really see that every day and they’re more and more engaged.”
Confidence is harder to measure than a sprint schedule, Nelson acknowledged. Still, his view is simple: “When someone feels good about what they do, it shows up in the results.”
