My Autistic Son Taught Me to Be a More Resilient Leader - with Adrian Jones, Goldman Sachs - Chairman & Co-Head, Global Private Equity, Asset Management

When you look at the resume or LinkedIn profile of today's guest, Adrian Jones, it's hard not to be wowed. He's the global chair and co head of private equity and asset management and one of the top financial services firm in the entire world, Goldman Sachs. He started at the firm in 1992 and has risen through the ranks in what appears to be a steady ascension of more responsibility, more power and more impressive titles. But don't believe everything you see.

Everyone looks better on paper or on LinkedIn and especially on Facebook and Instagram. This isn't real life in the real world. There are many setbacks and heartaches during life's journey. The question is what you learn from these crucible experiences along the way.

And like everyone else, Adrian has had plenty of setbacks and unexpected surprises during his leadership journey. By far the biggest surprise was the diagnosis he and his wife received when his second son Liam received a diagnosis of profound autism. Adrian's life was forever changed. Things got real tough for Adrian, but he got stronger and more resilient along the way.

He's one of the most classy, values driven leaders you will ever meet. So I hope you'll enjoy today's conversation with my new friend, Adrian Jones. Adrian, it's so good to see you again and thanks so much for joining us today. Very good to see you, Jeff.

So I want to talk to you today about some pretty heady topics. Business, culture, leadership and autism. They might not seem related, but they are. You've been very public about your beautiful son Liam, who's profoundly autistic and how he's helped shape your leadership style and even more than that, how he's helped you become a better father, husband and even a better leader as well.

But first I do want to hear about your current role at Goldman Sachs and what you do there and a little bit about your journey within Goldman. So I have just started my 32nd year at Goldman. I joined in 1994 and for the last 28 years I worked in our private equity business here at Goldman Sachs West Street Capital Partners. And today I co head that business.

So when I, when I started in Goldman SACHS in the mid-90s, we had around about 11,000 people. We're five times that size now, roughly 45,000 people globally and far more global. I would say it was very much a US and New York centric firm that I joined. It had international offices, but it was very New York centric business.

Some of my global colleagues would say it's still New York centric But in truth, it's a far more global firm today than it was now. The firm has been around a while. The firm's been around 156 years. On the other hand, the average age of someone at Goldman is actually about 27.

So you have this contrast between this long dated firm which has been a survivor of so much that has happened on Wall street and happened in the US and the global econom at the same time you have massive velocity young people coming through all the time. So you have a collection of 20 somethings and then you have dinosaurs like myself. On the other hand, weren't you there. When the firm started?

Some days it felt like that. Some days it felt like that. Do you see a difference in mindset between, you know, some of the younger guys that are there now joining the firm versus, you know, when you were a young associate? Yeah, there's, it's definitely, it's a very, very different mindset.

So, you know, the commonality, I would say is, you know, the, the quality of the people we were so fortunate to attract and hire, their work ethic, their ambition, their curiosity, their attitude, that hasn't changed. And the degree to which we, we thrive in a culture of collaboration, that hasn't changed. I think what has changed I see it for, and it's not just in the last few years. I've seen this, I've seen this 15 years ago.

I would say if you looked at our group in joining Goldman Sachs In 1994, I would say the timeline against which we were thinking through career and assessing how well we were doing, the timeline we would have been using for ourselves individually was significantly longer than it is for many of the people we're hiring at 22 today. Is that because they're more impatient and they'll leave or why is that? I think there are many dimensions to it, but social media is the one that people talk about.

But I think social media is only one element. But I think it's more, it's more broadly part of the culture than just social media. But there's no question there is, there is more fear fomo, there's more fear of missing out. There's more of a sense of compressed timeframes in which to evaluate how's this working?

Or a is it time to do something else? It's amazing. I mean, but can you really rush leadership development? You know, don't you need to kind of go through different steps and different challenges and reflect and that just takes time.

I mean, so how do you make sure that you're developing leaders along the. Way, spend a lot of time with people, lay it out for them, make it very clear that we are investing in them. Give them every reason to say, I think, you know, you train people so that it could go anywhere and you, hopefully you treat them so they never leave. But it's very challenging because there's a war for talent and the grass is always greener somewhere else.

And so there's always that dimension that's going on. And by the way, most of that is entirely healthy. But I also think people can do damage to themselves. There's the fear of missing out and there's the fear of a better option and the fear of missing out.

