Why Your ADHD Gets Worse When You Start Managing a Team & How To Fix It

0:00 There's a really weird feeling that happens when you give someone a task, forget you gave them the task, forget whether they're doing the task, have to ask them about the task, and then have them be unsure about what their task is or its importance. Like it feels like the most inefficient system in the world.

0:16 And then that's where you really start to feel like, what is the point of this? I thought a team was gonna help me. Why is it making it worse? Hello everybody, and welcome to today's episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. Today is a series that I'm really, really excited to be starting where we're gonna be looking at a model, and I'll get our wonderful editor Brad to put this model on screen, which is about focus balance growth, which is something that I've been teaching for ages, but I've redeveloped it and redesigned it, and I really want to take you guys through all the different stages.

0:46 But what we're gonna be talking about today is the piece where you go from I don't have enough time, I don't know what I'm doing, to actually getting your time back. One of the big things that can help you get your time back is to move everything into one shared task system. And we're gonna be talking about why that is today.

1:09 And then in the next episode, we're gonna be talking about exactly how you can do that. But before we get started, I do want to let you guys know, you know, in this episode as well as in general, it is our mission to support you to grow and develop as somebody who runs a business or runs a team. We talk about the idea of if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.

1:34 And we want to be that together for you with lots of strategies, systems for your ADHD, brain, community support when you need it. So if any of that sounds good to you, if you want to grow your business in a way that works for your brain and feels good, click the link down below and yeah, we'll see if we can help you out.

1:54 So imagine that you are in a leadership position. You finally made it into a leadership position. You probably did a bunch of work to get there in terms of your, you know, your systems, learning about how to run a calendar, how to run a task list, how to make things work for your ADHD brain. You learned how to focus, you learned about dopamine, and now you're in a position where you're a business owner and you've finally been able to afford your own team, or maybe you've been promoted and you have a team, but it feels like nothing is working.

2:31 You've essentially gotten to this place where you are back at square one. And what that means for you is it can be, well, it's really, really frustrating because it feels like everything that you've done to get you to where you are now is having to be rewritten to help you work with the team that you were hoping were going to be able to support you to get to the next level.

2:56 And this is something that we've experienced, um, me and my husband Robbie, who's here with me, um, and something that we have also seen with our clients, but it's something that it doesn't feel like it gets talked about a lot. So this is something that we wanted to talk about today.

3:13 Yeah, I think sometimes you've finally hired an EA thinking this is gonna be great. I'm gonna get all these routine tasks off my plates. You start delegating, and you realize at some point that you've lost track of what's being done. Certain things that you need done on time aren't happening. It seems like maybe some other things have been understood to be a higher priority than you intended, and you're now having to ask after things and try and get clarity with this other person about all these tasks that used to be on your to-do list that you could see, and yeah, you weren't getting through them all, but at least you knew the important stuff was getting done, and you could see where they were

3:56 up to.

3:56 Yeah, 100%. There's a really weird feeling that happens when you give someone a task, forget you gave them the task, forget whether they're doing the task, have to ask them about the task, and then have them be unsure about what their task is or its importance. Like it feels like the most, the most inefficient system in the world.

4:22 And then that's where you really start to feel like what is the point of this? I thought a team was gonna help me. Why is it making it worse?

4:32 Yeah, then you get the impulse to think maybe I can automate this into AI, which is a whole separate can of worms with its own set of problems.

4:39 Exactly. Exactly. And and problems that very much do not like there's nothing wrong with AI, and it's great, but it's it's a whole new system that you can struggle with with ADHD.

4:51 Yeah, now you're having to track all the different tasks and automations you've set up. Um, there are prompts through automation systems and in agents, and it's also it can't be the first thing you do. The automating something is a whole lot of upfront effort and jumping straight to I'm gonna create an agent for everything.

5:12 It can create its own quagmire.

5:14 Yeah, 100%. We've seen people use it amazing, we've seen people get lost in it. It's still gonna be a working memory nightmare if it's uh if it's set up wrong. So, yeah, so that's the first thing is like, do you give out tasks and then forget what you said? Really common with leadership and ADHD, really big struggle.

