Neurodiversity in Leadership
Creating workplaces where ADHD leaders feel included, accepted, and safe.
By Virginia Bauman and Casey Gipson
Striving to build a neurodiverse workplace is one product of the value such diversity provides. The resiliency from a wide array of life experiences, problem-solving approaches, and ways of working is the real value. Sometimes the drive for diversity is misunderstood and feels more like a Pokemon game where we’ve got to catch ’em all; this misses the entire opportunity.
If your organization is just beginning to think about cognitive diversity it may feel daunting.
If you’re just beginning to consider the needs of the neurodiverse, they’re likely pretending to be like you or at least catering to the way you think on top of their other responsibilities.
Neurodivergent people with ADHD typically have a lot of practice at pretending to be neurotypical; this is called masking. Masking is more prevalent in organizations where there may be negative consequences for talking about your neurodivergence. When the acceptance and recognition of neurodiversity isn’t out in the open it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. If there are no wheelchair ramps, you’re less likely to see a wheelchair user and less likely to see the value in building a ramp. If everyone is doing their best to pretend to work and perform like their neurotypical colleagues, needs will never truly be met. Most importantly: the power of diversity will remain hidden.
For people with ADHD, each person experiences a wide spectrum of symptoms.
Here is a very brief overview of the how and why of ADHD:
A main driver of many symptoms comes from emotional dysregulation. When you’re not always in control of your emotions, you’re not always in control of your motivation, you may say things you didn’t really mean to say and may lose self-confidence because you’re constantly replaying past failures in your head.
Self-awareness is also hard to come by. Someone with ADHD may not notice how their words and actions are being perceived. Self-awareness is critical in the behavioral feedback loop to modify behavior and not repeat the same mistakes. This is why 360 reviews for ADHD leaders are even more important, to see what cannot be seen naturally.
Inhibition shows up in many different ways, distractions are harder to avoid, uninteresting projects are harder to work on, a new ideas must be chased. It’s difficult to apply the brakes when you should.
Lastly, ADHD people struggle with executive function issues related to memory, mental visualization, verbal processing, timekeeping, planning, and problem-solving. The combination and severity of these issues differ from person to person but they all relate to the need to move these processes externally—sticky notes, timers, reading aloud, brainstorming, and moving things to the physical realm. To mask, to pretend that you can do things internally like your neurotypical co-workers, can lead to thoughts getting processed incorrectly, incompletely, or not at all.
An environment that forces everyone to think and perform in the same way will never see the advantages of thinking differently. If you’re not trying to understand what these differences are, many situations will feel like an obstacle. Trying to force people to think and work like you expect them to can bring out frustration, anger, and confusion. Built-in power dynamics make this worse by preventing open and honest conversations.
These conversations are necessary to understand what an individual needs to feel included, accepted, and safe. Understanding how and why ADHD people think and behave the way they do can be helpful to show up to these conversations and ask better questions.
In our next article, we’ll discuss common leadership challenges and how ADHD and neurotypical thinking can intersect to complicate things.
