Managing an ADHD and AuDHD Team: What Actually Works

The HR team that wanted to fire its “problem team”

Hello, hello, hello everyone. This is Danielle, V, and Jessica from ND OutLoud, and we are here today to talk about managing an ADHD and AuDHD team. The reason this is coming up, and it’s a very hot subject for me today, is that I met with an HR team yesterday that wanted to get rid of their problem team, because their problem team was causing too much chaos, questioning things too much, and the accommodations they were asking for were “ridiculous.” The accommodations their team was asking for: recorded meetings, agendas before meetings, AI transcription during meetings, and a longer time to respond to questions asked in meetings.

So, all appropriate accommodations. Not just appropriate, things that should be done anyway. Everyone benefits. And I told this HR manager: all you’re telling me is that you are a bad manager. You don’t want any of your words recorded for any reason, because you don’t know what you’re doing.

Unfortunately, I think that happens a lot, because those accommodations wouldn’t just help the neurodivergent employees, they would help all employees. But in doing so, they force the managers to be accountable for what they say.

And businesses need to practice giving that time and space to answer, because you don’t want off-the-tongue answers. You want your employees to think about it, mull it over, and have productive, actionable responses. I’ve had so many people come to me with stuff like this: “My manager wrote me up because I didn’t have an answer right away.” If you’re pressuring your employees to respond instantly, you are not getting well-thought-out answers, I don’t care who you ask. And for those of us who are trying hard to manage our brains and our emotional regulation, and who have developed some good boundaries, we’re going to push back any time we feel that pressure, and we’re going to ask for time.

“Why” is not a challenge to your authority

One of the other things, and I’ve run into this so many times: something is said in a team meeting, or an email, or a chat channel, and you have an employee who asks why. Something I want all managers to hear: I don’t care who’s asking why, they’re not criticizing you. They just want to know the reason, so they can make sense of it in their head. And honestly, it doesn’t even matter what the answer is. I don’t know how many times I’ve been accused of questioning somebody’s authority. I don’t care what the answer is. I just want the answer.

Really, it’s clarification. You may have already given us the answer, but that answer didn’t register. It needs to be said a different way, explained a different way. That’s why we’re asking. We’re missing information. Cannot compute, need more input. And by asking why, if I know why you’re trying to do this, I can get you to the end result.

If you tell me, “I need you to walk over to that corner, bend over, and touch your toes,” I’m going to ask you why. What is this trying to accomplish? That’s a ridiculous hyperbole, but sometimes the directives we’re given at work feel exactly like that. If it feels like that kind of order, I’m going to ask why so I understand what we’re trying to accomplish. Our brains work fast and extremely logically and analytically, and I can say that for all three of us on this call. We’re extremely methodical, and we want details. If you don’t give me the details, I do not understand the direction at all. Even with “go stand in the corner and touch your toes”: do you want me to sit on the floor and touch my toes? Bend over? Kneel down? What’s the reason? Do you want me to walk around the whole cubicle office before I get to the corner? Do I take my shoes off? Am I supposed to touch each toe one at a time? These are all questions going through my head.

I saw a colleague of ours doing a video about a question that’s on an autism assessment: what do the numbers two and seven have in common? He was talking about how the neurotypical people say, “Well, they’re numbers,” and the autistic people say, “They have a similar shape,” or go deeper. In my brain I went: they’re real numbers, they’re integers, how deep are we going with this?

I have a story to go with this. I was asked to write a blog post on a subject that should have been really simple. I spent seven hours writing the post, pulling in resources and qualifications and scientific research. They wanted a 300-word explanation of what this thing was. But they didn’t give me that, and they wouldn’t clarify when I asked, so they got billed for nine hours’ worth of work. This is why, when you are managing neurodivergent teams, clarifying questions, bullet-pointed lists, time to respond, and transcription will save you time as a whole company. It will save you energy, and it will save everyone frustration.

