The neurodivergent trauma that explains domineering executive behaviour

By Suzanne Tonks

We have all witnessed the dynamic. You sit across a boardroom table from a highly successful executive or business owner, presenting a strategy or an insight. Suddenly, the atmosphere shifts. The body language closes off. Arms crossed, posture rigid. If the idea didn't originate from them, it is dismissed out of hand with an irrational, dominating hostility. In modern corporate discourse, the immediate diagnostic reflex is to label it as male privilege, entitlement, or if directed towards a female, misogyny.

But as someone trained in educational and developmental psychology, advising global brands and scaling businesses for two decades, I know that reducing complex boardroom dynamics to a single demographic lens is a strategic failure.

When we rely solely on gendered explanations, we overlook the intricate, intersectional realities of human psychology.

Often, what looks like primitive entitlement is actually a sophisticated, deep-seated ego defence mechanism. One rooted in experiences. One of which can be trauma from experiences of neurodiversity.

The 5% Classroom Reality and the Millennial/Gen X Armour

To understand the defensive executive, we have to look backward. Specific Learning Disorders (SLDs) which encompass Dyslexia (reading), Dysgraphia (writing), and Dyscalculia (mathematics) affect roughly 5% of any given classroom.

For Gen X and Millennial leaders, their formative schooling took place in an era long before neurodiversity was celebrated or seamlessly accommodated. Instead, their experience was defined by a deficit model. They were the students told they "weren't trying hard enough," facing covert bullying from peers and systemic shaming from educators who misread a processing difference as an intellectual deficit.

To survive, these individuals had to build an armour of intense tenacity, rapid problem-solving, and non-linear thinking. Many thrived because of this friction, scaling massive enterprises on sheer resilience. But survival came at a cost. A psychological armour was formed, permanently hyper-vigilant against the threat of being exposed as "incompetent."

The Anatomy of a Boardroom Trigger

When diagnosing an SLD, psychologists perform comprehensive cognitive assessments to map Full Scale IQ (FSIQ) against cognitive domains. What we frequently see is an immense discrepancy. A average or high IQ paired with low academic results.

Decades later, that child is now a wealthy founder or a C-suite executive. They have constructed an adult success identity to mask the internalised weight of the student who felt out of control.

But psychological trauma is highly contextual. In a high-stakes meeting, if a peer challenges this executive using specific language, such as demanding they review a dense financial report on the spot, questioning their reading of a policy document, or using new or sophisticated terminology, the corporate veneer cracks.

The executive's or owner's brain misinterprets this cognitive challenge as an existential threat to their identity. The historical trauma of the classroom is re-activated. To protect themselves from feeling vulnerable or out of control, they regress. They deploy primitive defence mechanisms of projection, absolute denial, and dominant, irrational behaviour designed to shut down the conversation entirely. “If it isn’t my idea, it’s a bad idea.” 

It is not a demonstration of superior entitlement. It is a desperate attempt to regain psychological safety.

The Strategic Takeaway for Corporate Boards and Advisors

This is not an excuse for domineering behaviour. Leaders must be held accountable for the psychological safety of their environments. However, misdiagnosing the root cause of corporate behaviour leads to ineffective interventions.

When HR departments, boards, and advisors treat a deep-seated neurodivergent defence mechanism as a simple cultural or gender issue, their mitigation strategies miss the mark.

If you try to correct this behaviour through standard compliance lectures, the executive will simply double down on their defence.

True systemic optimisation requires a more sophisticated approach:

1. Recognise the intersectional root and move beyond binary explanations of workplace conflict. Consider cognitive diversity and historical learning backgrounds.

   
   

2. Shift the linguistic environment and alter the framing of challenges. Avoid high-stress, performative cognitive demands in public forums (e.g., "read this now or understand this now and defend your position") and pivot toward asynchronous reviews that respect diverse processing styles.

   
   

3. Align governance with psychology. For scaling businesses, understand that the very trauma that drove a founder's early tenacity can become the bottleneck to corporate governance if left unaddressed.

   
   

Why Action Must Be Immediate

Behaviours that reduce organisational outcomes and compromise psychological safety for leaders and their teams cannot be tolerated as corporate quirks. They must be addressed with priority, precision, and immediacy.

To achieve this, organisations cannot afford to lose valuable time reducing the immense complexities of human behaviour down to simple, established entitlement formed from biased gendered experiences. Superficial diagnoses yield superficial solutions. When we misclassify a deep-seated neurodivergent defense mechanism as mere cultural arrogance, our interventions inevitably fail, and the cycle continues.

Let me be clear. Structural gender privilege exists, and it actively influences how some executives show up in a room. However, powerhouse women leaders have been successfully managing male privilege for decades. We are not paralysed by it. We know exactly how to identify it, how to manage it, how to educate where necessary, and how to lead right through it.

At times, this leadership is not well received. It takes time, resilience, and clinical precision to break through maladaptive, deeply ingrained behaviours. But I can assure you of this. When leaders of all genders work together with mutual respect, and consciously drop the control-focused armour that shields their hidden vulnerabilities, organisations achieve extraordinary things.

Having sat in boardrooms advising at the most senior levels within traditionally male-dominated global environments, I can confidently state that there is ample room for all genders at the highest levels of governance. The bottleneck is not space. It is psychological maturity.

If we want healthier, more profitable, and genuinely innovative boardrooms, we must stop guessing at motivations from the surface. We must look past the immediate corporate friction, understand the historical psychological wounds that leaders bring to the table, and intentionally design corporate structures that build strategic bridges instead of triggering primal defences.

It's just food for thought.