Hi friends, I'm a therapist and workplace consultant and also in the ADHD club. I'm getting ready to do some talks and write some blog posts to help managers support their directs who have ADHD. As we're not a monolith, I only have my experience and the experience of my clients to go on, so I'm crowd-sourcing...

What's something you wish your manager knew or did to support your work as a person with ADHD?

Helpful if you can include which industry or type of work.

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1) I wish more leaders understood that having ADHD doesn’t just mean easily distracted or unfocused. Sometimes it means hyper focused; constant interruptions when you’re in a hyper focused state totally blows up your rhythm. This can literally derail your activity for the rest of the day.

2) Many ADHD adults are also high-intellectuals, remembering things from 2-3 years ago and seeing patterns much more quickly than others. We come up with solutions to problems in a very different way than others, and sometimes so quickly even we can’t explain how we got there, but the solutions work.

3) We may ask a lot of questions. It’s not us trying to be difficult; we need to understand how something got to where it is in order to make it better.

4) Many of us with ADHD need space. Whether it be to solve, create, or just breathe. We aren’t wasting time. We get things done, and usually in half the amount of time it takes others to do them. We sometimes procrastinate because we also work well under pressure.

Those are a few things that toppled out of my ADHD brain.

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All of this is REALLY relatable.

And on #1- YES. Interruptions to flow are brutal.

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My manager told me she had ADHD the first time I met her in person (remote role). You would think somebody like that would understand the importance of face to face communication and creating structure.

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where did she fall short? What could she have done to better support you?

She talks a mile a minute. I requested to set up one on ones every week and each time we meet she just starts out about what she needs instead of what help I need from her in removing roadblocks to achieve our joint goals. I also explained that I learn by repetition… specifically going step by step to learn tasks, yet she refuses to spend time going through in detail like that. Finally, after four months in role, she gave me feedback and I quote “You just aren’t getting it.” She then had the gall to ask for feedback on how she performed as a manager. I mentioned to her that I found her somewhat impatient and difficult to get a hold of (remote work environment and I have documented many occurrences of this) and she said that it’s just a “difference in management styles”. I’m being gas lit by this woman who is using her “ADHD” to work from home so she can be a mom to her three girls (I know that’s why she is unavailable) and the irony is she doesn’t know that I actually have it!

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Understand that like all humans, we get bored, but boredom hits harder for us, and that can affect morale, mental health and productivity. (Conversely, understand that hyperfocus on seemingly "boring" things can be a thing, too, especially for AuDHD people.) One thing I have noticed consistently with ADHD people is that if they're bored, they will often find themselves things to do. That can be good/helpful (finding new problems to solve, coming up with processes and ideas, sorting out messes, learning new things) or bad (wandering around the office to talk to random people, doing unrelated stuff at work like playing on phones).

Boredom is the absolute worst. It makes you feel stuck, it makes it harder to get *anything* done, it's like depression and helplessness and just this frustrating, lonely little place of emotional deadness. Boredom when combined with a lack of agency can be soul destroying. I don't know how to adequately explain it, but high pressure situations that are terrifying and painful and dangerous are WAY more appealing to me than *boredom*. Luckily I am good at making my own fun and will channel my boredom into work-friendly practices like reaching out to clients, creating systems and analysing data, writing documentation, learning stuff, or simply cleaning up stuff. The desire to escape boredom makes me seek novelty and find things to do. In some workplaces, though, it's made me seek other workplaces.

A comparison I can think of is... parrots. They're smart, often loud (but not always!), quirky, weird... and keeping them in a cage with nothing to do and no stimuli and interaction can make them get mean, destructive, or self-destructive just to break the endless monotony of nothingness. The sad thing is people often get parrots *because* they're smart and fun and weird, just in the same way employers hire people because they're bright and have ideas and curiousity, and then they... cage them and leave them to rot.

Making things not boring doesn't have to be a big deal, it can be as simple as mixing up tasks once someone has nailed them, encouraging ideas, and just letting people harmlessly be themselves without getting weird about it.

If you start asking for things and don’t plan to send an email, give them time to write it down- and don’t talk so fast!

Also, if you know where someone should start, offer your thoughts on that if you’re particular.

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