ADHD Leadership and Decision Making
There’s a huge body of research out there that says ADHDers just aren’t good at making decisions compared to the general populus. We’re more likely to gamble, to abuse substances, to participate in risky sexual behaviour. In this context it can seem like we’re worse leadership candidates due to our suboptimal decision making but in reality, these generalisations miss a huge amount of nuance and even though on average we might be worse decision makers in some contexts, in others it’s a completely different story. So let’s dive in.
As someone who knows so many leaders with ADHD, right from lower level management all the way up to senior leadership and C-Suite, I know that many of us perform exceptionally well in leadership positions and a key part of this is decision making, so I expected to find a lot of interesting studies with mixed results on this topic. What I found actually left me feeling pretty rubbish.
A 2014 meta-analysis of studies related to ADHD and decision making found robust small to medium negative effects on decision making correlated with ADHD. They found the magnitude of these effects to be of a similar magnitude to our attention deficits.
A 2018 study found that these decision making deficits are not driven by risk seeking behaviours where we may be keen to choose a riskier path despite it having a lower expected value. But instead our poor decision making is just, well that, poor decision making.
A 2019 study found that we tend to make poorer decisions financially and even though it can be mediated by numeracy, as a whole our financial decision making was statistically significant. We’re more likely to buy on impulse and use an avoidant or spontaneous decision making style.
I read about how we’re worse drivers, more likely to have a teen pregnancy, all these things that can be used to point to us to say that we are Bad and that our decision making can’t be trusted and I’ll tell you what, I felt a little dejected reading about this.
It doesn’t matter that the one time I gambled in Vegas I got bored within 5 minutes, used the rest of the 20 dollars I’d taken out on random machines to say I’d done it and then left and never gambled again. It doesn’t matter that I’m a safe road user and the only time I had an accident when cycling was entirely the other person’s fault. What does matter is that I have ADHD and so my decision making is taken into question because ADHDers are known to have worse decision making.
Sometimes I struggle with the balance on this. It would be incredibly arrogant of me to deny the result of multiple studies and suggest that we shouldn’t look into ADHD decision making because it will make ADHDers feel bad. But at the same time, every single individual with ADHD is a unique individual and just because on average ADHDers tend to make worse decisions, doesn’t mean that the potential leadership candidate with ADHD in front of you is also going to make bad decisions.
The stigma this attaches to ADHD can have far reaching impacts, not only getting in the way of the careers of amazing, capable ADHDers but also affecting all the people they would have their own positive impact on through their amazing leadership.
So self-confidence having taken a temporary hit, I didn’t feel I could do a video on ADHD and decision making in leadership justice right now so moved onto another topic until when searching something completely different I stumbled across a very interesting paper.
Because the reality is that the incredibly broad statement of “ADHDers tend to make worse decisions on average” is stigamtising because of how incredibly broad it is. It’s a very black and white approach to something that is a lot more nuanced, and so to understand this topic further we need to get into the nuance and that’s what I’m going to do.
So we’re going to look at a very specific paper here, called Strategies for improving decision making of leaders with ADHD and without ADHD in combat military context published in 2022 because its whole premise is to do with enivronment-leader congruency. When I spent a bit of time googling this and from my understanding this is a lot like the person-environment fit I was speaking about in my videos on ADHD and entrepreneurship, namely that if a leader is in the wrong environment, an environment that is incongruent to them, then they may struggle, but in an environment that is the right fit then they will thrive a whole lot more.
So the theory is that by improving environment-leader congruency then this will lead to better adaptability and better decision making and the environment in discussion here is the combat environment of the military.
Before we delve deep into the paper, I think this is an interesting place to look at due to all the anecdotal stories about ADHDers being amazing in a crisis, snapping into focus mode where others may panic. I’ve not yet been able to find research that backs up this trait but reading ADHD forums and ADHD social media this one seems an understudied area of the ADHD experience. And the combat field is absolutely a crisis situation so I can immediately see where ADHD is of value here, but actually this isn’t the topic of this paper.