Most managers were never trained to lead

But we’ve talked about this before: a lot of mid-level managers just don’t have the training to lead any team, let alone a neurodivergent team. It takes a level of behavior management training, or lived experience, to get the most out of your employees. The Marine Corps has a whole leadership course you have to go through before they’ll give you the next level of responsibility for leading people, and it’s pretty intense. To go from low-level to mid-level management in the Marine Corps, they make you go through training to be a leader. In corporate America, it’s, “Yeah, you look good, Fred, your numbers are good, come on over here and lead a team of ten.”

And when they do send people to management training, most management training is surface-level. It produces people-pleasers, the ones not asking the why. That’s what you get when you don’t allow the why: you’re getting the yes-sir and the yes-ma’am, and then you’re not getting the product you want. And then they say, “Well, why didn’t you understand I wanted this?” Well, you didn’t tell me you wanted this. Tell me what you want. I need all of the details, or that’s not what you’re going to get.

Traits of the best managers we ever had

So, out of all the managers we’ve worked for, corporate and the school system, what are some traits of the best managers you’ve ever had?

The ones that actually come check on you. They notice when you’re acting different, even if you’re trying to hide it. They just know it, and they nicely come over: “Hey, come for a walk with me,” take you out of the atmosphere, and say, “Just checking in, what’s going on?” The ones who are really in tune with their team are amazing.

The ones that listen. And the ones that ask the whys back: “Why would that help you? Why do you need that?” And again, not accusatory, because we’ve also worked for the managers who say “well, why do you need that?” in that tone of voice. If you recognize that it’s going to help me and you’re asking why, I’m happy to tell you why I need that agenda beforehand: it will help me make sure I’m tuned in and paying attention. If I have something written to follow, I can hear you when you talk.

Or the managers that do listen. In my own workplace, I’m teaching people simple things, like, “Hey, do you know you can turn closed captions on in our Teams meetings?” And it’s not “oh, that’s dumb,” it’s “oh my gosh, I didn’t know this was possible, I’m doing this every time now.” And it’s not hard. Hit record.

I think the best managers create a safe space. We need to be safe, seen, and heard. They create a safe space for dialogue. They allow you to be seen: “Hey, you don’t look like you’re having a great time. Do you need extra time to process? What do you need?” And then they hear you when you speak, and I mean hear you, not get judgy and talk over you. The people who create space for open dialogue, even if they don’t agree with you, make you feel safe to say, “I have a question, I don’t understand this.” As a teacher, we always tell students there’s no such thing as a dumb question, because if you have that question, other people have it too. Just because you’re 25 and working in a corporate office doesn’t mean that logic mysteriously went away. Managers who can create a safe space, hear their employees, and see their employees will get that back from their employees. It becomes a more collaborative space.

I think of my own situation. I’ve been with my company three years, and I’m finally learning to speak up. We have reviews every few months, and in the last one I finally spoke up when my manager asked what I need. I said, “I need to be recognized. I know I’m doing a good job because I’m not getting written up, and everyone says I do a good job, but can I be more than just ‘hey, good work, see you later’?” And they put me in, and I got an award this last quarter. They saw me, they heard me, and they did something about it. Those managers are awesome.

The personality test exercise that taught a team to work together

One of my best managers had us all do one of those free online personality tests. He said, “I know this is not super accurate, everybody go do it,” and he scheduled a meeting for us all to do it at the same time, so we were all chatting with each other as we filled these things out. That’s fun. Then we went through it, picked out the personality types and the movie characters our personalities most represented, and we watched movies around those, stopping to talk: “You see how they answered that? Hey Danielle, you do that! Look at how other people in the room interact.” It was silly, maybe the silliest exercise ever, but you want to know what it did? Every single person on that team knew how to interact with the rest of their team, not just the managers. And the managers took all of that information, came back to us, and said, “Okay, this is your personality type. Is this true for you? When I read about this, it says you might need this accommodation. Do you need this? Will this help you?” We didn’t even have to go ask, because they were actually analyzing it, looking at us as a team, and asking, “How can we help you be better?”

That’s where it is: learning to be community. And even as neurodivergent people ourselves, yes, we sometimes get tired of the self-advocacy, but we’ve got to keep it up, because they can’t read our brains, especially when our brains are going 20 million miles a minute and changing ideas every two seconds. We’ve got to learn to communicate clearly as well.

