Why ADHD Entrepreneurs Struggle With Delegating

You hired someone good. The work was fine. You still sent the late-night Slack message, redirected the task, and checked in on something that had already been handled.
This episode looks at what the research suggests is actually driving that pattern. Not trust issues. Not a bad hire. A specific kind of perfectionism that shows up differently in people with ADHD.
Two studies help explain it. A 2016 study found perfectionism was the most common cognitive distortion in adults formally diagnosed with ADHD, endorsed by 55% of the sample. It was not close. A 2023 study then looked at what kind of perfectionism. Their findings indicate ADHD founders are not setting impossibly high standards. They are feeling the gap between what they expected and what was delivered more intensely than others. What drove avoidance most strongly was not perfectionism in the traditional sense, but the persistent feeling of falling short, even when the original standard was reasonable.
Delegation becomes the thing most associated with that painful shortfall. So the brain starts treating it as a threat.
Friday's episode covers the practical side: how to structure delegation so the gap is smaller from the start and your perfectionism has less to react to.
What We Cover:
• Why ADHD perfectionism research suggests it is not about high standards but about feeling any shortfall more acutely than others
• How the discrepancy between expected and actual output drives avoidance in ADHD founders specifically
• The two scenarios where delegation breaks down even when the team is competent and the work is solid
• Why the founder who re-enters delegated work is not micromanaging but responding to a learned pattern of emotional pain
• What Friday's episode will cover on structuring delegation to reduce that gap from the start
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