Instead they speak about how ADHD symptoms are highly dependent on context and environment. This can explain how an ADHDer struggles to concentrate all day at work in an open plan office but gets home and absorbed into their hobby and the concentration issues go away. Or on an even simpler level, ADHDers with sensory sensitivities will struggle significantly in environments where they are in sensory overwhelm versus in an area where they are more catered to.
They discuss what makes an environment a positive fit for an ADHDer and refer to characteristics described as “high arousal parameters” which include unpredictable situations, demand for coping with motivational conflict issues, juggling multiple stimuli at once, abrupt transitions and changes and also prompt reward and immediate recognition.
In addition, although we may not seek it, highly structured environments are also hugely beneficial as they help bring structure to our chaos, allowing us to be more organised as well. So the paper argues that a military combat environment ticks off all of the above and could be a better fit for ADHDers.
However, they do acknowledge that not every ADHDer gets on well in the army and that there is significant literature to suggest that some ADHDers have a poor quality of life in the army. The paper acknowledges that those struggling are most likely to leave early on, likely because the environment is not a fit for them for other reasons or maybe their combinations of symptoms require a different environment, but for those that do stay there are a number of ways the army is a good fit for them, including risk and excitement, the requirement for higher energy levels and physical action, a demand for quick reaction and distributing attention across multiple assignments.
The fast turnover in military personnel as well makes space for rapid advancement in terms of position, status and personal growth which gives opportunities for leadership. I personally see a link to dopamine here as well as regular opportunity for advancement ticks off that prompt reward requirement mentioned earlier.
I’m starting to worry I sound like an ad for the military here, which is not my intention, we’re just exploring a specific example to understand the nuance, but the paper argues that the ADHDer brings benefits to the army through inhibition deficits and creativity in problem solving which is often needed in important and unusual decisions that are needed in this role. They also require proactivity, flexibility and a tolerance for instability which are also qualities that have been linked to ADHD.
They talk about combat leaders operating in highly complex situations and this makes me think back to my video about how valuable generalists are. I’ll link it above but in short, the book Range: How Generalists Triumph In A Specialised World argues that the more complex a situation is, the more useful generalists and generalism and ADHD often go hand in hand.
So with this theory out of the way, the paper wanted to look at ADHD decision making in the combat environment compared to non ADHD decision making and look for interventions in which they could make this ADHD decision making even better.
The study interviewed 1301 combat squad commanders from the Israel Defense Force of which 112 were identified as having ADHD using the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale. They investigated intelligence (which was found to be roughly equal between the two groups with ADHDers scoring just slightly higher) to control for any effect it might have but the real test was using the Combat Leadership Dilemmas Test, a military situational judgment test which has been designed to test decision-making of combat commanders.
The test is multiple choice with a scenario given and then five options for what to do below. The participants had to choose the two best possible responses to the given scenario from the five options.
The test was split into two parts, with participants taking the first part in a classroom situation with an invigilator keeping eye on them before a thirty minute break and then a second test in one of four intervention settings: a classroom situation again (with the same conditions as part one), in an isolated room without anyone else present, in a face to face scenario where the participant silently read the question while the responses were hidden before the examiner uncovered the responses and the participant told their examiner their first and second-best choices aloud for the examiner to record, and a final intervention which was the same set up as the third but the participant had to wait 12 seconds before sharing their answers.
The intention behind each intervention was as follows: The first provided a baseline to control for the break and round two, the second was to prove that reduced distractions improve performance, the third was to introduce external regulation, feedback and supervision and the final one was to also compensate for natural impulsivity, disinhibition and a lack of self regulation.
So what were the results? Well firstly, ADHD itself did not significantly predict better or worse scores on the second part which is interesting in itself because it means we don’t see the decision making penalty in this environment. But it gets more interesting.
You might not be surprised to hear that the isolation intervention where participants were sat in a room on their own raised performance in both the ADHD and the non-ADHD group. In fact this was the highest performance for the non-ADHD group. But it gets even more interesting.
