Season 3 Episode 3: Anna Thairs
Anna Thairs is an award-winning full-stack Strategy Director, holding senior strategy roles at Grey London and Portas in Melbourne before joining Ogilvy Sydney, where she’s also a member of the agency’s Behavioural Science unit. Anna is vocal about her experiences as a mixed-race woman with OCD, ADHD and depression, and is passionate about driving more in-depth approaches to inclusion and diversity in advertising and beyond.
Our chat includes:
Understanding neurodiversity and how organisations can be more inclusive to neurodiverse team members
ADHD including Anna’s own experiences being diagnosed
The idea of renaissance women strategists
Intersectionality and the importance of nuance in our perspectives of humans
Check out below some of my favourite quotes from our discussion and listen to our full conversation on apple podcasts or spotify.
ADHD diagnosis
Women with ADHD often present differently, I was told again and again as a child, no it’s just teenage hormones she’ll grow out of it, no, she’s very smart therefore she can’t have ADHD, which is such a huge thing that damages, it’s such a damaging misconception for everybody that has ADHD, the idea that A you can’t be smart if you have ADHD and that if you’re struggling at school because you have ADHD that means you’re not smart which is so not true it just means you learn in a different way…Women are also inherently better at masking, we’re taught to behave differently whether you have ADHD or not.
Renaissance women strategists and full-stack strategy
Good ideas come from anywhere...the obsession we have in the industry and in society with being experts and staying in your lane is damaging to development, collaboration, inclusion and tolerance. I think we should be encouraging Renaissance Women strategists and having fingers in lots of different pies... Boxing and bucketing people so early in their career to pick a lane and stay in that lane, is due to our desire for homogeneity, predictability and making us easier to understand and removing variety…I think the concept of the renaissance woman is fantastic. Encouraging constant learning and constant desire to get to the bottom of not just a problem but a skill-set or a new way of presenting work and ideas.
Intersectionality
The reason so many inclusion and diversity practices and programmes fail is because we never treat them from an intersectionality point of view. We go, here is the solution for LGBTQ+, here is the solution for women, here is the solution for people of colour. We never investigate how those different things overlap. I am a mixed race woman, I have very dark big hair, I’ve been described as mildly foreign but at the same I can be seen as white in certain situations, so my experience of being mixed race is not the same as someone else’s experience of being mixed race.You also cannot extract being a woman from issues of ADHD…All of these things intersect so aggressively.
Supporting organisational inclusivity for neurodiverse team members
It should be a self-disclosure thing. Some people are not comfortable talking about it...I’ve always been very open about having OCD, partly because I believe if you are comfortable talking about it you have a responsibility to do that to help destigmatize it. If you’re not comfortable then on the flip side you shouldn’t have to talk about it…
Being open-minded about how your neurodiverse colleagues work. As someone who is easily distracted and can have trouble putting pen to paper when my brain is not co-operating, flexible working has been a god-send as I can shut myself off…
It’s about investigating past the surface level and understanding that everyone experiences mental health and neurodiverse conditions differently. Having that conversation if the employee is comfortable to do so, hey what are the things you think other people are maybe misinterpreting and how can we get on the same page, to ensure people aren’t discriminating against you because of those things. Then, crucially, people who have neurodiverse conditions, don’t treat them differently, obviously you want concessions but I get treated differently a lot. I get a lot of reassurances which I don’t need… I don’t always need my hand held just because I have ADHD... It’s about letting employees self-disclose if they need the help and then otherwise just treating them the same.
Links to some of the stuff we chatted about: