Being a Manager With ADHD: Vision Is Easy, Follow-Up Is Hard

Being the one who sets the direction of a business wakes two different feelings in me at the same time.

On one side I feel very good. Seeing the big picture, thinking about where a brand should go, drawing a direction out of scattered data, recovering quickly when something goes wrong... These feel natural to me.

On the other side, when the week after a decision arrives, things change. Following up on what was discussed, remembering the promise that was made, checking the work that was delegated, applying the same rule the same way every time. These do not feel natural to me at all.

A person can sometimes be skilled at starting and a beginner at sustaining. And management consists mostly of sustaining.

The state of the evidence first

I need to begin this article with an honest note: there is very little research on managers with ADHD. Most sentences that begin "leaders with ADHD are like this" rest more on a narrative than on a scientific finding.

The few studies I could find say the following.

Carleton and Barling, with data collected from 98 leaders and the people who work with them, looked at the relationship between leaders' ADHD symptoms and passive leadership. Passive leadership covers behaviors such as not intervening until a problem grows, postponing decisions, and not being there when needed. Leaders' ADHD symptoms were related to passive leadership, and this relationship was explained through daytime sleepiness (Carleton & Barling, 2018).

This finding made me think two things. First, that the problem may lie not only in attention but also in tiredness and sleep. Second, that a manager's "not being there" can be read by the team as indifference.

There is also a finding in the other direction. A study of 367 small and medium-sized businesses in Russia found that top managers' ADHD symptoms were related to business model innovation (Artamoshina et al., 2023). That is, a mind that loves novelty and changing direction can also provide an advantage in some management work.

Both studies are cross-sectional; they do not establish cause and effect, and they look at symptom level, not clinical diagnosis. Still, the picture is familiar: novelty on one side, follow-up on the other.

Why managing is so demanding

When the daily tasks of management are listed, it almost becomes a list of executive functions: planning, prioritizing, remembering, managing time, regulating emotion, staying consistent.

When you work alone, difficulty in these functions affects you. When you are a manager, it affects others too. A follow-up you forgot becomes somebody else waiting. A priority that changed becomes somebody else's wasted week.

While running my own business I also noticed another dimension of this. A long-term study of people who start and run their own business shows that self-employed people generally report less work stress, and that this is explained by the feeling of being able to control the work. In the same study, business owners who employ workers report more stress than people working alone, and the reason is increased job demands (Hessels et al., 2017). Being responsible for others takes back part of your autonomy.

Common traps

There are a few patterns I often see in myself and in what managers with ADHD describe.

Showering ideas. I want to share every idea that comes to mind at that moment. For me this is part of thinking. For the other side, every idea sounds like a new task, and priorities blur.

Doing everything yourself. Delegating a task requires explaining it, drawing its limits and following up. Because these are hard, I say "I'll do it, it's faster." In the short run this is right; in the long run it is a road toward the overcommitment entry in the glossary.

Being a crisis manager. In an emergency I can work very well. This also makes it easy, without noticing, to let everything turn into a crisis. What the glossary calls crisis performance means constant firefighting for the team. I described its individual cost in the article on panic productivity; when you are a manager, the cost multiplies.

Inconsistently harsh, inconsistently soft. Reacting strongly to a small hitch on a tired day, and not noticing the same thing at all on a good day. For the team this means not knowing what the rule is. There is a small rule that works for me: on days when I notice I am tired, I leave conversations that involve evaluation or criticism to the next day. The content of the conversation does not change; only its tone is not set by my energy that day.

Disappearing. On days when I am buried in a task with hyperfocus, messages wait and questions go unanswered. This is the part I thought about most while reading Carleton and Barling's finding on passive leadership.

A manager's disorganization does not stay only on their own desk. It leaks into other people's calendars.

A fixed routine instead of personal effort

Most of these difficulties are not solved by "I'll be more careful." What I have found worth trying is taking the work out of memory and daily mood and tying it to a fixed routine.

Idea parking lot. Instead of sharing ideas at that moment, I write them in a single document. Once a week I look at that document and bring only one or two of them to the table. The idea is not lost, but everyone's week is not turned upside down by every new idea either.

Decision record. I write every decision in a single line: what was decided, who is doing it, by when. My memory is not bad, but it is not reliable enough to prove the sentence "we had discussed this." The record remembers in my place.

Delegation template. When delegating a task I give four things in writing: what the task is, why it matters, by when, and what "done" means. The last item is the one I skip most and the one that causes the most confusion.

Follow-up in the calendar. The moment I delegate a task to someone, I put a follow-up moment in the calendar. I do not leave follow-up to remembering, because I know I will not remember.

Working with a complementary person. If possible, working with someone who likes detail, follow-up and order. This is not a confession of weakness but good team design. Someone who shines where I struggle may struggle where I shine.

Saying your difficulty. You do not have to share your diagnosis with your team. But saying "I can focus on the big picture so much that I miss the detail; if you think I forgot something, remind me directly" both tells the team what to do and gives them permission to tell you about mistakes.

When you are the one running the meeting

Attending a meeting is already hard in ADHD. Being the person who runs the meeting adds a second layer: you have to both follow what is being said and hold the direction of the conversation. What I experience most often is drifting myself into an interesting side topic and running out the time without making the meeting's real decision.

I set myself a few rules for this. Before the meeting I write a one-line purpose: "At the end of this meeting this decision will have been made." I limit the agenda to at most three items. When side topics come up, I write them under a "later" heading in the notes file and I say it out loud: "I noted this, let's talk about it separately." I also set aside the last five minutes only for the decision record: who is doing what by when is read aloud and shared in writing.

This structure may look rigid. But for someone with a mind that scatters easily like mine, flexibility becomes possible inside the structure.

Building a safe environment

In Edmondson's study with work teams, it was found that teams who believed they would not be punished when they made a mistake or asked a question showed more learning behavior, and that this was reflected in performance (Edmondson, 1999).

This study was done with work teams in general. Still, for a manager with ADHD it says this: a manager who tries to hide their own mistakes teaches the team to hide as well. A manager who talks openly about their own forgetfulness, asks for help and builds systems shows the team something else.

For someone who has spent years trying to look flawless, this is not easy. I discussed this side in the article on the question of strengths too: it is not possible to describe ADHD as either a superpower or only a deficit.

Managing tiredness too

That the mediating variable in Carleton and Barling's finding is daytime sleepiness seems important to me. In adults with ADHD the sleep pattern is often disturbed, and a tired manager most easily turns into a passive manager. I described this side in detail in the article on ADHD and sleep.

Management taught me one thing: when I build a structure around my weak sides instead of hiding them, my strong sides work more comfortably too. Generating ideas is still easy. Now there is a place for the ideas to go.