Reading between the lines with Nicola Knobel

Pop me message to read out loud! Fit asks whether someone matches the organisation. Flow asks whether the organisation can adapt to how someone works best. That shift, from personality management to environmental design, is what this chapter is about. Chapter 18 of Leading Beyond Labels brings the book's central argument into its most practical form. Drawing on Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow, ISO 45003's psychosocial safety framework, and research on cognitive diversity, this chapter outl...

Pop me message to read out loud! What if the tools your organisation uses to "understand people" were never really about people at all? In this episode, Nicola Knobel traces the origins of psychometric testing from First World War military classification to a multibillion-dollar corporate industry, and asks the question nobody in HR wants to answer: what are these tests actually for? We unpack how personality testing became a corporate religion, why the promise of predictable people is a myth...

Pop me message to read out loud! This chapter explores how neurodivergent women and gender-diverse people experience leadership through layers of expectation, performance, and survival. Drawing on emerging diagnostic trends, research, and lived experience, it examines why so many women discover their neurodivergence later in life, often after burnout, breakdown, or profound exhaustion. These late diagnoses do not reflect new conditions, but long-standing differences that were previously invis...

Pop me message to read out loud! This episode features Chapter 5, The Language of Neurodiversity, from Unmasking Leadership, read in full as part of this audiobook podcast series. In this chapter, Nicola Knobel explores why language matters so deeply in neurodiversity-informed workplaces. The words we use to describe brains, behaviour, focus, and energy do more than label experience. They shape how leaders design work, interpret performance, and respond to difference. Chapter 5 introduces and...

Pop me message to read out loud! This episode features Chapter 2, When Leadership Feels Like a Performance, from Unmasking Leadership, read in full as part of this audiobook podcast series. In this chapter, Nicola Knobel explores how modern leadership often rewards visibility, confidence, and emotional performance over clarity, care, and capability. The chapter examines the pressure to appear composed, decisive, and endlessly resilient, and how these expectations disproportionately impact neu...

Pop me message to read out loud! This episode features the Author’s Note and Introduction from Unmasking Leadership, read in full as part of this subscription-only audiobook podcast. In these opening chapters, Nicola Knobel explains why this book needed to be written and sets out the central questions it explores. The introduction establishes the focus on neurodivergent leadership, psychological safety, burnout, masking, and the gap between how workplaces say they support people and how safe...