Neurodiversity in the Workforce: Gil Gershoni Of Gershoni Creative On Why It’s Important To Include Neurodiverse Employees & How To Make Your Workplace More Neuro-Inclusive
An Interview With Eric Pines
Be open to new technology. New tools and platforms are constantly emerging, and we approach each of them with an open mind, whether it’s Grammarly or ChatGPT. Allow your employees to share the technology that they’re using to create and connect with each other — anything that allows collaboration to flow.
Research suggests that up to 35% of entrepreneurs in the U.S. are dyslexic. There has been a slow but vitally important rise in companies embracing neurodiversity. How can companies support neurodiversity in the workplace? What are some benefits of including neurodivergent employees? To address these questions, we are talking to successful business leaders who can share stories and insights from their experience about “Neurodiversity in the Workforce.” As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Gil Gershoni.
Gil Gershoni is the founder of Gershoni Creative, a creative agency with offices in San Francisco and Dallas. For more than 30 years, Gershoni Creative has helped brands like Spotify, Google, Deloitte and Patrón stay ahead of the curve. More than a decade ago, Gil launched Dyslexic Design Thinking, an initiative that teaches intellectually curious people how to create, collaborate and problem-solve using the dyslexic mindset.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you ended up where you are?
I was a 6-year-old, curly-haired kid growing up in Israel, when I realized that I could not read like my classmates. At 11, I started looking for ways to express my creativity outside the classroom. I built my own magic sets, carefully crafting hidden compartments into puzzle boxes, sewing pockets into my magician’s clothes, and training my doves to hide inside said pockets during shows. I was 12 when I started my first business, picking up gigs as a magician at summer camps in Tel Aviv.
Those skills — the ways I found to navigate being dyslexic — have served me well. But throughout my childhood and beyond, I internalized my dyslexia as something wrong with me. It wasn’t until I was in my 40s, years after I’d been running my creative agency where I work with Fortune 500 companies that I realized that dyslexia — this “deficit” I’d been trying to hide my entire life — had been the magic behind my success.
Now I spend much of my time advocating for something I’ve long known: there’s a little bit of magic in dyslexic thinking. It’s about time the world recognized that.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
1. Getting comfortable with failure. My parents taught me that the greatest failure is not trying. As a child, that was a challenging concept to understand. But as I grew older, I realized that the ability to try and try again is part of my gift as a dyslexic thinker and entrepreneur. Trying is about problem-solving; we never fail because even a solution that’s not feasible may lead to another solution that is.
2. Collaboration. A lot of times, people who are neurodivergent can feel alone or misunderstood. However, I’ve noticed that whenever I’m working with others, the whole tends to be greater than the sum of its parts. In other words, collaboration brings out the best in all of us, whether we’re neurodivergent or neurotypical. Seeking out these opportunities allows us to see the forest for the trees and opens up paths to creativity that we would have never come to on our own.
3. Staying open to possibility. Innovation is not a destination; it’s a process. I’ve found that when you rush toward the solution, you find that the problem you set out to solve is not really the problem at all. When you give yourself the time and space to explore the challenge from all perspectives, new worlds open up and you tend to reach the solution faster.
Can you share a story about one of your greatest work-related struggles? Can you share what you did to overcome it?
I didn’t disclose my dyslexia until I was in my mid-30s. Up until then, I spent a lot of time and energy hiding it. I only saw it as a negative. Once I developed a relationship with it, I started to realize it was my strength. This thing that I thought was my greatest limitation was actually providing me with different abilities and perspectives that made me a better creative director.
Instead of being defined by my dyslexia, I redefined it on my own terms. I began to acknowledge the gifts of dyslexia: the ability to generate a great volume of ideas quickly, to see something from multiple perspectives all at once, to see the bigger picture where others noticed only the details. Once I shifted the focus to a lens of positivity, not only did the work improve but the act of doing the work became more rewarding as well.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?
Schwab Learning Center came to us to help reimagine their physical space down in Palo Alto. The center was started by Charles Schwab, who wanted to give students with dyslexia and ADHD the tools they needed to succeed in the educational system. We said, “What if it’s not a learning center but an innovation lab?” So, we changed the language in order to come at it using a strengths-based approach. It’s not about what you can do vs. what you can’t do. It’s about leaning into your neurodivergence to reveal the gifts it offers.
