Find a therapist to help with ADHD

People with ADHD often can't read the room at work, and the consequences can be career-defining.

The unwritten rules of workplace life are invisible to many ADHD brains, but the penalties are real.

Research shows people with ADHD experience more workplace conflict, bullying, and job loss than their peers.

I can tell you the exact moment I knew I was about to get fired. It was October 2012, and I was working in a call centre in Dublin, cold-calling from a spreadsheet of dead leads, and hoping the person on the other end didn’t pick up. The team worked in a large open-plan office where banter was the order of the day. However, ‘Sheila,’ the HR manager, didn't banter; she corrected people's grammar. She was part HR manager, part grammar police. One day, a coworker brought in a packet of almonds and passed them around, “Anyone want an almond?” he said, pronouncing the ‘L in almond. Sheila’s ears pricked up, “You don’t actually pronounce the ‘L’ in almond, Seamus, it’s pronounced ahm-mond.’ No one wanted to get on the wrong side of HR, so we all dutifully ignored how blindingly irritating Sheila was. Even more so, considering Sheila didn’t have the best grammar herself. One day, she made a common grammatical error you will often hear Irish people make: she said “I seen it’ instead of “I saw it.”

Everyone in the office heard it and silently fumed, knowing we couldn’t point out the error and risk the wrath of Sheila.

“I think you’ll find, it’s actually I saw it, Sheila.”

A hush fell over the office, and we all popped our heads above our monitors to see Sheila’s face turn red. A rash spread over her chest. If it were a cartoon, you would see steam spurting from both ears.

The tension was finally broken by a ripple of laughter that spread across the room. I laughed. Sheila shot me a look, and the eye of Sauron had descended upon me. I knew the second I got that look, I was a goner. I shouldn’t have laughed. Anyone with a bit of sense would have read the situation and known to keep their head down and avoid the wrath of Sheila.

‘It’s like everyone else has been given a rule book on how to behave, and I’m just trying to figure it out as I go along.’

Research shows that people with ADHD often struggle to pick up on the unwritten rules of work, have more impaired relationships with managers, and switch jobs more frequently than people without ADHD. These impairments can all lead to a person feeling bullied or victimised, and in turn being managed out of a workplace for not being a good fit. In my role as Ph.D. researcher into the lived experiences of ADHD women in their careers, a common theme that arises is having interpersonal conflicts in work, being bullied, and not being able to ‘play the corporate game,’ finding workplace dynamics confusing, overwhelming, and chaotic. As one of the participants in my research said; It’s like everyone else has been given a rule book on how to behave, and I’m just trying to figure it out as I go along. Inevitably, the more this happens, the greater the impact on a person’s self-esteem, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of I can’t fit in anywhere—which will be a sentiment familiar to neurodivergent people everywhere.

Problems with reading the room and knowing what to say and when to say it seem to be a common theme in the neurodiverse community. Judy Singer, the researcher who famously coined the term neurodiverse, was inspired to investigate the phenomenon by observing her own parents—in particular, her mother, who she was sure had something seriously wrong with her. Singer describes the lifelong problems her parents experienced due to their inability to, in Singer’s words, act normally.

“My father slaved at low-paid jobs his whole life. My mother spoke four languages and had a university education. Yet, while all my parents’ acquaintances began to prosper, my family remained behind. We couldn’t even raise the money for a television! At the end of the sixties, we were still in our poky, noisy inner city flat.”

"Can’t you be normal for once in your life?"

While Singer's exasperation with her parents was lifelong, she did reach some insights into how the behaviour was not within her mother's control. Thanks to the work of seminal researchers like Judy Singer, we have reached a new level of understanding of how neurodiverse people interact in the workplace, and how best to support them. My own research focuses on how women with ADHD break out of the confines of the 'normal' workforce to forge their own path and set their own parameters of what is a normal working life through entrepreneurship. Perhaps the real question isn't whether people with ADHD can fit into the workplace, but whether the workplace is ready to make room for them.

Find a therapist to help with ADHD

Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

Singer, J. (2017). Neurodiversity, The Birth of an Idea. Kindle e-book. ISBN 978-0-6481547-0-9

Murphy, K., & Barkley, R. A. (1996). Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder adults: Comorbidities and adaptive impairments. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 37(6), 393–401.

Singer, J. (1998). Odd people. The Birth of Community Amongst People on the" Autistic Spectrum". Sydney: University of Technology.

Barkley, R. A., Murphy, K. R., & Fischer, M. (2010). ADHD in adults: What the science says. Guilford Press.

Oscarsson, M., et al. (2022). Stress and work-related mental illness among working adults with ADHD: A qualitative study. BMC Psychiatry, 22, 751.

Schreuer, N., & Dorot, R. (2017). Experiences of employed women with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: A phenomenological study. Work, 56(3), 429–441.

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