Mark Scully founded his own executive coaching firm to raise awareness of the benefits of neurodiversity in the workplace and support young professionals.

For Mark Scully, his path to entrepreneurship as the owner of his own consulting business has been a highly personal endeavour.

A qualified barrister, Chartered Accountant and Chartered Tax Advisor, Scully launched Braver Coaching and Consulting (gobraver.com) in February 2024 to promote neurodiversity in Irish workplaces and provide executive coaching to young professionals.

The move followed his own autism diagnosis in 2021, which prompted Scully to leave behind a successful career as a Tax Director with KPMG in Dublin to set out on his own.

“I’m passionate about organisations becoming more neuro-inclusive for the benefit of all employees and this is very much down to my own experience,” Scully explains.

“Before I set up Braver, I found I loved coaching people at KPMG and raising people up. Looking out for others and wanting to help them – that was really the start of my focus on people development.”

Originally from Cork, Scully studied law at UCC and was called to the bar shortly after. He went on to join KPMG aged 22 to train as a Chartered Accountant specialising in tax. Following his qualification, he worked elsewhere as a tax lawyer before rejoining KPMG 18 months later.

“KPMG and Chartered Accountants Ireland had been brilliant to train with, especially as I had zero accounting knowledge before joining. I found I really missed the sheer scale of support on offer in a Big Four tax department, so I decided to go back to KPMG in 2016 as a manager,” he says.

Overcoming challenges

Scully was promoted to Associate Director in 2018 followed by Tax Director in 2021. Despite this impressive career progression, however, he found himself struggling with some aspects of his work and his mental health took a hit.

“I had a perfectionist mindset and would sometimes find myself researching to the ‘nth degree’, getting into the details without seeing the big picture. I also didn’t realise that multitasking or shifting from one task to another ate up a lot of mental energy for me, but I wasn’t approaching work in a way which factored that in,” he explains.

At times, Scully says he also found it difficult to navigate social dynamics in the workplace.

“I was very social, but certain dynamics I just didn’t ‘get’ and I was expending a lot of energy trying to get that right, which I didn’t realise at the time. I just had this notion in my head of, ‘It’s coming so easy to others but not me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’

“I stopped taking proper care of myself, working long hours, and in the end that really impacted my mental health, so I sought out professional counselling and coaching.”

The experience was, Scully says, “transformational”.

“It really opened my eyes to the meaning and importance of mental health. I realised I was in a hole and, once I got out of that hole, I had this drive to help other people avoid the same.

“Mental health was a big thing on my agenda, and I was always looking out for others in the department and making sure that their mental health was being looked after.”

Scully became a mental health advocate at work, co-leading a wellbeing committee in his department.

“I also received some excellent coaching which I found to be such a powerful tool for helping me implement positive changes in work and my personal life. So I studied it and became a coach myself and joined KPMG’s internal coaching panel to provide those benefits to others.”

Genesis of Braver

It was during a counselling session that the prospect of autism was first raised to Scully. This started him on his journey to educating himself about neurodiversity.

This journey, combined with his years spent leading teams and coaching experience, formed the genesis of Braver, which he would go on to found in February 2024.

“Getting the diagnosis really allowed me to have compassion for myself. Others may not need the diagnosis to feel that way, but I did. It allowed me to understand, ‘okay, this is why I am the way I am. I don’t have to berate myself for these areas I feel like I’m falling down’.

“In fact, maybe I can learn to ask for help or focus more on the things I am good at. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the year I was diagnosed was also the first year I received a top rating in my annual performance review at KPMG, and I got that rating ever since,” he says.

“I had dropped my own negative coping strategies and started playing to my strengths. I had also started opening up to people about my diagnosis.

“The feedback I was getting was pretty much entirely positive, and I count myself lucky for that. At the same time, I could see that awareness of neurodiversity in Irish workplaces simply wasn’t there yet and I wanted to do something to change that.”

Neurodiversity awareness and training

In addition to executive coaching for individuals and teams, Braver offers a range of neurodiversity awareness and training services for organisations, teams and individuals.

“When I go into an organisation for a neurodiversity awareness session, I bring them through some of the traits of various neurodivergences, but also their strengths,” Scully explains.

“I then go through some useful, high-level dos and don’ts everyone in the organisation can take away with them. I also deliver a more in-depth neuro-inclusion management training workshops for HR, people managers and leaders.

As Scully sees it, neurodiversity is “just a way of saying we all have different ways of thinking and experiencing the world.

“For some people, these different ways of experiencing the world have been medically pathologised as autism, ADHD, dyslexia or dyspraxia, for example,” he says.

“All have been framed purely in a deficit-based manner historically. However, we can adopt a different lens and view them simply as ‘difference’. For people like me who are neurodivergent, viewing our experience as a difference rather than a deficit can change our entire outlook.

“When I was first diagnosed, I thought, ‘I can’t be autistic’. I had preconceptions of what autism looked like, and it looked nothing like me, so I was taken aback.

“Once I looked into it further, however, I realised those autistic traits had always been there, and I was drained from masking them. I came to terms with it and I was kinder to myself and learned to adopt ways of working that suited me and changed my environment.

“I knew I wasn’t going to be good for two intense meetings in one day, for example, so I learned to move those things around to expend my energy more wisely.

“I learned that I needed a lot of certainty when it came to communication, expectations and timelines, so I was very clear with my bosses and team about this and requested communication in a way that would leave nothing ambiguous.”

Implementing these different ways of communicating and introducing clear boundaries around expectations allowed Scully to work more effectively.

“At this point, I hadn’t told them I was autistic. They just accepted I was trying out a new way of working. It was really just good people management on everyone’s part, and it made a massive difference to my ability to perform.”

Benefits for all employees

Above all, Scully says he wants his work with Braver to make employers in Ireland realise that a neuro-inclusive workplace doesn’t just benefit neurodivergent employees, it benefits everyone.

Scully sees neurodiversity training as “just one step” towards a more inclusive and adaptable management framework for all employees.

“We spend so long training people to be subject matter experts, but I don’t think we dedicate enough time to training them how to be effective managers,” he says.

“Learning to be a neuro-inclusive manager and leader is all about communication and adaptation – handling sensitive conversations and approaching adjustments to ways of working or communication that best suit the individual, for example.

“When you’re training your managers to be neuro-inclusive, they will be better managers to all staff, not just those who are neurodivergent.”

First steps for employers

For employers considering neurodiversity for the first time, it can be overwhelming. There are many organisational and environmental aspects to be considered, such as removing barriers to the recruitment process, workplace accessibility and the adequacy of policies and procedures.

“I believe there are many employers out there who want to make their workplaces more neuro-inclusive but don’t know where to start. I want to help and Braver is my way of doing so,” he says.

Scully says a good first step is simply letting your people know you want to have a conversation about how you can be more inclusive.

“Make neurodiversity a topic of conversation and create a space where your employees, particularly your neurodivergent employees, feel safe to participate in that conversation,” he advises.

“As part of this, train your people on how they can exercise inclusive management so that both the manager and the employee feel safe and confident to approach different ways of working that suit that individual.

“It’s a small step, but such an important one, and you will be on your way to supporting greater inclusion in your workforce and realising the benefits.”