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Reading between the lines with Nicola Knobel
I read my books out loud for you to have access to!
We are starting with Book 1!
Unmasking Leadership is a subscription-based audiobook podcast written and read by Nicola Knobel, exploring neurodivergent leadership, psychological safety, and the systems that shape who gets to lead at work.
Each episode features a full chapter from the book Unmasking Leadership: Neurodivergent Leaders, Psychological Safety, and the Future of Inclusive Workplaces. Chapters are released regularly and presented exactly as written, without summaries or commentary.
This podcast examines why traditional leadership models often fail neurodivergent people, how masking and burnout become occupational health issues, and why psychological safety frequently exists in policy but not in lived experience. It explores leadership through the lens of risk management, workplace safety, and organisational power, connecting inclusion to systems, not slogans.
Designed for leaders, safety and risk professionals, HR practitioners, and neurodivergent workers, Unmasking Leadership goes beyond awareness to examine how work actually operates, who it protects, and who it excludes.
If you are interested in leadership, neurodiversity at work, psychological safety, workplace safety, burnout, masking, psychosocial risk, and inclusive leadership, this podcast offers depth, clarity, and evidence-based insight.
The first two chapters are available free. Additional chapters can be accessed by purchasing the full audiobook series.
Episodes
44 episodes
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Chapter 20: End of an Era
Every generation of leadership inherits its tools. This one inherited personality profiling. The question is whether it will pass them on or put them down.Chapter 20 of Leading Beyond Labels is a closing argument and a call forward. It e...
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Chapter 19: Designing Neuroinclusive Teams Without Labels
Teams are not static structures. They breathe, adapt, and fluctuate based on energy, trust, and purpose. When we design them around personality types, we freeze that movement. When we design them for neuroinclusion, we invite evolution.C...
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Chapter 18: Leading Without Labels
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 Leadi...
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Chapter 17: Old Versus New Power
The organisation had flat structures, values-driven leadership, and distributed ownership. On paper it looked progressive. In practice it was old power with better branding. And the neurodivergent people in the room felt the difference first.
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Chapter 16: Steps for Inclusive Recruitment: From Job Advert to Offer Letter
Most exclusion begins before a role is ever advertised. The vague competency descriptor. The requirement to thrive in a fast-paced environment. The unexamined assumption that a good communicator looks a particular way. By the time a neurodiverg...
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Chapter 15: The Future of Recruitment Without Personality Testing
The question is no longer what type of person is this. It is what conditions allow this person to do their best work. That shift is not just ethical. It is supported by decades of organisational psychology research.Chapter 15 of Leading ...
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Chapter 14: Neurodivergence, Recruitment, and the Cost of Not Belonging
Around 30 percent of autistic adults are in paid employment. Many of those who are work in roles that are part-time, precarious, or well below their qualification level. These statistics do not reflect a lack of capability. They reflect cumulat...
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Chapter 13: A Special Note on the "Cult" of Agile
Agile does not have a questionnaire. There are no letter combinations, no colour wheels, no scores. And yet, if you have spent time in an Agile-heavy environment, you will recognise the feeling. The language. The right way to think. The wrong w...
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Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Chapter 12: Emerging Systems and AI Driven Psychometrics
The new generation of personality tools promised to fix the problems of the old ones. They added algorithms, AI, video analysis, and keystroke data. What they mostly did was replicate the same biases at scale, faster and with less transparency....
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Chapter 11: Emotional Intelligence (EQ and EI Tests)
Emotional intelligence was supposed to humanise the workplace. Then it became a score. Then it became a hiring filter. Then it became another way to penalise people who express empathy differently from how neurotypical norms expect it to look.<...
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Chapter 10: StrengthsFinder and the Positive Psychology Wave
After years of workplace tools that framed difference as dysfunction, StrengthsFinder felt like a relief. It told her she did not need to correct her weaknesses. She just needed to play to her strengths. Then, over time, that message quietly be...
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Chapter 9: The Big Five / OCEAN Model
The Big Five is the most scientifically credible personality model in existence. It has decades of peer-reviewed research, cross-cultural validation, and genuine predictive relationships with real-world outcomes. It is also routinely misused in...
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Chapter 3: Why We Love to Label
You are at a workshop. The question does not quite fit you, but you pick the closest option so you do not feel weird. Sound familiar?Chapter 3 of Leading Beyond Labels explores the cognitive and emotional pull of categorisation. Human br...
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Chapter 8: The Team Management Profile
She was told she was precise, detail-focused, and needed to work on her flexibility. What those phrases actually described were her neurodivergent traits. The profile was not entirely wrong. But it framed a strength as a flaw because it did not...
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Introduction: Chapter 7: DISC
William Moulton Marston called his source population "normal people." Nicola's response to that phrase in print is unrepeatable in a podcast description.Chapter 7 of Leading Beyond Labels examines DISC: its origins in Marston's 1928 beha...
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Chapter 6: The Enneagram
The Enneagram began as a mystical framework for spiritual development. By the time it reached the corporate training room, most of that complexity had been replaced with nine motivational profiles and a coaching invoice.Chapter 6 of Lead...
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Chapter 5: Myers Briggs Type Indicator MBTI
She came out INTJ the first time. Then the results shifted after burnout. Then they shifted again. For a long time she thought she was just hard to type. Eventually she realised the problem was not her. It was the tool.Chapter 5 of Leadi...
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Chapter 4: What the F*ck is "Fit"?
Every time someone says they are hiring for fit, it is worth asking: fit for what? Fit for comfort? Fit for sameness? Fit for whoever is already sitting at the table?Chapter 4 of Leading Beyond Labels dismantles one of the most pervasive...
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Chapter 2: Personality Profiling, MLMs, and Cult Psychology
This is the episode where things get uncomfortable. Nicola Knobel draws a direct line between corporate personality profiling, multi-level marketing psychology, and the dynamics of high-control groups, and explains exactly why the comparison ho...
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Chapter 1: A Brief History of Personality Testing
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-doll...
Book 2: Leading Beyond Labels: Introduction: What This Book Is About
Most leadership books tell you how to understand people better. This one asks whether the tools you have been using to do that were ever really fit for purpose.Leading Beyond Labels is the book that takes on the personality industrial co...
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Appendix 1: Safety Spectrum Baseline
Appendix 1: Safety Spectrum BaselinePsychological Safety, Measurement, and Moving from Tolerance to TrustPsychological safety is often talked about as a feeling, but feelings are not enough to change systems. In this appendix, I int...
Chapter 21: Women Who Lead Differently
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 m...
Chapter 20: The Neurodivergent Leader
Neurodivergent leadership has long been misunderstood, framed through deficit models that prioritise composure, social fluency, and consistency over depth, integrity, and insight. This chapter challenges those assumptions and reframes neurodive...
Chapter 19: The New Leadership Equation | Unmasking Leadership
Chapter 19 argues that every era reshapes leadership in response to what its people can no longer survive. The industrial age forced accountability after preventable harm. Corporate scandals pushed ethics programs to rebuild trust. Now, burnout...