The Pressure to Look Flawless at Work and ADHD

At work there are some sentences I say very fast.

"I'll sort it out."

"No, it's perfectly clear."

"I'm looking at it right now."

"It's no problem at all."

Behind all of these sentences stands the same thing: that a gap, a confusion, a stumble should not show. Even answering a message ten minutes late can feel like giving something away. Asking a question can feel like announcing that I do not know.

Sometimes a person carries not the work but the appearance of doing the work without any struggle.

I described the general side of masking, that is, hiding symptoms in every area of life, in a separate article. And the link between perfectionism and procrastination here. This article looks at a narrower place: the pressure to look flawless at work, in front of others.

Being flawless and looking flawless

These two are different things, and they are studied separately in the psychology literature too.

Hewitt and colleagues defined a concept they called "perfectionistic self-presentation." This is a person's effort to show themselves to others as flawless. It has three parts: promoting your own perfection, not showing your flaws through behavior and not admitting your flaws in words. Studies in different samples showed that this way of presenting oneself is consistently linked to both personal and relational psychological distress (Hewitt et al., 2003).

As I read these three parts, familiar scenes from my working life came to mind. All of them are patterns that have repeated over the years.

Not showing the flaw. When I saved a file in the wrong place or mixed up a date, quietly fixing it and acting as if nothing had happened.

Not saying the flaw. Instead of saying "I didn't understand this" or "I forgot this," carrying on as if I had understood and remembered, and then secretly looking it up.

Promoting flawlessness. Answering everything fast, trying to hand in every job early, looking as if I never get tired.

Looking flawless is more tiring than being flawless. Because you are doing two jobs at once: the work, and the show about the work.

Why it is more intense in ADHD

Here let me separate the evidence from the inference.

In a qualitative study examining how adults with ADHD manage daily life, in interviews with 32 people, compensation strategies were grouped under five headings: strategies related to organization, to movement, to attention, social strategies and strategies related to medication (Canela et al., 2017). So people with ADHD put constant and often invisible effort into coping with their symptoms.

This study does not directly measure the pressure to look flawless at work. My inference is this: if small mistakes happen more often in ADHD and the person who makes them has been corrected for years, hiding the mistake becomes one of the fastest learned compensation strategies. In the glossary its name is compensation strategy.

And there is this. As someone diagnosed late, who is seen from outside as "managing well," looking flawless also became an identity for me. The sentence "she handles everything" is a compliment to people. For me it means never being able to say "I couldn't keep up." In the glossary this appearance has a name too: hidden ADHD.

Together with the impostor feeling

The closest friend of the pressure to look flawless is the feeling that success is not deserved. In the glossary it appears as the impostor feeling.

A systematic review on this subject reports that this feeling often occurs together with depression and anxiety and is linked to lower job performance and job satisfaction. The same review also notes that it found no published study evaluating a treatment aimed at easing this feeling (Bravata et al., 2020).

In me the two feed each other: because I know how much compensation lies behind the work I do, the success does not feel like mine, and because it does not feel like mine, I try harder not to give anything away.

In digital strategy work there is also the invisible labor side. Because the research and the possibilities eliminated behind a strategy are not visible from outside, I feel that the only thing that shows, the result, has to be flawless. As if the result were the only proof of all the invisible labor, and if a mistake is found in it the whole effort will be questioned. Yet there are other ways of making labor visible: describing the process, sharing the intermediate stages, writing down what was eliminated and why.

What happens where mistakes cannot be spoken about

The pressure to look flawless is not only an individual matter; the environment feeds it or reduces it.

In Edmondson's study with 51 work teams, learning behaviors were higher in teams whose members believed they would not be punished for taking risks and making mistakes, and learning behaviors were linked to performance (Edmondson, 1999).

I read this finding from my side like this: hiding the mistake protects reputation in the short term but weakens both learning and the work in the long term. The hidden mistake grows. Something that would have been fixed in five minutes if said early turns into a crisis when it is noticed.

If you are not working in an environment where you can say the mistake, that is not your fault. But you also pay the price of that situation.

Being predictable instead of looking flawless

The change that worked best for me was changing the goal. "Being predictable" instead of "looking flawless." In working life most people want to work with someone whose "when and what" they know, rather than with someone who never makes mistakes.

Saying it early and small. When I notice that something has gone wrong, I try to say it while it is still small: "I made a mix-up here, I fixed it, just so you know." One sentence, with no explanation or shower of apologies.

Adding a continuation to "I don't know." "I don't know" on its own is still hard for me. "I don't know, I'll find out and get back to you by tomorrow noon" is easier, because it describes a plan.

Asking about the quality level. The pressure to look flawless wears me out most when I try to do every job to the highest standard. Asking "is this an internal draft or a document that will go outside?" lets me put the effort where it is really needed.

Not hiding the systems. For a long time I hid my alarms, my lists, my checking steps as if they were a deficiency. Yet these are the tools of someone who works well. Taking notes in front of someone or saying "let me put that in the calendar" looks professional.

Slowing down the reply speed. Answering every message at once is a show of flawlessness and very expensive for me, because every message means a switch. When I began answering messages at set times, I saw that no one said anything.

A small-flaw exercise. For a week, on a low-stakes subject, deliberately admit a small gap: "I didn't quite understand this, could you explain it again?" or "I skipped this." Then write down what happened. Most of the time what happens is nothing. Seeing the gap between the expected disaster and the actual reaction a few times starts to change the prediction behind this pressure.

The calculation of asking for help

The most expensive result of the pressure to look flawless in me was not asking for help.

When I get stuck on a job, this calculation goes through my mind: if I ask they will see I don't know, if I don't ask I can work on it a bit more and solve it myself. Most of the time that "a bit more" turns into hours. I spend an evening not asking a five-minute question.

Over the years I have been trying to learn to make this calculation differently. I ask myself: if someone else were asking this question, what would I think of them? Almost always the answer is "someone who wants to do their job properly." Passing a different verdict on myself for asking the same question is an account left over from the past.

There is also a pattern that works for me when asking for help: writing in a single message what I tried, where I got stuck and what I need. "In this report I pulled the data from this source, two tables don't match, which one should we take as the basis?" A question asked in this form both protects the other person's time and shows me as someone who is in the work.

When this pressure becomes heavy

When the effort to look flawless goes on for a long time, it usually breaks somewhere: a tiredness so deep that I cannot do anything in the evenings, a tight chest before going to work, being unable to get out of a small mistake for days. These are not only a matter of work habit. If you live such a picture, it would be right to talk with a specialist. For someone who tries to look flawless this step is hard too, I know.

I described the side related to criticism separately in the feedback article.

I no longer want to look flawless. I want to be trustworthy. The difference between the two is that I stop hiding my mistakes.