Raise ADHD awareness in your workplace this October.
Around 3 to 4% of adults have ADHD, often much higher in some teams. Managing with ADHD, or being managed when you have it, comes with its own challenges.
This October, let's raise awareness of ADHD and how to work with it, not against it.
Four ways to mark the month properly.
A talk for the room, a webinar for the evidence, the research for the record, and a free book for anyone who wants the whole picture.
Free DE&I Briefings
Stop diagnosing character. Start reading the room.
Every October somebody in HR puts up a poster about ADHD awareness. Every November the poster comes down and nothing else changes.
Here is the bit that never makes the poster: most of this is happening to people who have said nothing to anyone. The mask pays the bills, so it stays on. It is the sleepless night before a Monday you can't explain, the comment in a meeting that quietly crucifies you for a week while everyone else has already forgotten it, the drive home rehearsing what you should have said. It is trying so hard to do the thing you can't quite start that the not-starting becomes more exhausting than the task ever was. From the outside it looks like won't. From the inside it has never once felt like won't.
I ran three companies on ADHD I didn't know I had, and for most of that time I was the person masking, not the tribunal case. Nobody sues over a comment that keeps you up at night. You just get quietly worse at trusting the room, and the people around you, the ones in your orbit, get whatever is left of you by the time you get home.
I used to think awareness was the goal. I don't anymore. A poster does not reach someone masking at their desk. What reaches them is somebody, in the room, choosing to read a struggle as a struggle instead of an attitude, before it ever gets as far as a file, a warning, or a resignation nobody saw coming.
Five things about ADHD I wish every manager knew before October ends
Good DE&I training does not stop at getting people to disclose. It asks what you do with them once they have. ADHD is linked, in the research, to faster pattern recognition, higher divergent thinking, and a real edge in creative problem-solving under pressure. Build the processes to draw that out on purpose, and you are not doing anyone a favour. You are force-multiplying a trait most competitors are still filing as a performance issue. Working with it is not hard or disruptive, and it says more about the organisation you actually are than any presentation or culture deck ever will. And if it's the numbers you care about: productivity, engagement, retention, creativity and new ideas all move when people stop spending their energy on masking and start spending it on the work.
The mask pays the bills, so it stays on. Most people with ADHD who are struggling at work have told nobody. Not HR, not their manager, sometimes not their partner. They just get quietly better at performing fine.
A symptom read as a character flaw becomes four words in particular: careless, lazy, aggressive, disrespectful. Say them out loud and notice how personal each one feels, then imagine hearing one of them about a mistake you made while trying harder than anyone in the room knew.
Most people never get as far as a tribunal, or even a disclosure. They just leave, quietly, taking the shame and the knowledge with them, and the exit interview says "new opportunity". The pause that would have kept them costs about ten minutes. Nobody ever gets to take it, because nobody ever finds out in time.
Regulation is contagious in both directions. Regulate the centre and the orbit steadies: the team reads the numbers again instead of the room, and the person you go home to gets more than the leftovers. Dysregulate the centre and everyone downstream pays for it, on a delay, in a currency nobody puts on a spreadsheet.
The questions people actually ask me in October
Why should HR run something in October specifically, rather than whenever?
Because a named month is permission. It gives you a reason on the calendar to talk about something people have been quietly navigating on their own all year, without it looking like a reaction to one difficult case. Use the moment, then don't stop when November arrives.
What should an HR team actually do this month, beyond the poster?
Three things, in order of effort: put a presentation or webinar in front of the whole company so the subject stops being a whisper, brief every manager on the Disclosure Pause so the process is ready before anyone uses it, and read the research so your policy is built on what actually loses and wins cases, not on guesswork.
What's the business case, not just the moral one?
Productivity, engagement, retention and innovation all move when people stop spending their energy on masking and start spending it on the work. ADHD is linked, in the research, to faster pattern recognition and a genuine edge in creative problem-solving; a programme that draws that out is force-multiplying talent your competitors are still filing as a performance issue.
Isn't this just a compliance box-tick?
It is if a poster is all you do. It stops being one the moment a manager reads a symptom as a symptom instead of writing "careless" in a file, which is the actual difference between the organisations that keep their best people and the ones that end up in a tribunal judgment explaining why they didn't.
Fine. What's the one thing to actually do this week, not this year?
The Disclosure Pause. The next time anyone tells you, or hints at, or half-discloses something about how their brain works, stop whatever formal process is moving until you've thought about it in writing. That's it. That's the whole habit, and it's the single cleanest pattern in every one of the 475 judgments I read.
Put the poster up if you want. But this October, do the one thing that's actually free: when someone tells you what's going on in their head, stop the process before it moves.
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