In boardrooms throughout the globe, a quiet revolution is unfolding. A rising variety of senior leaders are discovering, typically in midlife, that the actual motive for his or her profession highs and private struggles has a reputation: ADHD.
As consciousness of grownup ADHD grows, so too does the realisation that many high-performing leaders have spent a long time succeeding with out realising their distinctive mind wiring was formed by a type of neurodivergence. What was as soon as labelled as a character quirk, emotional volatility, or inconsistent efficiency is now recognised as a part of an government profile formed by interest-based mind wiring, divergent considering, and extraordinary resilience.
ADHD in management shouldn’t be a rarity. It’s typically the motive force of entrepreneurial aptitude, rapid-fire ideation, and intuitive risk-taking. However late prognosis can convey each aid and reckoning. Understanding your mind is a robust factor. However what occurs subsequent is simply as vital.
The Delusion of Consistency
For leaders with ADHD, conventional office expectations round productiveness and consistency generally is a poor match for a way their brains are wired. Many government environments reward predictability, linear progress, and excessive emotional regulation. But ADHD thrives on urgency, novelty, and the liberty to comply with curiosity.
The consequence? A persistent mismatch between potential and efficiency. This mismatch isn’t about functionality. It’s about atmosphere. One of the vital widespread patterns I see in my teaching work is leaders mistaking their cyclical focus and inconsistent motivation for private failure.
However ADHD shouldn’t be a deficit of consideration. It’s a distinction in consideration. Curiosity-based nervous methods wrestle to activate on demand, particularly with routine or low-stimulation duties. The strain to carry out constantly, with out understanding this dynamic, results in continual burnout, disgrace, and government dysfunction.
Reframing consistency as a method, fairly than an id marker, is essential. This implies constructing environments that assist fluctuating power and designing methods that harness bursts of hyperfocus with out demanding fixed output.
The Strengths Already in Play
One of the vital missed truths about late-diagnosed leaders is that this: they’re already succeeding with ADHD. They’ve been for years.
Usually, their most celebrated qualities like decisiveness, big-picture considering, pace underneath strain, are straight tied to their neurodivergent wiring. The problem shouldn’t be studying to operate with ADHD. It’s studying to know it, declare it, and work with it on function.
Analysis helps what I see every day in teaching. ADHD leaders excel in advanced environments, notably these with fast change, ambiguous outcomes, and artistic problem-solving. Their brains are wired to scan for patterns, generate concepts rapidly, and reply intuitively to dynamic methods. However these strengths flourish greatest when paired with consciousness and assist.
Teaching as Strategic Self-Management
That is the place ADHD teaching provides one thing distinctive. In contrast to generic management growth programmes, ADHD teaching focuses on id, government operate (the mind’s administration system accountable for planning, organising, process initiation, emotional regulation, and reminiscence processing), and sustainable self-management. It’s not about fixing flaws. It’s about understanding the working system.
A great ADHD coach will work with a frontrunner to uncover how their mind naturally works, their strengths, and construct methods that align with that. This would possibly imply shifting how they handle time, redefining their relationship with delegation, or constructing rituals round emotional regulation.
For instance, one shopper, a CEO within the tech sector, realised via teaching that their inconsistent engagement with inner conferences wasn’t a matter of self-discipline. It was a matter of stimulus. As soon as they moved recurring check-ins to extra energising codecs (shorter, extra interactive, with standing agendas), their engagement and readability improved virtually in a single day.
It’s not that ADHD leaders can’t carry out the routines of management. It’s that they typically have to carry out them otherwise. Teaching helps them work out how.
The Price of Masking
Many late-diagnosed leaders have spent years masking by adapting their behaviour to suit neurotypical expectations with out even realising it. They suppress impulses, spend conferences nodding alongside and showing engaged, whereas internally struggling to remain current or monitor what’s being stated, or over-deliver to compensate for perceived shortcomings.
This masking, whereas typically unconscious, is exhausting. It takes an immense cognitive toll and prevents leaders from constructing groups, schedules, and methods which might be genuinely aligned with how they operate.
Late prognosis brings a reckoning. For a lot of, it’s the first time they see their previous via a compassionate lens. What regarded like chaos was truly a survival technique, one thing I discover deeply in my new guide, co-authored with Katie Friedman, ADHD… Now What?, the place we title the theme of ‘survival mode’ as central to the late-diagnosed expertise. What felt like failure was a mismatch of atmosphere and mind. With this shift in perspective comes an invite: to cease pretending and begin main from a spot of authenticity.
What Organisations Have to Know
From a enterprise standpoint, the implications are important. Retaining high-performing, late-diagnosed leaders means recognising the necessity for flexibility and psychological security.
This doesn’t imply reducing requirements. It means evolving assist. Assume past fundamental lodging. Contemplate ADHD teaching, asynchronous workflows, sensory-aware assembly areas, and efficiency opinions that account for outcomes via the lens of neurodivergent wants and strengths. These are the helps that result in sustainable success.
Organisations that assist ADHDers in management are usually not simply extra inclusive. They’re extra resilient. They’re higher positioned to adapt, innovate, and reply to complexity. In a world the place change is fixed, ADHD shouldn’t be a weak point to handle. It’s a energy to work with and harness.
A Remaining Phrase
Being recognized later in life shouldn’t be the tip of the story. It’s the starting of a brand new one. One the place you get to steer by yourself phrases.
As a result of whenever you cease losing power attempting to work like everybody else, you free your self to work such as you.
Written by Alex Campbell.
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