St. Louis Business Journal
How to cope with learning disabilities in the workplace

By Anna Navarro

December 1999 - Larry was a very bright guy who thought he was stupid.

I knew he was bright because he clearly understood subtle points in our discussions. He asked good questions, and gave me insightful answers in response to the questions I asked him.

When I pointed to his considerable workplace accomplishments he shrugged and assured me he had faked it and was lucky not to get caught.

This wasn't just misplaced modesty. He really believed he was stupid, and it was useless to attempt to persuade him otherwise. Obviously, this was a major stumbling block in helping him achieve career satisfaction and success.

The truth was, Larry wasn't stupid. He had a serious learning disability, which had not been diagnosed in childhood. He had done very poorly in school. Teachers thought he was lazy. Kids taunted him. His father berated him for his poor performance.

People with learning disabilities deal with information differently than the rest of us. They may have above average intelligence, as did Larry, but still fail to learn in traditional school settings.

He had trouble getting accepted to college. When he did get in, he majored in accounting because he did somewhat better with numbers than in other areas. As an adult, he had ended up in a number of companies that were falling apart. They seemed to be the only ones that would hire him. Over time, other people with talent would abandon the organizations, and he would find himself in charge of a mess.

Then his leadership skills would really start to come through. He was great in a crisis. He seemed to have an instinct for what needed to be done first, how to motivate others, and how to save the day. But when the situation righted itself, he had trouble coping with business as usual.

By the time he got to me, he was totally discouraged.

I am not a psychologist or a counselor. I could not diagnose Larry's specific issues, or help him develop coping strategies. But I recognized that he had a learning disability and helped him find resources for dealing with it.

He underwent testing and discovered that he had problems processing a lot of information in written form. After diagnosis, he worked with a learning coach who taught him to compensate for his problem. He learned to highlight the main points in a text as he read, then to outline what he had highlighted and finally to boil the text down to a few key thoughts. It was laborious, but it worked.

The testing also showed he had some major strengths.

One strength was taking in auditory information. This is why he was so adept at handling crises at work. When intense discussions and interactions replaced memos and written reports, he excelled. This fit with my intuitive experience of him as an intelligent person.

Another strength was his ability to work with symbols. He was really good at doing things like projecting cash flow, and developing mathematical models for ordering raw materials. These practical problems were easy for him even though the algebra text he used in high school wasn't.

We took several months off from working with career issues while he focused on his learning agenda. Then we went back to work to find a career that minimized information in text form and where auditory and symbolic information was central.

His work also needed to meet other criteria including working conditions, income, location, etc.

Initially, he thought of his method of assimilating text as a crutch. But he soon learned that it was his wand. He got to be very good at distilling the central issues in written information. Combined with his natural talent for auditory and quantitative data, it made him a star.

The process took a while, but eventually he decided to focus on the financial and operations aspects of turnaround management, working with companies that were in serious difficulty.

How did he make this transformation?

He had the courage to get help in diagnosing his difficulty and the humility to learn to compensate for it.

He planned ahead and made the extra time when needed to process written texts. He focused on a field that played to his strengths, and minimized what he wasn't good at.

The biggest transformation in Larry's life was that slowly, as his understanding of his situation and his coping skills grew, so did his belief in himself.

Anna Navarro is the founder of Work Transitions, a nationwide career consulting firm that trains independent career strategists and consults with individual clients.

This column was originally published by the St. Louis Business Journal. The actual title of the column and date in which it appeared in the Business Journal may be slightly different from what appears on WorkTransitions.com.