You're only damaging yourself. Fear of a better option. You're kind of damaging yourself and everyone around you. But those are, those are pervasive in our society today.

We're not the only ones who are dealing with that. So you work with people, you lay it out. But that piece that I just touched on investing in those people and treating them appropriately. If you treat people like they're going to leave in two years, they will, they will.

You can get two years out of them. If you treat them as colleagues who have a forward here and you can share that forward to them, you. You have a shot at keeping the best of them. Yeah.

And I don't know you that well, but I do know that you're a very good mentor. And I've heard that now from several people, Adrian. But I'm interested to know what you were like when you were young, when you were young talent, even before college and business school. What was it like, you know, growing up as a kid and Ireland.

So I grew up in a small village. I went to an elementary school where at its peak, there were seven kids in school. There were six in my class and I was the eldest of seven. So it was.

It was many ways, I look back, and it was an idyllic childhood by virtue of the fact my dad was a farmer. He was present. We worked on the farm as kids. My father and mother were present.

They had a family of seven. They were very, very invested in us as kids. It was a very warm, nurturing environment and a great childhood. What was your relationship like with your dad?

I mean, do you even remember days of going out there on the farm and doing manual labor and chores with your dad? And what was that like? My dad died suddenly when I was 20, so I. But I have great memories of him.

He was, by today's standards, he would be looked down as quite strict. His father had been very strict. His father was well known for how strict he was. And my dad grew up in a family of 11.

But he himself, he was very enlightened. His education finished at 12, but he was very thoughtful, he was very curious about the world. Very, very intelligent man and he was very humane. He was a great neighbor, he was a wonderful dad, he was a great friend.

And you join the dots as you get older and you remember how his neighbors, how his friends thought about him, what he was like to his brothers and sisters. And a lot of that would have not been as obvious to me at the time he died when I was 20. But as I got older, as I became a father myself, I remember so much how my dad dealt with different things. He wasn't warm and fuzzy and he was strict and I was the eldest.

So I got a full dose of all of that. And it's interesting, he figured out very quickly that I really didn't like farming and I had no interest in it. I was fortunate because my next two brothers actually did like it. So depending on what the task was that we were dealing with on the farm, he would cut me some slack and let me go off and do the stuff that I was actually genuinely interested in.

What was that? What did you like doing? Find a place to hide from everyone else and leave something or play football. That was what I wanted to do.

I had no interest in farming from the beginning. How did that relationship with such an amazing man, your dad, shape your vision of what you thought fatherhood would be like even before you had a child? It definitely for me it was the, it was, it was definitely the North Star in terms of how I wanted the relationship I wanted to have with, with, with my kids. I definitely, first of all I wanted to have kids.

And I suppose when I thought about kids, I thought about sons just given I myself had been a son. So I definitely wanted kids. It also informed how I thought about who I wanted to have those kids with because my dad and my mom had a truly loving relationship and I rarely, rarely saw any tension or stress or disagreement between them. They were very, very complimentary.

And so I wanted to have that warmth for our kids and to be really invested in our kids lives. So my dad, yeah, as you said, my dad was very much a model of the kind of relationship I wanted to have with my kids. And then when did you meet your wife? In college in university in Galway.

She did her junior year in Ireland and she arrived back with me. So. So tell me a Little bit about when you received the diagnosis of autism for Liam. Danny and Liam were born in London while I was working with Boland in London.

And I would say at the time, you know, we decided to have kids. We'd been married for 10 years, Tia and I, which in hindsight was invaluable. The fact that we had that kind of settled relationship. We weren't 20 somethings.

We were in our mid-30s when we, when we decided to have kids. We were extremely happy in London. We loved the dynamic in London. We had just bought an apartment, we had the boys down for local schools.

We loved the idea of staying on in London was just like, Danny Lynn was a beautiful child in every respect. And then he started missing milestones. And then we got a diagnosis of autism just before he turned 2, which was a massive shock to us. We knew nothing about autism, nothing.

And it was a brutal shock. June 26, 2001. It's, you know, it's. It's a date that I'll.

I'll never forget. And then we went through a journey of really, how did you, Adrian, you. You say a brutal shock. You remember the date.

You know, I can even see it in your eyes. You're a little, you know, almost teary. But, like, how, how did you feel when you got that diagnosis that you really didn't even know what autism was probably back then? Like, how did you feel and how did you deal with some of those immediate feelings?

