Coaching for Executive Leaders with ADHD: Your Complete Guide
Lynda Hoffman
ICF Professional Certified Coach | Coaching professionals who yearn for meaningful personal and organizational change | ADHD Coaching for Professionals | Speaker on executive functioning in adults
Are you thinking about hiring an executive coach, but you don’t think they’ll understand your ADHD?
Is it even possible to find executive coaching for folks with ADHD?
These are very good questions.
Not every executive coach will have the knowledge base to understand how ADHD impacts performance. This matters.
ADHD is complex - and it’s full of contradictions.
For example, your strengths may be the very things that get in your way. You might be excellent at social interactions, exuding charm and wit, but they tend to distract you from larger projects.
Your ability to overfocus means valuable and large amounts of work can get done, but usually at the cost of other details.
You find meetings with several participants hard to follow. You lose the main thread, or you find it difficult to take notes and contribute meaningfully.
Understanding the neurological and physiological roots of these behaviours is critical to your success.
Executive Leadership Coaching - with an ADHD Twist
ADHD executive leadership coaching is structured and has an explicit emphasis on executive functioning – the brain-based capacities for driving behaviour.
If you’re going to achieve your goals, understanding the neurology of ADHD becomes essential.
What works for you will not work for a neurotypical person.
The aim is to have agency, not to be like everyone else.
What makes it so hard to change behaviour?
Changing behaviour is not easy to do – whether you’re neurotypical or not. “Left to your own devices, you are 80% likely to fail,” says the American University. ?
For someone with ADHD, it is doubly difficult.
ADHD is a problem with execution. Not with intelligence or vision.
With ADHD, making behavioural change is impaired by inconsistent motivation. You can have robust self-awareness, but not feel inspired or energized enough to follow through consistently.
“Behavioral change that requires both new high-level skills and high motivation to implement those skills is in fact the hardest behavioral change to achieve.”?
?Even with neurotypical leaders, company training alone is not the answer to building leadership skills.
“Organizations that offer training alone experience?22% increase in productivity, but when combined with coaching that figure rises to 88%”
Heidi’s Story
Heidi wanted to clean up the messiness in her thinking. She was an executive who knew that her efficiency and bottom line were being impacted.
Once all her goals - and the executive functioning challenges underlying those goals - were identified, Heidi began to tackle each and every one.
First, she began break down a large project across time. She reported that she ‘couldn’t find the steps’ between the start and the finish, so she kept avoiding the task altogether.?
As with many high functioning executives with ADHD, Heidi would think about the end goal and where she stood now, but with a big blank space between those two points.
As it turned out, the quality of her thinking was not supporting her. “I can do xyz. I’m not good at xyz. I don’t know what to do.”
What Heidi was not doing was asking herself open-ended questions. Meta-cognitive questions (the thinking about our thinking) are often underused or not used at all in folks with ADHD.
For Heidi, executive leadership coaching topics covered:
In all cases, the underlying executive functioning mechanism was part of the conversation.
Over time, Heidi became aware of how ADHD impacts higher-order thinking, and how she could develop those skills.
Heidi learned about ADHD, and she learned about herself. ?
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How to Choose the Right ADHD Executive Leadership Coach for You?
Choosing the right ADHD executive leadership coach for you is a very personal matter. You want great rapport, but not a friend.
You want someone who has considerable emotional intelligence, adaptability, curiosity and professional credentials - but not necessarily an expert in your field.
Your excellent executive coach should show they can:
How to Measure Success in the ADHD Executive Leadership Coaching Process
Successful coaching outcomes begin with successful initial meetings.
Create clear objectives
In your initial meeting with your coach, you want to create very explicit goals. Your coach may help you refine your objectives, if needed.
Create a way to measure where you are now, and where you want to get to
When your goal feels unmeasurable, you can still use a Likert scale to record where you are now. ?“Today, my confidence feels like a 4/10 but I want to get to an 8/10.”? Make sure you identify key behaviours that indicate increased confidence. “When my confidence is at an 8/10, I’ll be speaking up more assertively with my superior.”
Get feedback from observers
Objective feedback from your team and/or your mentor/leader at work is invaluable for challenging perceptions. Get this feedback at least twice during the coaching period.
When to Hire an ADHD Executive Leadership Coach
ADHD executive leadership coaching can be enormously helpful when:
You’re transitioning to a new position and you want to be at your best.
Perhaps this new role will require a you hadn’t needed before. Leaders who are great at details must also learn to be great at seeing the bigger picture when they’re promoted. What skill would you like to hone?
You’re receiving feedback that suggests you need help.
A performance review that confronts you with behaviours you’ve suspected have been an issue for a while, but you couldn’t change them yourself. Or, the feedback you received makes no sense to you. You don’t quite know how to make concrete something that feels amorphous.
You’re feeling overwhelmed.
You’ve tried not to let it show, but the reality is you by the sheer volume of the demands on your time. You might be losing your temper or resorting to doing everything yourself as a way to ‘get things done’. You want to feel peaceful and in control.
You’re living with imposter syndrome.
You love your work but can’t quite believe you’ve been elevated to your position. You’re undermined by persistent thoughts that you’re not as good as others and that you don’t belong. Worse, it shows in your behaviour. You stay quiet when you could use your voice. You let others share their ideas first.
Your output is not matching your goals for yourself.
Who do you want to be as a leader? Where do you shine? What are your results telling you? If your results are not matching with what you want for yourself, executive coaching would support you in reaching those goals efficiently.
Be Proud
If you are an executive leader with ADHD, you are part of a large contingent of courageous executives who want to increase their productivity, enhance interpersonal relationships, and increase their sense of agency.
ADHD Executive Leaders who ask to be coached are the ones who gain fresh insight, new perspectives, and powerful new ways of leading.??
Coaching works. It doesn’t teach you to be someone else.
It reveals who you actually are.
Coaching empowers the leader within you.
“Lynda's coaching has been game changing. In only a few sessions, her empathetic approach and wise questions have unlocked so many powerful revelations that helped me understand what was blocking me and made me a better leader and person. I highly recommend Lynda to any executives who want to grow in their roles.” - C.D.
With love and gratitude,
Lynda
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1 个月I like the emphasis on executive function. It's the underlying issue underneath all of the infinite ways ADHD can show up, and understanding that is really helpful!