Feedback, RSD, and keeping feelings out of team meetings

A lot of the time, the only thing a manager needs to learn to do is not react to something we say during a call. There are workshops I do think are good for any team, and one of them, no matter what level you’re on: everyone needs to be able to take negative feedback without having an emotional response to it. Which is difficult for a lot of neurodivergent people because it triggers our RSD, but it’s also really hard for a lot of neurotypical people, because everyone gets defensive. You may not feel rejected, but everybody gets defensive when someone says, “Hang on, I just need to tell you this didn’t work for me and we need to fix it.”

When you’re on a call with an entire team, neurodivergent or not, it is no one’s job to manage your feelings and your perception of what was said. Take your feelings out of team meetings; they don’t belong there. If you are offended by something I say in a team meeting, take it to me after the meeting. I will handle it. I’m not going to handle it perfectly, because RSD, but don’t do it in a team call, ever.

But how many times have we been told we talk too much during a team call, or too loud, or “you might want to check yourself”? I think a lot of classroom management strategies should be taught to managers. If this happened in a classroom, I’m not going to chastise you in front of 30 other children. I’m going to take you out in the hall and we’re going to talk: “Hey, are you okay? What’s going on? You seem a little agitated today.” And then we’re going to go back in and rejoin. And that’s only if I haven’t been able to redirect you first, because we have all these tools in our toolbox for how to handle that. Depending on the manager’s emotional response, there may be a reason they’re trying to put you in your place in front of the team. But if you want to degrade the foundation of your workspace, that’s how you do it: you punish and humiliate and degrade your team in front of each other. Then no one feels safe to speak, so they stop talking, and they stop giving you ideas.

And we need to remember that in our daily lives too, on social media. If there’s something you see you don’t like, either scroll on, you don’t have to put that negativity out there, or, if you know the person and really want to engage, private message them: “Hey, can we talk about this? I don’t understand where you’re coming from, can you explain it further?” Try to understand. I did this wrong last week and hurt the feelings of someone I really care about, because my logical brain jumped in instead of trying to understand the situation first. We talked in the back end and we’re all fine now, but I still hate that I hurt someone’s feelings. I don’t think any of us really wants to.

Meeting norms: training people how to work together

When you work in large teams, here’s something someone did once that irritated me at first, but only because of how it was applied. Before we started having team meetings, we sat down and established norms for the meetings. Talking over each other violated a norm; we did not do that. And she made these paddles on popsicle sticks with the face of Norm from Cheers on them, and when someone violated the norm, you just raised your paddle. Right, Norm? It was a way to hold people accountable, and it was kind of silly, but it offset the rejection sensitivity and the defensiveness. The most awkward time is the first and second time someone raises it; after that, everybody understands this is allowed. Sometimes you get people who are Norm-happy and you have to remind everybody of the norms and move on. But that is just training people how you want the team to run.

It’s like when I talk to my kids about movies: if people had a good conversation in the first five minutes of the movie, it would be over. None of the wacky hijinks would ensue, none of the emotional angst would happen. Every Shakespeare play would be over before the first act ended if people just had a conversation. But people are terrified of having a conversation, especially a negative one.

Basic accommodations cost almost nothing

So how do managers manage ADHD and AuDHD teams? That’s who we are here at ND OutLoud, but I’m going to tell you that every invisible disability falls under these management styles. Listen. Take your emotions out of the conversation. Answer the questions asked of you. And give basic accommodations. The accommodations I mentioned at the beginning are super basic. They do not cost your company more than maybe $30 a month, and that’s only if you want to buy fancy software. Zoom has it built in now. Microsoft Teams has almost all of it built in now.

