What Leaders/Managers Can Learn from Taking Charge of Adult ADHD
Devon ran a strong quarterly planning meeting, everyone left aligned and energized, and then watched the plan quietly dissolve within two weeks because no one, including him, had built a way to track who owed what by when. He prided himself on vision and people skills, but one-on-ones kept surfacing the same complaint: promised feedback never arrived, and action items from meetings evaporated into the next meeting's agenda instead of becoming finished work. His team wasn't lazy or disengaged; the gap was between Devon's intentions in the room and what actually got followed up afterward. His best ideas as a leader were only as good as the structure that caught them once the meeting ended, and that structure was the thing missing.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Why good intentions don't survive the hallway
The distance between deciding something in a meeting and actually executing it later is exactly where executive function lives, and leadership roles stretch that distance further than almost any other job. It's not that a manager doesn't care about a raise request or a project blocker; it's that the intention has to survive hours of context-switching and a packed calendar before it becomes action. Naming this as a structural challenge, not a leadership failing, opens the door to building around it deliberately.
Leaders assume that caring enough about their people will translate into consistent follow-through without any system to catch what's decided.
End every one-on-one and meeting by writing down, in a shared and visible place, the specific next action and its owner before moving to the next thing.
Turning verbal commitments into tracked ones
A leader's word is only as reliable as the system behind it. Externalizing means every commitment made in a meeting, a hallway chat, or a Slack thread gets captured somewhere your team can see and check, not just in your head. This might be a shared action-item tracker or a recurring review of open commitments, but it has to exist outside your memory to survive a busy week.
The tracking system gets skipped during the exact weeks it's needed most, when the calendar is fullest and the temptation to wing it is strongest.
Block fifteen minutes every Friday to review all open commitments from the week and reassign or close each one explicitly.
Rebuilding trust after inconsistency
Team members read inconsistency as unreliability long before they read it as anything else, and repeated dropped follow-through quietly teaches people to stop bringing you their real concerns. Leaders sometimes compensate by overpromising to make up for past gaps, which only deepens the cycle.
Apologizing generically for being disorganized without changing anything specific leaves the team's trust exactly where it was.
When you drop the ball, name the concrete process change you're making, not just an apology, so your team sees a system respond, not just a sentiment.
Structure as a leadership discipline, not a phase
The best leaders don't outgrow the need for systems as they gain seniority, they build sturdier ones, because more responsibility means more commitments competing for the same finite attention. Treating your calendar, task tracker, and follow-up rituals as core leadership infrastructure, revisited and refined continuously, rather than scaffolding to eventually discard, is what lets consistency scale alongside your role instead of collapsing under it.
The instinct to build airtight tracking systems can crowd out the relational repair work your team actually needs after a stretch of inconsistency; a perfect tracker won't undo the trust damage on its own, so pair new structure with an honest, specific conversation about what changed.
Name one thing, honestly
Which commitment from your last team meeting do you genuinely not know the status of right now?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
When you drop the ball, name the concrete process change you're making, not just an apology, so your team sees a system respond, not just a sentiment.