I think as, as we processed it in the, in the weeks, the days and weeks immediately afterwards, there was tremendous amount of grief. Very emotional for me, for Tina, overwhelming in so many respects, very raw. There's also a degree of guilt. I don't know if that's part of my, part of my makeup, but it's not unusual.

I know this is something that's very typical amongst parents. And at the time, there were allegations in the press that the rising levels of autism were related to vaccinations. And so there was a lot of speculation around that. And so for me, the impact of that in particular as I learned more about autism, was a sense of, should I have done something to protect my family, to protect lean from this, and was there something I should have done differently?

So that obviously compounds the brief, but it was really, really challenging. You're dealing with something deeply, deeply personal. There aren't too many people you can turn to discuss something like this. So there's a sense of isolation as well, which probably adds to the grief.

It was a very, very difficult time. So there's Grief, guilt, isolation. How does someone you know? And in the meantime, here you are in London, your career's booming.

At Goldman Sachs, it's such a dichotomy. Like, what are the, is the process that you go through to deal with all of these emotions? And oh, my God, did you sleep? Did you bring some of these feelings in the office?

And I know people, you know, especially successful executives, talk about the importance of compartmentalizing, but my God, is that even possible? Like, how do you do that? Certainly not for me. It's, it's, it's, I, I, I have, I have colleagues who, I have colleagues and I've watched friends over time who are particularly good at compartmentalizing.

I, I think all of us have to do some elements of it to a degree, but I'm not particularly good at it. So, no, this was, this was overwhelming. It was very distracting, one of the decisions I made. So, so as a result of the diagnosis and more work we did, we decided to move.

We decided we needed to move back from London to the States. And I went and I told my boss about this. And he and Goldman were amazing, really. They actually wanted me in New York, in London.

They didn't need me in New York, but they accommodated us. Were you scared before that conversation, or how did you feel going to tell them about that? I think she felt fine. I had a very good relationship with my boss at the time, Barry Volpert, who ran our business in New York, in London.

And then I came over and met with Rich Friedman and our leaders in New York, and I liked them. They were very supportive of me. Beth Colgan, who was one of the people who worked in our business at the time, tremendously supportive, very empathetic. It wasn't a hard conversation to have.

The firm didn't need me in New York, but the firm accommodated bringing us home because it was the right thing for our family, for me. And so I was very grateful for that. Well, as part of that process of coming back to New York, I decided that I was going to open up to my new colleagues in New York as to why I was coming back. And I didn't think that much more about it at the time other than I'm going to be here and I'm going to be dealing with this, and people are very respectful of each other's privacy.

But I'm actually going to do something that's a little uncharacteristic for myself. I'm going to open up about this as to why I don't want people speculating as to why is Adrian coming back from London. I'm just going to tell people why I'm coming back and be open with it. And that decision in and of itself was monumental.

I didn't realize at the time how significant that decision would be over the coming years because it allowed other people to open up to me about different elements of what they were dealing with. And for many of my colleagues here, that's how they got to know me initially. Was that level of vulnerability really difficult and scary for you at the time? Yeah, it was, yeah.

Because I think my friends, my colleagues here will tell you I'm reserved, and I think I am. I value privacy. I don't live my life on Instagram or any other form of social media, and I value other people's privacy. I respect other people's privacy.

So it's not in my nature to talk about my family or to talk about my kids or about my feelings. And so that was hard. But I also felt there was an urgent. To shape the narrative.

I didn't want people speculating. I didn't. I didn't want this thing to be an elephant in the. I also want.

Knew I would need space. I knew I would need understanding and accommodations over time. Do you think. In general.

And again, I love asking you specifically this question because you are at such a great firm like Goldman. You are in a very tough, you know, competitive industry like private equity. So I love asking you this. Do you think vulnerability is more of a strength or is it a weakness in business?

So it's more of a strength than a weakness, but it really is about how you. How you use it. I mean, think about it like this. To me, it's an extension of humility.

So it's humility, a strength or weakness. There's no question. Humility is a great strength. Why?

The limits of what you can accomplish, certainly what you can accomplish by yourself to. To realize you don't have all the answers, to have the ability, the capacity to acknowledge when you've made mistakes, to learn from those mistakes. That's humility. In some ways, vulnerability is an extension of that.

You're not perfect. Nobody has a perfect life. You don't. You.

We all have gaps. We all have gaps. We all have gaps. We all have weaknesses.