For the past six years, we’ve been working with Spotify’s Global Partner Marketing team, building relationships and developing activations for Spotify and some of the biggest brands and titles in the world, whether it’s Netflix and Stranger Things or Disney and Soul.
We also started Dear Dyslexia: The Postcard Project, where we invited dyslexics of all ages to share what dyslexia means to them on a postcard and send it back to us. To date, we’ve received more than 2,000 postcards from across the country and around the world, including ones from high-profile dyslexics like Alyssa Milano, Greg Louganis, and Zack Snyder.
It seems we always have something going on. Check us out at gershoni.com.
Fantastic. Let’s now shift to our discussion about neurodiversity in the workforce. Can you tell our readers a bit about your experience working with initiatives to include neurodiverse employees? Can you share a story with us?
More than a decade ago, we started an initiative called Dyslexic Design Thinking, which is based on the idea that dyslexia is not a disability but a “hyper-ability” that offers heightened advantages.
Working with our team, we put together a talk about collaboration, innovation, and diversity that we gave at South by Southwest around the intersection of different mindsets. Part of it for us was to create something that was inclusive and co-created. We knew that whatever we were doing at the studio had unique outcomes and results, and we wanted to understand it more.
From that work, we started doing salons and think tanks on the subject to learn how people relate to one another from different perspectives. We started a podcast, also called Dyslexic Design Thinking, which was a place for us to talk to other neurodivergent individuals in different industries and categories, both for the benefit of our team, the larger community, and our clients. For the last five years I’ve been giving talks, educating others, and creating campaigns around dyslexia, identity, and neurodiversity, not only to share what we’ve learned but also to create a platform for others to express themselves and find their communities.
This may be obvious to you, but it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you articulate to our readers a few reasons why it is so important for a business or organization to have an inclusive work culture?
Having an inclusive, diverse workplace is the secret sauce to my agency’s success. Neurodivergent employees are innovative thinkers, creative problem solvers, and have unique ways of seeing the world around us that are such coveted traits in an employee, a colleague, a partner, in anyone. These traits are all “hyper-abilities” that dyslexic minds like mine have, and that we see in neurodivergent minds everywhere. Nonlinear thinkers bring something to the table that cannot be taught, and this unique perspective is magic.
Can you share a few examples of ideas that were implemented at your workplace to help include neurodiverse employees? Can you share with us how the work culture was affected as a result?
Thanks to me being dyslexic, Gershoni Creative has always been open to different ways of thinking. Neurodiversity has always been a part of the workflow and our culture, whether we had a name for it or not. The sense of play we bring every day, the way we structure projects, the way we designed our studio — it was all in support of stimulating creativity and providing the eye and mind with different sources of inspiration. We set up different working environments with quiet spaces, shared spaces, and lots of surfaces to write on. We try to be as sensitive as we can to the environment, knowing different minds work in different ways.
What are some of the challenges or obstacles to including neurodivergent employees? What needs to be done to address those obstacles?
Neurodivergence cannot be seen with the naked eye. This means implementing ways of working and company-wide best practices that apply to everyone and making the workplace a better place for us all. Fostering a company culture that promotes openness and makes everyone feel safe should be every company’s top priority.
As I mentioned previously, different minds work in different ways, so it is important to acknowledge these differences by doing things such as reimagining recruitment and hiring processes, creating the opportunity for everyone to work in ways that best suit them, providing resources to support employees, and most importantly, to continue learning and addressing obstacles as we see a need.
How do you and your organization educate yourselves and your teams on the concept of neurodiversity and the needs of neurodivergent employees? Are there any resources, training, or workshops that you have found particularly helpful?
Our approach to neurodiversity was formed rather organically. I always look for people who think differently than I do, who process information differently, who use different tools, who have different backgrounds. Because I’ve learned over the years that by including all types of diversities not only does it enrich the outcome but it also enriches the process. We come up with insightful branding solutions, and we learn something about each other — and maybe even have fun — getting to the outcome.
I respect each team member’s process and mindset, and I hope they do mine. But collaboration is give-and-take. Sometimes I recommend a change; sometimes someone else does, and then we adjust for it. It’s a dance. That’s how we work with neurodiversity. You are different than me, and I’m different than you. We don’t always have to label it, but just by acknowledging that we think differently, we can appreciate where each other is coming from.
Can you please share five best practices that can make a business place feel more welcoming and inclusive of people who are neurodivergent?
