Why Managers Should Never Diagnose Employees

(with guest Michelle Spencer Fourney, Global Director of Employee Relations at Zscaler)A manager tells HR she's "pretty sure" an employee has undiagnosed ADHD — based on nothing but his disorganization — and asks whether she can require a psych evaluation before granting more deadline extensions. He's never disclosed a condition or asked for an accommodation. In this episode, host Rebecca Taylor and Michelle Spencer Fourney dig into what happens when good intentions turn into an amateur diagnosis, and why "pretty sure" is never a basis for anything. It's a scenario built on assumption stacked on assumption — and untangling it means going back to the one thing that's actually documented: performance.What you'll hear in this episode:Why a manager's well-meaning guess about a disability can create more legal exposure than the performance issue it was meant to solveA framework for sequencing a hard HR conversation: start with what's easy (performance), save the harder disability conversation for lastHow to tell the difference between witnessed behavior and a diagnosis — and why HR should never let a manager blur the twoWhat to actually ask a manager who suspects an employee is using an accommodation as an "excuse" for poor performanceWhy HR almost never talks to the employee directly in these situations — and what that says about the invisible work HR doesHow to turn a manager's success in a moment like this into a training story that builds a peer network of better managersAbout Michelle Spencer Fourney:Michelle is Global Director of Employee Relations at Zscaler, where she navigates the highest-stakes, most ambiguous conversations HR has with managers — the ones involving disability, performance, and everything tangled up in between. Her approach: start where it's easy, protect the employee's privacy, and never lose the manager in the process of coaching them through it.