Vulnerability is just an acknowledgment of that, and I suppose to some degree, a disclosing of that, or at least not hiding that acknowledgement. That's what vulnerability is. So what vulnerability is, is its authenticity. And so what were the results?

You. You Share. You were scared. You were vulnerable.

You shared this with all of your New York colleagues. How did they respond and like, what were the results did, especially on the. On the culture of. Of your team and even more broadly at Goldman Sachs?

What. What I talked about, I shared it with my colleagues. I shared what I was dealing with, and then I just got on with doing my job the best way possible. It shaped for them who I was, who this person was, but I didn't allow it to define me, either personally or professionally.

And I think that was important, too. I kind of got it out of the way. I shared this vulnerability with people, and then I created a narrative around myself in terms of what I did professionally and how I dealt with people personally. So there's a vulnerability there, but the vulnerability doesn't define you.

You don't allow it to find. How did this diagnosis impact your marriage? When Tina and I think back on this, one of the things we feel so blessed for is that we didn't have kids straight away. We got married very, very early.

We were in our early 20s when we got married. And then, you know, we moved from Ireland to the States. We moved from Boston to New York. I was working very, very hard.

We weren't ready to have kids. We knew that. So we. By the time we were dealing with kids and certainly by the time we were dealing with autism, we knew each other very well.

And this wasn't easy. None of this was easy. But one of the things we. I already knew.

We already knew is that we were in this for the. We were in this for a lifetime with each other. We were soulmates. We were also very complementary to each other in terms of our skill sets and our attitudes.

And anyone who knows us, we'd be able to go through what Tina brings, what I bring. We're not the same. We have shared values, but we're very different people. In what ways?

Because I've heard so many nice things about Tina from you and others, but what is Tina's like, and what are you like, and why are you complimentary? Well, in the context of Liam and the journey we've had with living, maybe that's the best way to shape it. So there's a massive decision for us to move back from London to New York and then massive decision, massive logistical challenge to figure out, find the right stool for Liam and then find the right home on the basis of where that school was and all that, that kind of big lift, getting stuff done, project stuff.

I'm. I'm pretty good at that. I'M pretty good at that kind of stuff. What Tina has been superb at world class at over the last 24 years, 25 years, is getting up every day and doing the right thing by Liam, putting together a wonderful program, putting together a lean team, getting everything that lean needs and providing for him in every way, shape or form, and then doing exactly the same thing the second day and the day after that, and dealing with all the trials and tribulations of having a child with autism and a young adult with autism, and all the frustrations and all the microaggressions and all the challenges and then doing it again the next day and the next day.

I wouldn't be as good at that. I know that for sure. And so we know each other's strengths, we know each other's weaknesses. We're also invested in our relationship with each other and we're in this for the duration.

So that I have no doubt, again, we've been very blessed. I have no doubt that our relationship has been strengthened in so many respects by what we've dealt with with Liam. But probably a lot of it comes back to the shared values that we've applied to doing things and picking, picking the pieces that each of us is strongest at. Yeah, because it must be the shared values and the complementary style.

Because you do read not not to be so negative, but you do read that it often results in a lot of divorces or alcoholism or even suicide. So this is a really stressful thing, you know. And so I, I, I. Does it come back to the values?

Yeah, I think the values piece is hugely important. It's values, shared values, the ability to talk openly in each other, the ability to disagree, the ability to give it the time to not personalize things, to not use bad situations and bad dynamics as a way to hurt each other. It helps a lot, that capacity to talk and to be looking for ultimately the right outcomes and to have the maturity to know that nothing's ever perfect and some of it is just, is always going to be a work in process.

And I think we were also very, very fortunate. We have two great loving families, Tina's family and mine. And she's very close to her siblings, to her mom, as a line to mine. And that was, that was a tremendously important board network as well to all of us.

How has this whole journey impacted your relationship with Liam? Well, I think anyone who has a child with autism or indeed any other disability has been on this life journey or somewhere along the line with this life journey. They know that Polaris degree. This is the journey that defines your journey.

This becomes your journey, okay? And so if you. If you're. If you're to navigate it in.

In a kind of sustainable way as a. As a family, as a unit, the rest of your life has, to some degree, revolve around this. And so Lima's been at the center of our lives for. I mean, as a child, he probably would have been all along, but for.

For his life, he would be at the center of our lives. And so you're navigating other commitments you're making or choosing not to make, or even the more mundane holiday vacation choices or how you spend your weekends or whatever. All of it is revolving around what's in the right. What's the right thing for Liam and what works for Liam as well as what works for the rest of the family unit.