And if somebody is asking for transcription accommodations, they probably already own their own software for it. I do. When I worked in corporate, I brought my own tools just to make my life easier. If they want to wear earplugs at work, great. If they want noise-canceling headphones and they’re asking for the accommodation, they’re really asking for acceptance of the thing they’re going to bring in themselves. They’re not asking you to purchase anything. Reasonable accommodations are going to strengthen your team. If I had an agenda before a call so I knew what to bring, and transcription during the call so I knew what to follow up on after, you just made me super powerful and hit every single one of my superpowers as a neurodivergent adult.

And at most larger businesses, it’s already a requirement for meetings to have someone take minutes. That is a business requirement. So someone is doing it. Add people to the email string that gets them, or send them out to everybody. I’ve worked in companies where they take minutes at every single meeting, and then the minutes go into this mysterious purgatory of nonexistence. That’s a lot of energy expended for no one to get the notes. And the basis behind it is partly a tax and audit thing: minutes exist to document that meetings happened. As a business owner, I need to keep minutes and transcriptions of certain kinds of meetings so that if I ever get audited, I can prove all of that. It’s in a digital file. So why can’t you share these things? Take it one step further and share it with your whole team. All of this is built into 99.9 percent of the software companies already use. And if you aren’t using these things as a company, let’s have a very different operational discussion, because there are bigger issues. If you do have these tools in place, there is zero excuse for not giving your team members accommodations.

If middle management pushes back, ask why

So as upper management, if someone asks for this and middle management is pushing back on it, you need to ask yourself why. Clarity of mission matters. Do you know how many meetings I’ve sat in about getting really clear on the mission and vision of the company? If you have middle management pushing back against these accommodations, ask yourself why. A lot of times it’s because they are not confident in their ability to do their job, and they don’t want it highlighted. Maybe not all people. But a person who is doing their job correctly will not have a problem with transcription software.

I had someone come to me who went to a meeting and got written up for taking notes. The manager said, “If you’re taking notes, you’re not paying attention.” Whoa, whoa, whoa. You need to stop that manager right there. Number one, they are paying attention. And this was a middle manager who needed to take information back to their employees. Does this person expect them to memorize things? No. Neurotypical or not, you need to take notes, especially if you’re relaying information.

Accommodation is cheaper than turnover

You can give your employees these very reasonable, appropriate accommodations, or, as we said the other day, you either take care of it on the front end, or you end up paying for the EEO claims. Or the turnover. It’s more expensive to replace an employee than it is to accommodate them, whatever that accommodation is. I don’t care if that’s a pay raise or accommodations. Thirty dollars a month is way cheaper than replacing your employee. On average it’s $50,000 to $60,000 to hire a new employee, between training, onboarding, the new salary, and benefits starting up. That’s the low end, honestly. And if you’re talking about upper management and executive level, that number triples or more.

People are so shortsighted. They don’t see the big picture. They say, “I’m just going to fire this problematic employee,” when you could accommodate them essentially for free, and then guess what: they’re an asset, not a problem. I just think it’s so funny that it’s, “We should get rid of them, they’re asking too many questions.” I know the book is problematic, but if you’ve ever read The 48 Laws of Power, one of the historical vignettes tells of a general during Vietnam who said the best soldiers he ever had were the ones who were drafted and did not want to be there, because they asked questions about every single thing, and they made everybody get crystal clear on the mission, what they were doing, why they were doing it, and what was expected. He was one of the most successful generals, and he credited the guys who asked questions. That was a high-anxiety, life-or-death situation, and questions made it better. So at the mid-level paper-company management level, I imagine you can handle a few questions in a board meeting.

Something to always keep in mind, and we have to tie this up because time is running out: as a manager, make sure you have a safe space for your people to be heard, take your emotions out of the equation, answer clarifying questions, and make sure everything is documented. This will make you a better manager. This will make your team more efficient and better at their jobs. And if you don’t know how to manage your neurodivergent people, reach out. This is what we do. All three of us have specialized ways we do it: software that helps you find the needs across your whole company and cater to them, behavioral modification, and executive functioning and operational support from years of operational management, to help you find ways to make your team work more efficiently. Let us know how we can help. Our contact information is below this video. If you have any questions, please let us know. We’re always happy to answer you. Thank you again, and this is the team from ND OutLoud. Bye, guys.