I'll be straight with you from the start. I'm not a C-level or a head of anything, and I've never run a big team. But building Loops means hearing from people who do.
One thing comes up so often it's become impossible to miss. Someone who was brilliant at the actual work, who stepped up to lead and then found that within a few months something had quietly gone wrong. Not the vision. Not the big calls. Everything around them. The follow-ups they meant to make, the delegated work they forgot to check on, the feedback they kept putting off, the meeting they walked into cold. Before an ADHD diagnosis, this was simply read as failing at leadership.
They usually have it backwards. They aren't failing at leadership. They're failing at the invisible machine that leadership actually runs on.
I can do the work. I just can't reliably run the system around the work.
In this post I want to go through why this happens, what the research says about it, and why it hits leaders with ADHD the hardest. Then I'll tell you what we did about it at Loops.
Leadership leans almost entirely on executive functions. Planning, monitoring, prioritising, delegating, holding the whole picture in mind and sustaining follow-through across a lot of people at once. Those are exactly the functions ADHD most consistently disrupts.
One workplace study spells it out clearly. Executive-function deficits create problems with time management, organisation, multitasking, setting priorities, decision-making, communication and conflict resolution, all of which are the daily texture of management.
And in the same study, self-management to time and self-organisation were the strongest links between ADHD and job burnout. Leadership isn't just hard with ADHD. It's a stress test aimed squarely at the weak points.
The bit people imagine being hard, the strategy and the big ideas, is rarely where it breaks. Leaders with ADHD are very good at that. It's the maintenance underneath that breaks.
Tracking who's doing what and when to check in. Preparing for and recovering from meetings. Giving regular feedback. Noticing what's slipped before it becomes a fire. This work is low in novelty, high in importance, and almost never urgent until it's already overdue.
That's the worst possible combination for an ADHD brain.
Ramsay's clinical work describes adults with ADHD who know exactly what they should do, and understand the cost of not doing it, and still can't reliably execute the plan. That intention-to-action gap barely shows when the work is your own and interesting. But it's brutal when the work is a dozen unstimulating follow-ups that only you are responsible for remembering.
There's a cruel twist in how this plays out.
Adult ADHD involves impaired time perception and steep delay discounting, which means immediate, visible problems feel far more compelling than slow-burn ones. So the crisis gets handled superbly, while the quiet, anticipatory work, the delegation, the succession planning, the steady culture-building, keeps getting postponed until it's urgent too. Which is usually too late.
There's even a direct leadership signal in the research. A 2018 study found leaders' ADHD symptoms were associated with more passive leadership, and that the link ran through daytime sleepiness. That's oddly hopeful, because it means the path from symptoms to struggle runs partly through things you can change, like sleep, fatigue and how engaging the work feels. For a leader who keeps slipping, sleep isn't a side issue. It's central.
Here's the part almost nobody warns you about.
A systematic review of emotion dysregulation in adults with ADHD found more frequent use of unhelpful emotion-regulation strategies and consistently lower emotion-regulation scores than in people without ADHD.
In leadership, that shows up as overreacting to criticism, avoiding a hard conversation, or struggling to steady yourself after conflict.
A difficult conversation that costs a peer an afternoon can cost an ADHDer the whole day, and some of the next one.
Nobody sees that cost, so nobody accounts for it. But it's real, and it accumulates into a kind of debt that makes the hard parts of the role heavier over time.
For a while, you can hold all of this together by force.
Case studies of professionally successful adults with ADHD describe compensation strategies that are conscious, energy-demanding and time-consuming. You can run on those for years. Longer hours, everything kept in your head, personally rescuing whatever's failing.
The trouble is that leadership scales the invisible work upwards and the compensation eventually breaks. What looks from the outside like high drive is often a brittle operating model with no slack in it. Work longer, mask harder, hold it all in your head, stay late to patch the gaps, then burn out or become inconsistent. It's a cycle, and it's exhausting.
I want to be fair, because ADHD does bring genuine strengths to leadership. A systematic review of ADHD in employment lists creativity, rapid task-switching, hyperfocus, energy and empathy among them.