5:33 Then do you forget to plan for or send out agendas for the meeting that you asked for? Because one of the things that we start to do more of when we have uh when we're in that leadership position is be like, right, we have to have a meeting to discuss this, to make sure we're on the same page, which sounds great, but who's sending out the agenda?

5:54 Who's remembering the agenda? Who's doing all of these different pieces? Um, do you forget about the meeting entirely? I know sometimes it can be very easy to be like, oh, it's Tuesday. I have to have the meeting with my team about the thing, and you've just been hyperfixating on something else and you haven't even prepared for the meeting that you're supposed to do.

6:15 Do you try and you know inspect what you expect when it comes to the team members? Do you give them some tasks for performance improvement, but then forget to follow up on that plan? It's it can become really frustrating when one not only are you monitoring your own tasks and your own performance, but now you're monitoring somebody else's tasks and somebody else's improvements, and you have people who are doing better than others, so the people who aren't doing as well need extra support and extra monitoring from you, but you were already, you know, executive functioningly tapped out.

6:51 And now you have to remember to remind them to do things. It can get really, really frustrating. And it's one of the reasons why a leader with ADHD can start to feel a little bit like they're going backwards, and like all of the work that they put into getting to where they are now is being met with, you know, it's it's basically not being rewarded, essentially.

7:12 Yeah, you're losing so much time in communication with the team, micromanaging them, having to catch whether or not things are getting done.

7:21 Yeah. Exactly. Okay, so if you struggle with these problems, welcome to ADHD in leadership. ADHD has followed you here, and yes, you are a visionary, and yes, you're a creative thinker who thinks outside the box, and that's probably why you're now managing a team, but you still struggle with the same executive functioning struggles that you did before, except now you're the person who has to take care of a whole bunch of other people as well as you.

7:49 So I wanted to go into a little bit more detail about why we struggle with this. There's one particular thing that is the executive functioning struggle that really makes this a problem for us. Time blindness, dopamine, impulsivity, like they do have an effect, but working memory is the real culprit, I would say.

8:14 And we talked a little bit about working memory in our last episode with Robbie and I. We talked about the meta-analytic review of working memory in ADHD adults, and essentially what they found, just to summarize, but feel free to go back and listen to that episode as well, is that you know, there was a well-documented working memory deficit in children, but actually it does persist in adulthood support for working memory back in 2013 as a core feature of ADHD.

8:47 So that was kind of when we were like, oh, okay, this is a problem we have as adults. And I would say to add to that, this is a problem we have as adult leaders now as well. That wasn't the only working memory struggle papers. There's a couple of others that I just wanted to touch on as well. We're not going to go into too much depth on these, but they are just helpful to give you a sense of kind of the the area.

9:12 There was a really interesting one from um from Pran and colleagues, including Wickland, who I've seen before basically. They looked at who benefits from ADHD and entrepreneurship specifically. So this was from 2026. And they looked at this idea that one of the benefits of entrepreneurship when it came to ADHD was that there was a there was a needs fit support.

9:40 So essentially what they were saying was that, you know, if ADHD is a struggle in terms of working memory and self-regulation and attention span and all of that kind of thing, then entrepreneurship was able to, and I would consider entrepreneurship. When people talk about entrepreneurship, I would also consider like if you're a lawyer and you have your own, you bill your own hours, like there's a lot of other jobs where you have some flexibility.

10:09 But they were saying that, you know, you can set if you can set your own schedules, you can design your own work environments, then you can actively deploy cognitive strengths to manage attention and working memory struggles. So again, the reason I wanted to point out to this paper is to say, okay, if working memory struggles are a thing, it's also something that we can support with a better environment through things like entrepreneurship.

10:37 Yeah, it gives us access to a lot of tools like delegating.

10:40 Yeah. I think you can, I think you and I have definitely spent a lot of time building environments that support our ADHD.

10:50 Yeah. Much more flexibility, much more control.