So I suppose Liam is how the lean relationship. Lean is at the center of my life. It's at the center of Tina's life. And so that's.

That's really, I suppose, how it's defined. And then, you know, for me, I have a pretty heavy workload. I'm a great believer there's a Goldman culture around. You can do two things really well, one of them had better be Goldman.

You better do the Goldman piece. Well, you get to choose what the second thing is. If you try and make it three things, it probably won't work. Well, second thing has to be family.

And, you know, so working through this with Tina and with Liam, with Danny over the last 25 years, it's very clarifying. You have to decide all of this is no longer abstract. It's very real. And you have to decide what matters, what doesn't matter, who matters, who doesn't matter.

And you have to prioritize things, and that means letting stuff go. And just as I suppose lean in some respects is a little bit of a forcing function on that, it clarifies for you what matters, what doesn't matter, how you. And the greatest indicator of that is how you spend your time. So, you know, my life is very much around work and family, getting the balance right in that and just kind of doing it as a suit from thinking about it or talking about it.

Yeah, that's beautifully said. And so let's go full circle. You know, if the Goldman motto is let's do two things, one better be Goldman, and for you, one is human. So if you look back at this entire journey, even though we're still right in the middle of it, how has this crucible experience impacted you as a leader at Goldman and the way you think about leadership and culture, I've no doubt it has.

And sometimes it's hard because you're completing everything else that's happening in your life. So if Liam had never been born, we'd never have gotten. If Liam had never been diagnosed with autism, hopefully I would have matured as I would have gotten older and wiser, and that would have shaped my leadership style and my capacity to be a good colleague to my colleagueship. And then you add on.

It's hard at times to separate out what was really lean induced versus what would have happened in the natural arc of a career anyway. But it all feeds into that process and I suppose it comes back in some ways to people and how you treat people. I think one of the great subliminal learnings for me of dealing with Liam and dealing with disability was giving me greater empathy for what's happening in other people's lives. You know, we have such a.

Particularly in the kind of culture we live in today, the Instagrammable culture, where everyone's living a beautiful life, everyone has beautiful relationship, everyone's got a boat, everyone's on a boat. Drives me crazy. And the reality is it's all nonsense. It's all nonsense.

It's all complete and total nonsense. And everybody has challenges going on in their life and everyone will. And nobody can avoid them, nobody can hide from them. It's just a reality.

Just as a fundamental level, understanding that that's happening in people's lives, you're not going to see that most of the time, you'll be oblivious to that. They won't share it, you won't be able to see it. But understand that that's happening in people's lives. And factoring that into your decision making, how do you think about other people and never losing sight of that human element?

So that's one dimension where I know it has influenced me. Then just maybe on the same topic, and this would be true whether Liam is part of my life or not, there is this sense people will look at my career here at Goldman Sachs, and it's very easy to look at it and even to look at my resume or what's on LinkedIn or whatever. And you'd say, well, that looks like it's up and to the right. That has just been this wonderful journey.

And it's not either professionally or personally. It's not for me and it's not for anybody else. It's a series of good days are three steps forward and one back. But there are a lot of days with the orders reverse.

And actually one of the things we've done here, again, because we have such a young population, 27, you know, average age 27, because they're, they're, they're exposed to this sense of what's good and what's, you should have a wonderful life or a perfect life. And to see all of this in social media. One of the things we've worked on here is I've sat down with younger colleagues and actually walked them through the graph of both my career and my personal life. We, and I'm not the only one doing this, by the way.

There's a group of us dinosaurs that do this. Even the mistakes, Adrian, even like the three, even the one step back or the three steps back you share with them. Show them and show them where, you know, I walked through freshly personally, this is the last 30 years for me. Here's where I got a step, function change or I hit a crucial milestone.

Here's where I was flatlining, here's why things were going so bad. Here's where I had a dreadful year or a terrible time with my boss. We go through that and because they squint and they think it's up until the right, nothing's up and to the right. How do they respond when you, when you're that authentic with them?

It resonates powerfully for them because it's, I think it's refreshing for them and it's also, in some ways it's inspiring for them because there's such pressure on young people today. Some of it is self induced, but so much of it culturally is brutal about the fear of making a mistake or somebody saying no and the fear of being called wrong. And again, it's just very much part of the culture. But understanding it won't all go well.