But those strengths are highly context-dependent.
In a well-designed role with good support, they look like decisive, energising, strategic leadership. In a badly designed one, the very same profile turns into firefighting, impulsive communication and unreliable follow-up. The strengths are real. They just need the right container to become an asset rather than a liability.
So the usual advice, be more disciplined and get more organised, completely misses the point.
NICE recommends holistic plans that address occupational needs, not willpower. Medication can genuinely help you focus, but it doesn't build a delegation system or an emotionally safe feedback habit for you. And the support that would do that barely exists. A 2022 systematic review of ADHD support at work pulled together 143 studies and found most looked at medication, with workplace-specific design still thin on the ground.
The context matters as much as the individual.
A study of what makes work sustainable for adults with ADHD found that ADHD at work becomes a resource when it's met with trust and practical support, and a liability when it's met with scrutiny. Person-environment fit, in other words, is the big lever. Existing support is still far better at treating symptoms than at helping someone actually run a leadership role. That gap is the whole opportunity, and it's where we decided to build something.
Loops is our answer to this specific problem. At its core, Loops is a daily coaching app for people with ADHD, and for leaders, it's built to make the invisible maintenance work visible and doable.
It can give you clear daily leadership actions, a follow-up to make, a one-to-one to prepare for, a check-in to schedule, so the steady work happens before it becomes a fire. It coaches you through the parts that cost the most, the difficult conversation and the recovery afterwards. And it's built to resume, not restart, so a bad week doesn't collapse the whole cadence.
There's also the strange loneliness of the role, where you follow up on everyone and nobody follows up on you. So there's one person you trust who gets to see you keep going, and a coach at the point of performance, right before the conversation you've been dreading.
I'm not writing this to sell you anything. I'm writing it because I keep hearing this same machine described by the people Loops is for, and the problem was never them.
If leadership has felt like something you can only just about hold together, you've probably wondered whether you're cut out for it at all. I don't think that's the right question, and the evidence doesn't either.
For most leaders with ADHD, the gap was never ability. You can do the work. What often breaks is the system around the work, and a system is a thing you can build.
You don't need to work harder or become a different kind of person. You need the invisible work made visible, small manageable actions a day, an easy way back in after a hard week, and ideally one person who finally checks in on you. Leadership shouldn't be something you can only sustain by burning yourself down.
Leadership rarely fails for people with ADHD because of the vision or the big decisions. It fails on the invisible system underneath.
Leadership leans almost entirely on executive functions: planning, monitoring, prioritising, delegating, and following through across many people. Those are the functions ADHD most affects, and research shows time management and organisation are the strongest links between ADHD and burnout at work.
The struggle tends to follow a predictable shape:
The maintenance work is low-novelty, high-importance and rarely urgent until it's overdue, which is exactly what an ADHD brain struggles to action. Emotion dysregulation, well evidenced in ADHD, makes feedback and conflict unusually costly. Left unaddressed, the compensation breaks, and you burn out or go inconsistent. The question stops being why the follow-up slipped and becomes whether you belong in the role at all.
The evidence favours external structure and good person-environment fit over trying harder. Medication helps focus but won't build a delegation system for you. What actually helps looks like:
Loops makes the maintenance work of leadership doable. It helps you:
Struggling with the role doesn't mean you're in the wrong one. For most leaders with ADHD, the gap was never ability. You can do the work. What breaks is the system around it, and a system can be built.
You don't need to work harder or be a different person. You need the invisible work made visible, small actions a day, and one person who sees it.
Matt has worked in design and marketing for 14 years and is fascinated by how AI will shape the future of both. Diagnosed with ADHD in his early thirties, he writes and researches the ideas that help him better understand his own brain.
At Loops, Matt helps train the AI coach, speaks with users and shapes the app around how people with ADHD actually think and work. It's the kind of tool he wishes he'd had years before his diagnosis.
Outside work, Matt lives with his wife, dog and cat, grows pine trees and dreams of one day owning a patch of land to plant them on.