10:52 Mm-hmm. Minimal meetings run by somebody else. Things like that are really, really helpful. Yeah. And then there were other papers. There was a paper looking at organizational skills problems in ADHD with kids, but I'm actually gonna skip that one because I don't think that, given that we already talked about it in adults, I don't think kids are as useful.

11:14 There was a paper from 2019 that talked a little bit more about the neuropsychologic evidence that working memory deficits in ADHD patients are partially influenced by their insufficient attentional selection ability, which basically means that one of the potential reasons when we look at the neuroscience behind how our brains work for these working memory struggles are just that are related to our our difficulty with focusing our attention, which was an interesting one.

11:47 Yeah, which I think relates back to the other paper we talked about, which was saying we didn't have a problem with recall. We had a problem with encoding. We had a problem with encoding the information, and that's that attentional selection, we're we're not paying enough attention during the encoding phase to put the memory in.

12:09 And so, yeah, that's where it's saying that's what I think this is talking about, is it's that struggle with attention during the encoding phase that's causing the issue.

12:20 If you are the business owner who is growing, your operations and delivery are growing, and you're starting to feel pretty overwhelmed, like you're not getting enough time, you're struggling with consistency, and you'd really like somebody else to get it all out of your head and project manage it for you.

12:35 That's what we do. We are fractional operators for your business, designed for ADHD symptoms. We take it out of your head, we set it all up for you, and you just kind of watch. It's pretty, pretty fun. Click the links down below, and if you're interested, you can book a call with me. So it's really interesting.

12:51 So we've got all of these different sort of areas of study coming together. We've got entrepreneurship, we've got meta-analysis, we've got neuropsychology, and they're all coming together to say that yes, people who have ADHD struggle with working memory. So this is something that we're gonna struggle with, whether it's just managing ourselves and you know, somebody tells us to do something and we forget to do it, but it's also gonna become a problem when we're managing other people because now we have to remember their working memory struggles basically and their tasks.

13:30 And it's also, you know, if you're an entrepreneur and you can manage your own environment a little bit better, okay, now we have some of the tools to maybe solve this. So let's imagine you can adjust your environment. What are some of the things you can do? I have two two things that tend to be two things that tend to be identified most commonly.

14:01 Or maybe one thing that tends to be identified most commonly and one that I think is most powerful. So the first one is hiring somebody. So when you talk to entrepreneurs, very very successful entrepreneurs about how they succeeded, you know, there's a few people who've probably been on this podcast, actually, if you've heard them and they've talked about this as well.

14:24 They will say that they had a team member who was incredibly organized and incredibly detail-oriented and provided that systematic backbone for the business, which is which is awesome. I mean, we have someone like that. We have Robin, right, Robbie?

14:42 Yeah, I think sometimes you get lucky and someone comes in who just doesn't drop the ball ever, who understands exactly what you mean from the get-go and just handles things. But but that's also very often not the case.

14:58 Yeah, yeah. I mean, what I'll say is like one of the people in our business has been really amazing at organization, at never dropping things. It's been incredibly, incredibly helpful. But if I told someone, oh, you just need to go find Robin, that would be incredibly uh it would be a little bit unhelpful.

15:17 Like, yeah, you should definitely have a great team, but it feels a little bit like when somebody is talking to somebody who has ADHD in a relationship context and they say, Oh, you should just tell your partner to help you remember because they don't have ADHD, or if somebody is in an employment context and they said, Oh, you should just, you should just get your manager to to break everything down for you.

15:40 Like, it's great, but it doesn't provide a lot of agency for the individual who has this struggle. It doesn't allow you to build systems on your own. It's usually better to have a mix of good people and good systems.

15:57 Yeah, I would say one, you're not gonna find a whole team of very high executive functioning individuals.

16:04 Or you're unlikely to.

16:07 You're going to need some people management tools and systems. You're also going to want to have those tools and systems so that you're not overwhelming the pepper pots person in your business. Even if they are amazing at handling things, there's a good chance they'd want some help.

