Guide to Managing an Employee with ADHD

Do you manage a team member who seems paradoxical? Perhaps they’re your most creative problem-solver during a crisis, yet they consistently miss routine deadlines. They contribute brilliant ideas in brainstorming sessions but zone out during standard team meetings. They’re clearly talented but their performance feels frustratingly inconsistent.

If this sounds familiar and that employee has ADHD, here’s what you need to know: this isn’t a motivation problem. It’s a regulation difference.

This guide will help you understand what ADHD looks like in the workplace and provide practical strategies to unlock the high performance your ADHD employee is capable of delivering, without micromanagement.

Understanding ADHD in the Workplace

It’s Not About Concentration

When most people think of ADHD they imagine someone who can’t focus or is easily distracted. While attention challenges are part of the picture, ADHD is fundamentally about regulation. This affects:

• Planning and prioritisation
• Time perception and management
• Working memory
• Emotional regulation
• Task initiation and completion
• Sustaining attention on non-preferred activities

The Interest-Based Nervous System

Most employees operate with an importance-based nervous system. If a task is important or has clear consequences, they feel motivated to complete it. Deadlines, professional obligations and stated priorities naturally drive their engagement. ADHD brains work differently, operating on an interest-based nervous system, powered by four key factors:

• Interest - is this genuinely engaging to them?
• Novelty - is this new or different?
• Challenge - does this stretch their abilities?
• Urgency - is there immediate time pressure?

When a task lacks these elements - when it’s routine, boring or has a distant deadline - the ADHD brain physically struggles to engage. This isn’t laziness or defiance, it’s just a different motivation.

But when the right conditions are present? ADHD employees can enter a state of hyperfocus, outperforming their own baseline and often their neurotypical peers by significant margins.

Think about that team member who missed every weekly status report but delivered that crisis project in record time. That’s not inconsistency, that’s the interest-based nervous system in action.

The Foundation: Clear, Specific Communication

If you take away just one strategy from this article, make it this: Be Clear and Specific.

Ambiguity is the enemy of good performance for employees with ADHD. Their working memory challenges mean vague instructions create overwhelming confusion, leading to paralysis or incorrect work.

Instead of this:

❌   “Can you get that report to me soon?”

❌   “We need to improve our social media presence.”

❌   “Think about how we could streamline this process.”

Say this:

✅   “Please send me the draft report by 3pm on Thursday. It should include Q3 sales figures, regional breakdowns and three key recommendations.”

✅   “By Friday at 5pm, create a two-week content calendar with five posts focusing on our new product launch.”

✅   “By our meeting on Tuesday, identify three specific bottlenecks in our current process and one potential solution for each.”

Clear communication benefits everyone. For someone with ADHD it’s transformative.

Three Quick Wins You Can Implement Today

1. Always Write It Down

The challenge: ADHD brains struggle with working memory. When you give verbal instructions, even if your employee is making eye contact and nodding, those instructions maybe understood but often don’t get “saved” properly. It’s not that they weren’t listening. Their brain simply didn’t encode the information for later retrieval.

The fix:

• Never rely on verbal requests alone
• Follow up every conversation with a written confirmation (email, Slack message, task in your project management system)
• Create a “paper trail of clarity”
• Remember: If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist for the ADHD brain

Bonus strategy: Give structure, not micromanagement. Provide:

• Bullet-point instructions
• Checklists they can work through
• Step-by-step sequences
• Templates they can follow

This removes working memory load and helps them initiate tasks more quickly.

2. Shorten the Feedback Loop

The challenge: ADHD creates something called “time blindness.” A deadline that’s 30 days away doesn’t create urgency, it feels abstract and far off, essentially non-existent. This leads to last-minute panic, rushed work and burnout.

The fix:

• Replace monthly goals with weekly sprints
• Instead of one long monthly review, schedule brief weekly check-ins (even 10 minutes works)
• Break large projects into smaller milestones with near-term deadlines
• Ask two simple questions each week:
  • “What did you accomplish this week?”
  • “What are you working on next week?”

This creates the urgency their brain needs to engage consistently rather than relying on panic-driven last-minute performance.

3. Redesign Your Meetings

The challenge: Fast-paced verbal exchanges can overwhelm the ADHD brain’s working memory capacity. When multiple people are speaking, decisions are being made quickly and information is flying around the room, your ADHD employee may miss crucial details. This is not because they’re not trying but because their brain can’t process and store information at that pace.

The fix, before the meeting:

Share an agenda at least a few hours in advance and include any documents or data they’ll need to review. This gives them time to prepare and reduces in-the-moment processing load.

And during the meeting:

• Give thinking time before expecting responses to complex questions
• Don’t interpret silence as lack of engagement
• Consider which items they can respond to later in writing

Then after the meeting:

• Send a written summary of key decisions and action items
• Never assume they captured everything in real-time
• Include deadlines and owners for each action

These adjustments aren’t about lowering standards, they’re about setting everyone up to contribute their best thinking.

The ROI: Why Should You Adjust Your Management Style?

You might be thinking: “This sounds like extra work. Why should I adapt to them?”

Here’s why: the return on investment is massive.

When you clear the barriers for an ADHD employee, you don’t just get adequate performance. You get:

• Crisis management skills - they thrive under pressure when others freeze
• Lateral problem-solving - they spot connections and solutions others miss
• Creative innovation - their different thinking style generates genuinely novel ideas
• Passionate expertise - when interested in a topic, they become your go-to expert
• Adaptability - they excel in dynamic, changing environments

Many successful entrepreneurs, innovators and creative leaders have ADHD traits. This is not despite their neurodivergence but because of the unique cognitive strengths it brings.

Benefits Beyond Your ADHD Employee

These management practices don’t just help your ADHD employee. They improve performance across your entire team.

• Clear, written communication reduces everyone’s cognitive load
• Regular check-ins catch problems early for all team members
• Structured meetings are more productive for everyone
• Specific deadlines and expectations eliminate ambiguity

You’re not creating “special treatment”, you’re implementing better management practices that happen to be essential for ADHD brains and beneficial for everyone else.

When to Seek Additional Support

Workplace Needs Assessments (WNA)

If you’re unsure what specific adjustments would help or if your employee is struggling despite your best efforts, a Workplace Needs Assessment can provide clarity.

A Workplace Needs Assessment delivers:

• Individualised recommendations based on the person’s specific ADHD presentation
• Practical strategies tailored to their role and your workplace
• Clear documentation to support reasonable adjustments
• Measurable outcomes to track improvement

This takes the guesswork out and provides both you and your employee with specific adjustments that will enable them to thrive.

Training for Your Management Team

If you have multiple neurodivergent employees or if you want to build neurodiversity competence across your organisation, structured training can make a significant difference.

Effective neurodiversity training should:

• Go beyond awareness to practical application
• Address common management challenges with evidence-based solutions
• Provide tools and frameworks managers can use immediately
• Create a shared language and approach across the organisation

The Bottom Line

You don’t need to be a therapist or an ADHD expert to successfully manage neurodivergent employees. You just need to be a clear communicator who’s willing to make small adjustments to your management approach.

When you do you’ll unlock potential that was always there, by removing the barriers that were blocking it.

Because neurodiversity isn’t a problem to solve, it’s potential to unlock.