The paper doesn’t discuss this but you’ll see when I put the results up at the end that the ADHDers had a much wider performance than the non-ADHDers with members of the group performing both significantly better and significantly worse than the non-ADHDers. But where it gets really interesting is in the last two interventions, that the paper calls “Simple Face to Face” and “Withheld Face to Face” respectively.
Because in these two interventions the ADHDers performed not only significantly better than the classroom or isolation scenarios, but they also demonstrated significantly better results over the non ADHD group and I now need to show you the result diagram for you to fully appreciate just how significant this result is:
What is interesting is that the withheld scenario where the participant had to wait twelve seconds after making their decision before telling the examiner their response actually performed worse than the simple face to face scenario where the participant shared their decision as soon as they had finished making it. This might suggest that this scenario didn’t combat impulsivity as was intended or maybe twelve seconds was too long, further studies would be needed to establish this.
The paper points to studies of ADHD children which point to a positive influence when interacting with an examiner which created opportunities for social feedback and in turn improved executive functioning. They highlighted the importance of a “meaningful other”, a significant person who could fill that role when it came to important leadership decisions.
The study can only speculate on the reason. They say:
“Plausibly, the presence of a significant individual induces a beneficial atmosphere for leaders with ADHD, providing implicit social feedback, supporting a sense of being supervised and receiving validation, thereby increasing self-gathering and willingness to please and being positively appreciated, as opposed to the alienated context of the control classroom setting where there was no personal face-to-face interaction with the examiner, nor with other peers when solving the social problems.”
And in some ways the underlying mechanisms might not matter too much because of how easy this is to implement for the benefit it brings. In the military this meaningful other is almost built in where leaders have a deputy to fulfill that role.
While real world testing would be required in order to evidence this effect in the real world, there are some ways in which we might be able to generalise. Because the point of this video is not to say that ADHDers should join the military in order to become a leader, although you can if you wish, but the paper itself acknowledges the traits of military combat leadership that might be found in other roles to which this decision making strategy may apply.
Things like coping with stress and danger could see this generalised to fire departments, law enforcement, medical fields and crisis response. Industries where things are stressful without being life or death such as those driven by a goal for high profitability and performance could also benefit. They also point to a study suggesting that highly stimulating, stressful and challenging work environments are often actually sought out by individuals with ADHDers who report to be both more successful and more satisfied in such work environments.
(ADHD in context: Young adults’ reports of the impact of occupational environment on the manifestation of ADHD, Lasky et al., 2016)
And actually, that’s where a lot of my clients come from. The industries are diverse from finance and consulting to social care and education to more creative pursuits in the film industry. But my clients often find themselves in highly stimulating, stressful and challenging work environments that they need help working through.
And this is also very pertinent to the role I play in my coaching. I have a rule where I don’t tell people what to do because that just doesn’t work, instead I help them find a way forward that works for them, meaning in this context I become the meaningful person to them to enable them to make better decisions for their challenges in their work and their career.
So stepping back to the context of ADHD decision making as a whole, I haven’t been through every one of the 60-odd papers covered in the meta-analysis but I imagine a lot of study designs have been missing this meaningful person approach or the effect of environment-leadership congruency. And that doesn’t mean they’re bad studies, but this is just a fact of life. When we generalise things to answer a big picture question, we end up missing a lot of the nuance, and often that nuance is important.
And when it comes down to it, we know that stereotyping based on generalisations is bad. That’s why we have laws that prevent people from discriminating. Because just because studies indicate that people with ADHD are on average worse at making decisions doesn’t mean that the ADHDer in front of you going for a leadership position will be bad at making decisions. Your environment might be the perfect fit for them to thrive and chances are they’ll find their meaningful person along the way as well - it might even end up being you.
And if you’re an ADHD leader who needs a meaningful person to help them with making their decisions, the leadership coaching I offer is perfect for this. Head on over to ttncoaching.com to find out more and get in touch so we can chat about what that might look like for you.
If this resonates with you and feel you would be interested in talking to an adhd and autism-friendly coach, feel free to get in touch. If you’re looking for more blog posts, you can find them here.
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