There is a strange assumption that seniority gradually cures executive-function difficulties. Once somebody becomes experienced enough, organised enough or responsible enough, we seem to expect the practical realities of ADHD to fade into the background. I can confirm that becoming a manager does not cause your working memory to salute, reorganise itself and promise never to lose another task again.
Leadership can actually make some ADHD challenges more visible because the work contains more switching, more competing priorities and more information that arrives without a neat ending. There are fewer tasks you can simply complete and close. Instead, there are people, decisions, projects, relationships and strategic threads all moving at different speeds, which is wonderfully interesting and occasionally a perfect habitat for every Monster in the collection.
Some parts of leadership suit my brain very well. I enjoy complexity, pattern-spotting, building new things and making decisions when the route is not obvious. I can hold the bigger picture while noticing connections between areas that appear separate. The difficulty comes when the role also requires hundreds of small administrative closures, repeated transitions and the ability to keep several mundane processes alive without the stimulation of novelty or urgency.
That is why I still need scaffolding. My whiteboards, electronic notes, project folders, calendars and visible systems do not become less legitimate because I am senior. If anything, they matter more because the consequences of dropping a thread can affect other people as well as me. Leadership responsibility makes support more important, not more embarrassing.
I have also had to become aware of how my own ADHD can shape the environment for the Crew. My enthusiasm can produce ideas faster than anybody could reasonably implement them, and a message I regard as thinking aloud may arrive with very different weight because it came from the boss. I have learnt to label ideas more clearly, distinguish curiosity from instruction and remember that my urgency does not automatically become everybody else’s.
Being open about this does not undermine authority. I think pretending to be effortlessly organised would be far more dangerous because it would make the systems supporting me invisible and potentially encourage other people to hide the support they need too. Competence and scaffolding are not opposites.
Barry would probably say that being at the centre of the web does not mean you personally hold every thread. Good leadership is partly knowing which ones are yours, which belong to somebody else and when the structure needs strengthening rather than another heroic sprint across it.