how do I manage someone with poorly controlled ADHD?

A reader writes:

I manage an employee who has admitted that she struggles with ADHD, and unfortunately it’s affecting her work. I could use some advice on how to proceed.

She regularly forgets to clock in and clock out when she works, sometimes missing more than half her clock punches in a pay period. This leaves us struggling to finalize her timecard when it’s due, often having to call her at home on her day off to find out her hours. I’m concerned that her memory of the hours worked a week prior might not be accurate either, so who knows if we’re paying appropriately for the time she actually spent at work.

She often ignores high-priority work that needs to be finished by the end of the day, in favor of random projects that inspire her in the moment. (Think, reorganizing the office storage cabinets, which is not part of her job.) This leads to unnecessary overtime pay when she realizes that she didn’t finish the more important tasks that need to be done before she can go home for the day. Or if she’s not scheduled to work the next day, she’ll leave a half-completed frivolous project on someone else’s desk to deal with, which is understandably irritating to her coworkers.

She also goes so far above-and-beyond on some of her assigned tasks that the work takes three times as long as it should, and we’re back into paying overtime. I think she sees this as excellent quality work, but in reality it’s too much detail, and it takes too long.

Aside from all of the above, she’s a great person to work with. She cares about our mission, she has strong knowledge of our specialty, and she has a fun personality so people enjoy working with her. I’ve seen her do great work and also keep up with the administrative stuff like her timecard before, so I know she can do it. I just need her to do it consistently over the long term.

We’ve had casual conversations about each of these issues, a couple times each. She always improves for a month or two, then slides back into old habits. Two months ago we did a formal verbal coaching, and the improvement only lasted for about six weeks. The next step in our company policy would be a written warning, and eventually escalating to termination if these things don’t improve.

The part I’m struggling with is how much I should work with her to develop strategies around these behaviors, versus explaining expectations and leaving her to figure out how to meet those expectations. Letting her figure it out on her own hasn’t worked well so far, but imposing strict structure feels like micromanaging. Is it appropriate to talk her through the process of creating her own structures to stay focused, or is that veering into therapist territory?

She actually admitted recently that she’s been forgetting to take her ADHD meds, and I can’t help thinking that many of these problems would disappear if she was following her medication plan. I’m not a mental health professional, so I’m trying to stay in my lane, but all of these problematic things she’s doing (or not doing) feel like classic ADHD examples. That said, coaching an employee on how to find ways to remember to take their meds feels potentially inappropriate? Maybe?

I also don’t love the idea of progressive discipline for someone who is genuinely struggling with their mental health. I’d be happy to make appropriate accommodations, but I’m not sure what those would be.

How can I help this employee succeed?

Yeah, you should definitely stay out of coaching her to take her ADHD meds; that would be overstepping in the extreme.

However, it is not micromanaging to see an employee needs better structure to support her and dig into helping her create those structures.

You should also let her know that the problems have become serious ones and could jeopardize her job if she doesn’t get them under control, both because it sounds like that’s true (or will be true at some point if it’s not addressed) and because it will help explain why you’re going to be getting more intensively involved in helping to solve those problems.

You could then say something like, “We’re at the point where we need stronger structures in place to support your work. There are two routes we can take in doing that: I can work closely with you to help figure out and implement systems to do things like ensuring you’re clocking in and out every day and prioritizing work correctly and that we’re on the same page about how long projects should take. Or if you’d like to try coming up with your own systems first, that’s fine too — with the understanding that if I don’t see the improvement we need, I’m going to step in and impose some systems after that.”

If she says she wants to come up with her own systems, you could ask her to think it over and come back to you in a few days with a proposal for what she thinks will work. Or you could skip that and just give her a few weeks to see if what she comes up with is working … but the problems you described are serious enough that there’s an argument for being involved more intensively right now.

A few other things:

– When you give her assignments, set her up for success as much as you can by telling her explicitly how long you expect her to spend on it — e.g., “Please don’t spend more than two hours on this” or “If it looks like you’ll be spending more than two hours on this, come back and check with me first.” That way you’re explaining your expectations ahead of time rather than after the fact.

– Have you told her directly that spending three times longer on projects than she should isn’t “excellent quality work” but in fact a problem that’s lowering the quality of her work overall? If you haven’t, you need to spell that out.

– You should also explicitly name consistency as part of the problem: “When we’ve talked about this in the past, you’ve improved temporarily, but then the problems return. I need you to sustain that improvement going forward — it needs to be consistent, not something that you backslide on once time goes by.” You should also say, “If there are things from me or the company that will help you do that, I’m very open to that — but consistently meeting these expectations is part of the job.”

– Would the company be willing to get her a few sessions with an ADHD coach to help figure out strategies that will work for her? What works well for ADHD brains isn’t always intuitive to people without ADHD (or even to the ADHD-havers themselves), so I’d push hard for that if you can.

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