It’s ADHD Awareness Month!
You know what that means, it’s a time to remind ourselves that people with ADHD exist… they could be in your family, right next to you, or even in the mirror!
We want to challenge our readers to move beyond awareness, and into action. So, what can you do?
If you’re a colleague or manager of someone with ADHD, here are some key skills you’ll want to refine and build on:
- Clarity: Providing agendas (using the POST method is a great start!), being clear in assigning tasks by including the deadline, purpose, context, and preferred format in written form.
- Creating space for creativity: Creative problem solving, identifying changes to processes for efficacy, challenging existing assumptions… these are all strengths of a colleague with ADHD.
- Honest and authentic communication: Understand that clarifying questions are just that – clarifying questions. Not a disagreement, or challenge, or undermining of your ideas. Take people at face value, and communicate yourself on this level. Not only do you increase efficiency (no unravelling hidden agendas or subtext!), you also build psychological safety!
- Learning and Advocacy: Learn about the needs, lived experiences, and history of communities in order to actively advocate for them. This goes for all marginalised groups. In this case, it’s learning more about ADHD and how people with ADHD experience the world in order to push for the removal of barriers. The responsibility to deconstruct exclusion should not lie with the person excluded, but the people who are in the majority, or privileged group.
- Giving and receiving feedback: We see across many industries and company contexts that giving and receiving feedback can be tricky. We know from the thin file problem that people from marginalised groups receive less feedback – impacting progression opportunities. Explore your options for frameworks: Stop/Start/Continue, the GROW model, or the good old fashioned compliment sandwich are good starting points.
- When receiving feedback, assume the best of intentions: they are investing time in your growth/progression, they feel comfortable enough to give you feedback, they care about your day to day work… the list could go on. Receive feedback with curiosity, gratitude, and give yourself the time to process it before responding or acting. As a general rule, remember to respond when you’re ready, instead of reacting in the moment.
If you have ADHD, here are some tips from one neurodivergent professional to another:
We can request reasonable adjustments: using noise cancelling headphones, listening to music or white noise whilst working, adjusting our hybrid working approach, using assistive technology like todoist, dragon speech to text, Otter AI… Consider where you find a challenge or barrier in your working, and identify an improvement.
We can move around (stretch, fiddle, doodle) if we need to, and feel safe and able to do so. It wasn’t until I checked in on my body that I realised I was sacrificing comfort in order to sit/type/listen in a way which was the assumed ‘professional’ way. Many of us have physical health conditions, so consider your body and brain working together, and what you need as a whole human.
We can advocate for ourselves, and/or pair up and have a colleague who advocates for us. Often, the excluded or minoritised person takes on additional labour in advocating for their needs and community – but we need the support and active participation of folks outside of our communities to make sustainable progress. If you can, point people in the right direction or share your experience and needs before asking them to step up as advocates.
If you, or someone you know has ADHD and is working, they can apply for Access To Work support. We’ll be honest – the wait is long, and you’re not guaranteed support, and the process is imperfect. But for some people, it can be helpful.
For example, I received strategy coaching to help me find ways to work with a memory affected by pain and brain fog.
Our top tips for Access to Work applications are:
- Have an idea of what you’d benefit from in terms of support/technology/workstations
- Ensure the person applying does as little of the admin as possible – we already have to spend time working around inaccessible practices in an inaccessible world, so we should not have a further time-penalty to address barriers we face. On that note – thank you Vikki and Anthony for taking on so much of my own ATW paperwork. You free up that time so that I can do my day-to-day job.
Understanding ADHD as a concept is just the beginning
The true goal is to understand people’s experiences of ADHD, and actively transform our workplaces, communities, and perspectives to be fully inclusive and accessible. By refining our approaches to communication, creativity, and advocacy, and by removing barriers rather than expecting individuals to adjust to them, we can create environments where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.
Make inclusion a part of your daily routine. Advocate, educate, and innovate continuously. For those with ADHD and the champions supporting them, remember, every small action contributes to a more inclusive world. Keep pushing for adjustments, ask for what you need, and extend your support to others.