Even in a great career, in a great personal journey, it won't all go well. There'll be, there'll be stumbles, there'll be mistakes, there'll be your mistakes, there'll be other people's mistakes. There'll be times when you're, when it's a misery to come to work. And one of the stories I tell them, we have a, one of the most interesting things groups we have at Goldman.

We have what we call the Quarter Century Club, which you've been, you've been at Goldman 25 years. Become a member of this club and then you're a member for life. And we get together once a year. It's one of the most Enjoyable nights here.

And last year David Solomon became a member of the club, and this year John Waldron became a member of the club. It's a very special night. When you're talking to people on that night as we all get together, the one commonality across all of it is resilience. That's the word you hear.

That's the word we talk about ourselves because we've all been through challenges, personal, professional challenge, but somehow or other, serendipity, good luck, perseverance, passion, whatever, somehow we got through it. That's resilience. That's the message I'll try and convey to my younger colleagues. I mean, Goldman's a really hard place to get a job or an internship.

When you're interviewing, do you look for people that have failed and that are willing to talk about it and kind of show what they've learned from that experience? It depends. I do that when we're hiring people who are older. First of all, they don't let me talk to our 21 year old hirers at all.

They don't want me picking 22 year old graduates at all. We let our 25 year olds pick our 22 year olds. And to be honest, if I was allowed to interview 22 year olds, I wouldn't be pushing them on the mistakes they've made. I think it's very, I think 22 year olds will struggle to, to discuss all that.

Now if I'm, if I'm hiring somebody laterally at 45, that's a completely different stuff. Or if I'm hiring them for one of the, for one of the, one of our portfolio companies, which is the more typical way in which I would be doing some hiring if I was. If I'm talking to a candidate for a CEO role or a CFO role. You know, I love seeing their resume and of course the resume will be up and to the right, but, but I'm old enough and they're old enough to know that it's not up and to the right.

So we'll talk about the three steps forward and one step back and we'll talk about the flatlining and we'll talk about stuff that didn't go well. Is it a warning or a red flag when they say nothing has gone wrong in their past or they haven't had any major failures or they've been reluctant to talk about them to you? The reluctance I'm fine with. I get that the denial in a 45 year old would be a red flag.

The sense that everything has just Gone perfectly. Yeah, absolutely. A red flag. Yeah.

35 year olds, that would be a red flag. 22 year old, I cut them a lot more slack. That's why they don't want you interviewing them, Adrian. They don't want me near them.

They don't let me near them. They're like, stay away. Last question. Because I know we're up against 25.

Year olds, know exactly what they want from the 22 year olds. Last question. You know, back to autism. The, the rate is skyrocketing.

You know, it's like 1 in 30 kids now in America are diagnosed with autism. A lot of different reasons. Nobody really fully understands it. You know, we're again having the vaccine debate.

I have no idea what causes it, but if you do the math, that means a lot of high performers at Goldman are going to be parents of autistic children and a lot of executives and people at work everywhere are going to be parents. You know, what advice do you have for them? It's a lot different now than when, when Liam was diagnosed, but what advice? It's still scary, still lonely, still this crucible experience that they can't escape and nor do they want to.

You know, one of our mutual friends said it's a club that you didn't really ask to be invited to, but you're in it nonetheless. What advice do you have for them? Few pieces of advice I give. First part, I would say you kind of touched on this one already.

For this journey, you're going to need to have strong family unit, or certainly the journey will be less painful with a strong family unit. That means you need to really invest in that family unit. And if you haven't done so already, you need to start investing in that and that. You won't agree on everything, but you need to set down some ground rules as to what you're going to do differently to sustain that family unit.

Because this is going to tax everybody. That's number one. Number two, and I think this is one of the great challenges of dealing with this. And I remember this so well from the early years, the early weeks of this.

You think you're going through this alone and everyone else is living an Instagrammable life. Make no mistake, everyone's got stuff going on. We have thousands of colleagues who are caring for somebody with a disability. Thousands of colleagues, by the way, we have thousands of colleagues with a disability.

Thousands of colleagues with a disability themselves. And that's because you guys have done such a great job actually appreciating the value of neurodiversity and differences more generally in terms of staying and keeping your innovative edge. Yep. The vast majority of our colleagues who have a disability don't tell us.

We just knew. By virtue of the experts on the space, tell us that your population, given how you're hiring, 15 to 20% of your colleagues have a disability. Two thirds of that is hidden. Most of that is neurodiverse.

