Leading With ADHD: How To Turn Chaos Into Clarity

Leading with attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a masterclass in “fake it till you make it.” Even when we do make it to the corner office, the same backstage chaos of our brains remains. Finding work that is challenging, flexible, dynamic, and unpredictable is the dream of every employee with ADHD, but the traits that make this exciting work fun can also make the path to getting to those kinds of roles a convoluted and lengthy one. But the same ADHD traits that make focused work difficult are just as likely to produce the best flow state possible, depending on context.

To understand this, I ask people to think of their brain as a marketplace for ideas and memories. Sometimes your brain is the new mall at the center of the financial district. The layout remains consistent across repeated visits, the products are placed in clear, easy-to-find categories, and you usually know what you’ll get when you go. This is the version of your brain you get when your brain chemistry is balanced and stable.

Your brain is just as likely to function as an open-air bazaar. This is a hive of commerce, with products you can’t find anywhere else, and no guarantee that you will find exactly what you’re looking for. It seems chaotic from the outside, but the bazaar operates on a deeper logic of intuition and opportunity, and it represents your brain at its most creative and dynamic.

Many ADHD employees fail to make it to management because traditional advice tells them to demolish the bazaar and replace it with the orderly mall. Most ADHD brains are simultaneously the mall and the market, with our attention shifting between marketplaces based on our energy, ambitions, and interests. The key is using the right levers to make these shifts intentional and get the best of both flow states.

Five Easy Levers To Lead With ADHD

Most management theory does not work for ADHD leaders. Even if we wanted to, those of us with ADHD simply cannot use discipline, motivation, punishment, or willpower alone to get our brains into manager mode. None of those levers changes our brain chemistry, our underlying beliefs about work, or how we get things done with others.

I use five levers to fuel my brain, simplify my work to reduce the quantity of outputs and quality of outcomes, and help my team help me. The key is not to stop once these basic levers are in place. They are most powerful when they become the foundations for broader and more complex personal systems for accountability and routines for results.

1/ Self-Care Is A Leadership Skill

Self-care is an ADHD leadership essential, but rest and relaxation are not as important as biochemical stability. It is so obvious that it sounds silly even to write this, but it’s true: when your body works well, your brain works better, too. Biochemical self-care is designed to protect your brain’s ability to handle hours of high-volume and high-speed processing every day. This means never skipping your workouts, whether you have to do them at 5am or 11pm. For me, while dealing with the unpredictability of my time while travelling for work, it meant waking up at two or three in the morning to go to the hotel gym until I broke a sweat.

Why did I take such a rigid approach to staying fit? My roles in consulting, banking, and telco all involved sitting in front of a laptop for eight to ten hours a day. A few months of this and everything hurt: my back, wrists, hips, and neck were particularly unhappy with this inactivity. A few more months of that, and thinking creatively was more painful, too.

Even with all the ergonomic equipment in the world, you’ll still end up with issues if you’re not doing weight training, working on your core, and staying strong. Physical fitness is one of the most underrated tools ADHD leaders have to enhance their effectiveness.

2/ Automate Everything

Rather than obsessing over new ways to keep track of tactical tasks and admin activities, it’s far more effective to establish systems that become habits you can do without needing to think about them. I have appointments set in advance for everything from my dog’s baths to taking my medication.

Staying on the theme of fitness, I prepay and book after-work sessions with a trainer, and I wear my workout clothes underneath my work clothes all day. This means I don’t have to remember to pack my gym clothes—I’m already wearing them. I do it even when I am working from home because it’s now automatic and I don’t need to think too much about it.

At the end of the day, I just have to remove the top layer of clothing and join another Zoom call. Like all the best automations, this method is low.

3/ Protect Your Energy, Not Your Time

Traditional time management advice suggests that effective leaders timebox work, get the most important thing done first, and prioritize appropriately. I would love to be better at prioritizing my time, but I’m often fighting my brain’s resistance to sequential prioritization, and I have to pick my battles.

But the truth is that the ADHD brain loves parallel processing and doesn’t think it needs to prioritize. While there are costs associated with task switching for other people, I experience more distractibility trying to stay focused on one task than I do with multiple tasks.

I will always spend more time at work than at home, but that doesn’t mean I have to spend more energy there if my family needs me more. I choose to be fully present and engaged for short spurts rather than tired and stressed, trying to fit more time in something that I don’t have the energy for. This is also why I invest in admin support for routine tasks, because administrative details consume much more energy than complex strategic thinking. Draining my energy on filing and booking meetings is misallocating my strongest cognitive resources.

4/ Make Everything Scannable

People with ADHD are often excellent at seeing the big picture, but paying attention to details requires a narrowing of focus that we’re typically not great at. It’s difficult for us to forgo the flexibility of being more agile and able to change things as we go along.

If you know you aren’t going to see or pay attention to all the details, make sure that all of the information your process is scannable and allows you to see what is most important at a glance. I ensure that I color-code everything from my wardrobe to the pens on my desk. I even use different colored pens for different things. When writing verbatim notes of a meeting, I use my black pen. When I am adding my thoughts about what someone was saying, I write that in a red pen.

5/ Get Teams To Help You Help Them

Your teams can make your ADHD leadership journey easier if you work with them to develop team norms that benefit everyone in general and make you more efficient specifically.

One practical way I do this is by making sure my team signposts and categorizes their communications using three categories: For Your Information (information only), Inconvenience (affects workflow), or Deal-Breaker (urgent action required). I ask them to start the subject line of their emails with the relevant category, which helps me process information by priority rather than missing something, because I scan every email with equal levels of attention. An unintended benefit was helping my team members quickly recognize what information leaders need to make which decisions, and tailoring their communications appropriately.

You cannot coach or willpower your way out of ADHD, but you can get better at managing the traits that do not serve you. You can get better at accepting and refining how your brain works, and you should learn to shift between the mall and bazaar whenever you need to.

Leading with ADHD means being unconventional, and that isn’t really a choice. Luckily, in a workplace more diverse than ever, that can only be a good thing.

About The Author

Bontle Senne is a speaker, transformation leader, author of The ADHD Boss, and a coach for neurodivergent leaders.

This article first appeared in the October 2025 issue of Inc. Arabia magazine. To read the full issue online, click here.