16:23 Yeah. That's a really good point. That's a really good point. And it's, I think that's the same. And this is why I like to talk about it in the context of relationships, because it kind of brings it to a space where we do know that this is true and we have seen the research. Is like nobody wants to be parented by their partner.

16:41 You know, nobody wants to be in a position where they're the ADHD person and they're relying on their neurotypical partner for all their executive functioning needs. And nobody wants to be the neurotypical partner whose, you know, ADHD spouse is relying on them for everything either. Like this is not a good in this is not a good relationship.

17:01 We know this. There's a lot of, you know, books and things like that that talk about this now. In the same way, you don't necessarily want to be overly reliant on your team member, even though they're awesome and hopefully they're going to be with you forever. And, you know, all of those kinds of things are true.

17:18 But you do want to be able to say, hey, you're allowed to go on holiday. You're allowed to take a break. You don't have to do everything, you know, and and I don't have to know that technically this business is running on you because it just provides a healthier balance. And so when somebody says, Oh, well, it's just I had, you know, Judy, and Judy did everything for me, and that's why I became successful, and you should find a Judy, it's it's a it's a little bit, I would say a little bit simplistic.

17:49 Yeah, I think we know from relationship studies that a reasonable amount of complimenting each other and covering for each other's weaknesses is fine, ideal, actually, but too much of it, if their full-time job becomes managing your ADHD, I think we've measured the dissatisfaction that comes along with that.

18:07 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And and the conversation we're having here about ADHD leadership, it's it's pretty un-researched. So we're kind of bringing a bunch of different pieces of research together to have this conversation. So we're not going to be able to bring you like, this is what the research says about ADHD business owners working with assistants, for example.

18:28 Maybe soon, maybe one day we can actually bring you our research on that.

18:31 No, I think I went looking for that with one of the struggle episodes, and I found a paper from Israel, I think, about spouses of ADHD partners and dissatisfaction around it. But it was an interesting study, and it was a little bit too too many steps removed from what I was trying to make the point on.

18:58 Yeah, exactly. So that's one piece of advice. It's the one you'll probably most likely hear if you went out into the world to see what to do. The second piece of advice, the one that we teach alongside finding really awesome people, is centralizing your system with a prioritization filter. In the same way as you have centralized your own task system.

19:23 If you've heard me talk about the prioritization filter for you as an individual, you'll know we talk about the idea of, okay, let's do a brain dump and then it's filter through what's urgent, what's important, what needs to be done, what doesn't need to be done right now, and kind of building that prioritization scale so that you can really get focused very quickly on what you need to do.

19:45 We've been talking about this one for five years. So for a lot of you guys, this is not the first time you've heard of it. But what we've now developed and what we're now really talking about is building that for your team as well. Bringing the tasks and the systems and everything like that into the light so that you don't have to go, what is my team doing?

20:08 You don't have to even micromanage because it's just a shared, transparent system that supports the trust you hopefully already have with your team.

20:17 Yeah, you're getting the transparency, you're getting the immediate clarity on where their priorities are, where they spent their time last week, what's going on, and you're able to go in and see when what's on paper or digital in this case doesn't match what you had in your head. And again, like we've talked about with brief gap, that can be again a communication problem that's downstream of your own ADHD as well.

20:49 But we can fix that by having a place you can go and see clearly what's been communicated, what's being understood by them.

20:56 Yeah, exactly, exactly. So this episode was talking about a little bit more about the working memory struggles and why we do it. In the next episode, we're gonna be going through exactly how you can create this shared system with your team, what to do when your team doesn't want to do this, because you know, there is gonna be a little bit of pushback, but I'm gonna go through why, even for the most neurotypical team member, this is still gonna be a good decision.

21:23 And then we'll talk about, yeah, really practical ways to help you and we'll give you the whole system. So excited for that episode, and we will see you in the next one. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. If you liked it, leave us a five star review. It helps other people learn more about us.

21:41 And thank you so much to our wonderful team for making us sound good, look good, couldn't do it without you.