Is that a reasonable. I mean, is that reasonable for them to mask it or hide it or should they come forward and talk about it? It's entirely understandable. I understand it myself.

I understand exactly in this culture why people will not share this. Our levels of self identification are meaningfully higher than most of our pure firms, but it's, it's a fraction of what's actually happening there. But I, I totally respect why people would. It's their own private reality and they don't want, they choose not to share it.

And that's, and that's how they want to play it. And I, I respect that. We want to, we work very hard here to create a culture where people don't have to hide any element of themselves and they can be their complete, authentic self and, and, and share that with other people. But it's their choice whether they do or not.

And that's, that's a journey for us as much as it is a journey for them. And, you know, that's around how we show that we are an inclusive, tolerance, enlightened people to work with. But that's a journey for us. And what's the third piece of advice that you have for the parents?

Third piece is agency. Actually, there's a lot you can do to shape the outcome here. It's not in terms of shaping the outcome, in terms of making autism go away, but do not be passive in any piece of this. Build your network.

Build a network that can sustain you for the long term. Sometimes the greatest investment you can make. I hate the term quality time. It's quantity of time.

Just invest the time with your child, with your family unit. Just be there, be present, make the time, make the effort. And that can take multiple forms. But the agency piece, don't be docile about this.

Don't be passive. Build out the network. Understand what's happening. Agitate ferociously for your child, ferociously for your child.

I love that. And how is Liam? What's. What's next for Liam?

And how's he doing? Liam's. He's a very happy. He turns 26 on July 4th.

Wow. So Liam is. You would be considered Profoundly autistic. So you have fairly limited cognitive functioning.

But every July 4th is a big day. The whole. The whole world comes to stand still and celebrate Sleem's birthday. And that's just fine.

He's very secure. He lives with us at home. The next part of our journey with Liam will be to create a setting for Liam that can survive us. And that's something I think that any parent who has a child in their 20s with autism will understand.

Who has a child with autism or a child that's going to need support. Because you start thinking, you start to be conscious of your own mortality and understanding that there's going to be a third leg to this. The first leg was childhood and education. I'm working through that.

And the second is early adulthood and post education. And then there's what's going to happen when I'm out, no longer in the picture, because this child, this man, this woman will live a full, natural life. So what can I do now? Again, it's agency.

What can I do now to influence that? Or am I going to be reliant on the kindness of strangers? And so we're just at that point in journey now, as Tina and I. Once again, I said, it's a question of just talking through this ourselves, finding our support network, understanding what others have done.

And again, we're not isolated. We're not the first people to have to go down this journey. There's so much we can learn from those who came before us. And we're in that point now where we're learning what's out there, what good is, and we're determining what will be a setting for lean that we will know will survive us and you will thrive in.

Maybe that's the last thing I would say to parents, particularly parents who've just gotten a recent diagnosis. And I don't know, is this just a function of everything I've just said in terms of investing time in it and building support network, or just it's a function of aging and maturing, but it gets better. I don't know. It never gets easy.

But your capacity to deal it, you. You get stronger. You definitely get stronger. And I think your capacity to deal with what you're confronted with definitely grows.

It grows not only as a father, but as a husband, as a leader, and as a human being. Yeah. And again, I just. I don't know how much a part of that is just dealing with the reality of lean and dealing with autism or whether it's just the natural maturing that we all face.

But there's no question it's the words I described to deal with it from 24 years ago. Grief overwhelming. The grief passes and it never fully goes away. There's always a little bit of regret for expectations lost and all of that, but the overwhelming goes away.

I think if you put the right effort into this, I think the overwhelming you strengthen, you deal with it and you move on, particularly if you can keep a family unit strong. Well, God bless you and Tina and Liam and I so appreciate you talking to me about this and and our listeners. Thank you for being so authentic and vulnerable yourself, Adrian. I really appreciate it.

Thank you, Jeff. I hope you guys enjoyed that conversation. Adrian really is a classy and humble leader. I love his saying the talent at.

Goldman can really focus only on two. Things in their lives and one of them better be work. They get get to choose the other one. And I also love this story about the 25 year club at Coleman.

He was so proud about everyone in that club, showed remarkable resilience over the years. And if his deeply personal story about having an autistic son resonated, I invite you to reach out to our team. Tell us why it resonated. You can reach us@imperfectleaders.

com so see you next week for another episode and until then, have a great week. Everyone.