He was one of the most capable people in the room. Everyone knew it. His ideas were sharp, his energy in a meeting was electric, and when he was locked in on something, he was genuinely exceptional. But the deadlines kept slipping. Projects would launch with enormous momentum and then stall. The follow-through was erratic. His manager had given feedback twice, clearly and professionally. Nothing changed. Quietly, the conclusion had been reached: he just wasn’t applying himself. Bright, but not reliable. Talented, but not quite the right fit.
Linda, a clinical psychologist who has spent 16 years working with ADHD clients, would have a different read. She has sat with hundreds of people who have heard that conclusion about themselves for most of their working lives. And she has one question for the people making it: what do you actually know about how their brain works?
What Is Actually Happening in the ADHD Brain
ADHD is not a focus problem. It is not an attitude problem. It sits in the prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain that manages motivation, task initiation, decision-making, and impulse control – and it runs on dopamine. In an ADHD brain, dopamine is depleted. The internal coaching system that tells a neurotypical person ‘start that, complete it, feel the reward, move to the next thing’ is not firing reliably. That is not laziness. It is not a character flaw. It is a structural and biochemical difference, hardwired from birth and, in many cases, undiagnosed for decades.
The Analogy That Changes Everything
Linda uses an analogy that reframes this completely. Imagine a colleague with diabetes who needs to take insulin at lunch. Nobody says: can’t you just try harder? Nobody questions their commitment because their pancreas doesn’t process sugars the way everyone else’s does. You understand they have a physiological condition. You let them manage it without attaching moral weight to it.
Now carry that analogy all the way. Diabetes: low insulin. ADHD: low dopamine and noradrenaline. Same category of problem. Wildly different social response.
Because when the condition sits in the brain rather than the body, we stop thinking about biochemistry and start thinking about character. The language ADHD has attracted goes back to the 1700s, when it was first documented in medical textbooks. Not as a neurological condition, but as a moral failing. Lazy. Uncommitted. Uncaring. Australia’s Parliamentary ADHD inquiry in 2023 found that children and adults with ADHD are still routinely described in those same terms today. Three centuries of moral framing, applied to something that was always physiological.
What It Feels Like From the Inside
Consider what that actually feels like from the inside. A person who knows they are intelligent – because they are, most ADHD people sit at above-average IQ but cannot access that intelligence consistently. Who starts assignments with genuine intent and watches themselves lose the thread anyway. Who arrives late to the meeting they had in their calendar and has no clean explanation for why. Who is told, again, that the issue is effort or attitude or care, when they are trying harder than anyone around them can see. Linda describes her clients as carrying oceans of shame. Not because they have failed, but because they have failed in ways they do not have the framework to understand or explain.
Why This Is a Leadership Problem
ADHD over-represents at senior levels. The same low dopamine that creates execution problems also drives risk tolerance, because risk produces dopamine. That wiring generates a disproportionate number of founders, CEOs, elite athletes, and high-energy creative leaders. The person in your organisation who is most entrepreneurial, most lateral in their thinking, most willing to back an unconventional idea – there is a real possibility that pattern has ADHD driving it. Which means the performance volatility sitting underneath all of that energy is not a motivation problem. It is a physiological one.
And the performance frameworks most organisations apply to it – set a clear expectation, give feedback, hold accountability, review the outcome – were not designed with that in mind. Those steps assume the brain receiving the feedback has the neurochemical architecture to translate a conversation into sustained behavioural change. For an undiagnosed or unsupported ADHD brain, that assumption is simply wrong. The feedback lands. The intention is genuine. And then the same pattern resurfaces two weeks later, with everyone more frustrated and the ADHD person carrying more shame.
Extending the diabetes analogy fully: nobody would expect a type 1 diabetic to manage their blood glucose through willpower alone, and then put them on a performance improvement plan when the glucose spiked anyway. The idea is absurd. But functionally, that is what happens to many ADHD adults in the workplace, every day, in organisations that consider themselves progressive and high-performing.
What Leaders Can Do Differently
The practical shift for a leader is not complicated. It does not require becoming a clinician or diagnosing your team. It requires one thing: becoming curious about how people are wired before drawing conclusions about why they perform the way they do. Linda sits with a client for up to six months before raising a potential ADHD diagnosis. She is watching patterns across time, not reacting to individual incidents. Most leaders do not have that luxury. But the discipline underneath it is available to everyone: observe before you conclude. Suspend the moral framework long enough to ask whether the pattern you are seeing might have an explanation you have not considered – and whether the performance conversation you are planning is actually designed to help.
In practice, that means a few things. If standard feedback is not producing change after two clear attempts, the first question should not be: how do I escalate? It should be: am I changing the environment, or just repeating the conversation? For many ADHD adults, the issue is not knowing what to do. It is the gap between intention and execution, which is a neurological gap, not a motivational one. Shorter deadlines with more frequent check-ins close that gap better than longer timelines with a single review point. Removing context-switching where possible, giving one clear priority at a time rather than a list, and building in external structure where the internal system is unreliable: these are not accommodations. They are just better management. And they tend to work for the whole team, not just the neurodiverse members of it.
The other shift is in how you read the pattern itself. Consistent underperformance across every type of task, in every context, over an extended period, is different from inconsistent performance that spikes and drops depending on the work. The second pattern, brilliant in a meeting, erratic on execution, electric when interested, invisible when not, is a neurological signal worth paying attention to. It is not proof of ADHD. But it is a reason to ask a different set of questions before writing the performance review.
One in 20 people are navigating ADHD. More than a million Australians. The odds that this has never touched your team are very low. The odds that the framework you have applied to it was built for a different kind of brain are considerably higher.
The moral language is 300 years old.
Is yours?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew May is a performance scientist, author, and keynote speaker. As founder of Performance Intelligence, he works with senior leaders and organisations across Australia to build the systems, culture, and mindset that make high performance sustainable. He is the author of MatchFit and The Ripple Effect, and host of the Performance Intelligence Podcast.
REFERENCES
ADHD Foundation Australia: estimates 3–5% of Australian adults have ADHD (approx. 1 million Australians).
Australian Parliament ADHD Inquiry, 2023: language labelling children and adults with ADHD as ‘lazy, careless, undisciplined, disruptive, not trying hard enough.’