1. Approach neurodiversity as a difference, not a problem to solve. By embracing what I can do, everything I am challenged with is so much easier to deal with. And frankly, it’s not as charged anymore. The charge went away, and I was able to put my full energy toward what matters.
2. Empower individuals to talk openly about their needs. When you frame diversity as a benefit and celebrate each other’s differences, it makes it easier to self-disclose. I’ve noticed that if I start by sharing a personal story, it makes it less difficult for someone else to share when they want to or need to.
3. Create a multisensory space. Find ways to accommodate needs, whether it’s sound, light, smell, or stimulation. Some people like to stand, some people like to sit on a bouncy ball, some people like an ergonomic chair, a walking desk. By creating different types of working and learning environments, productivity and creativity flourish.
4. Embrace the way individuals work. There are lots of helpful frameworks for understanding individuals’ different work styles, including one that we helped shape for Deloitte called Business Chemistry. These frameworks help everyone learn to communicate with people who work differently than them, and it makes for a better office culture and, ultimately, better client work.
5. Be open to new technology. New tools and platforms are constantly emerging, and we approach each of them with an open mind, whether it’s Grammarly or ChatGPT. Allow your employees to share the technology that they’re using to create and connect with each other — anything that allows collaboration to flow.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story about how that was relevant in your own life?
“Embrace beginner’s mind.” It’s an old Zen Buddhist concept and something that dyslexics come by naturally. How do you approach something for the thousandth time as if for the first time? How do you bring a childlike sense of wonder to old or complex problems?
We use beginner’s mind all the time in our client work. Some of our clients have been in business for decades. They’ve seen it all, so the usual approach won’t work. So we go back to basics. We throw out assumptions. We ask lots of questions, especially “Why?” We think “blue sky,” with no restrictions or judgment. Most of all, we hold off trying to solve the problem for as long as possible, until we’ve explored all possibilities. What we find is that not only do we arrive at a novel solution but we also get there faster and more aligned than we would have if we stuck to the status quo. We’ll never go back to being kids, but we can always begin again.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Dear Dyslexia is an initiative that I hope inspires a larger movement; I know it inspires me! About 20% of the American population has dyslexia and many are never diagnosed. My wish for this initiative is to highlight the unique challenges and opportunities of those with dyslexia, and reframe negative perceptions of the learning difference so people see dyslexia as less of a disability and more as the “hyper-ability” it is. We have already had so much participation in this project from people of all ages, all over the world, so I guess you could say the movement has already started.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Readers can follow our movement Dear Dyslexia, by following us on Instagram @dyslexicdesignthinking, and even participate in the project themselves by going to our website and learning more! To learn more about me, Dyslexic Design Thinking, or my agency Gershoni Creative, please visit gershoni.com.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success and good health!
About the Interviewer: Eric L. Pines is a nationally recognized federal employment lawyer, mediator, and attorney business coach. He represents federal employees and acts as in-house counsel for over fifty thousand federal employees through his work as a federal employee labor union representative. A formal federal employee himself, Mr. Pines began his federal employment law career as in-house counsel for AFGE Local 1923 which is in Social Security Administration’s headquarters and is the largest federal union local in the world. He presently serves as AFGE 1923’s Chief Counsel as well as in-house counsel for all FEMA bargaining unit employees and numerous Department of Defense and Veteran Affairs unions.
While he and his firm specialize in representing federal employees from all federal agencies and in reference to virtually all federal employee matters, his firm has placed special attention on representing Veteran Affairs doctors and nurses hired under the authority of Title. He and his firm have a particular passion in representing disabled federal employees with their requests for medical and religious reasonable accommodations when those accommodations are warranted under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (ADA). He also represents them with their requests for Federal Employee Disability Retirement (OPM) when an accommodation would not be possible.
Mr. Pines has also served as a mediator for numerous federal agencies including serving a year as the Library of Congress’ in-house EEO Mediator. He has also served as an expert witness in federal court for federal employee matters. He has also worked as an EEO technical writer drafting hundreds of Final Agency Decisions for the federal sector.
Mr. Pines’ firm is headquartered in Houston, Texas and has offices in Baltimore, Maryland and Atlanta, Georgia. His first passion is his wife and five children. He plays classical and rock guitar and enjoys playing ice hockey, running, and biking. Please visit his websites at www.pinesfederal.com and www.toughinjurylawyers.com. He can also be reached at eric@pinesfederal.com.
Neurodiversity in the Workforce: Gil Gershoni Of Gershoni Creative On Why It’s Important To Include… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.