Why AuDHD (ADHD & Autistic) Leaders Struggle to Delegate
You’ve been promoted as recognition of your skills. You’re highly competent, collaborative and have all the qualities that mean you’re more than capable of succeeding in your new, more senior role. And yet, while on paper you should be thriving, the reality looks a little different.
The work is getting done still, of course, but you’re not having the bigger picture impact you expected. More than anything you’re exhausted from keeping things going and absorbing the extra responsibility both.
You probably don’t need me to tell you the answer to why you’re struggling because it’s probably something you know deep down. But it means relinquishing control over the very work you got promoted for excelling at.
So let’s talk about why delegation is so difficult for AuDHD leaders and how to stop it from feeling like yet another thing we’re struggling with.
This was the longest stock todo list image I could find and let’s face it, this is way too short to be an AuDHDer’s
Why delegating feels so foreign for AuDHD leaders
You’re not struggling to delegate because you’re lacking in any way. It’s actually a side effect of your success. You were promoted because you were good at your role, knew what it meant to move things forward and were exceptional at getting things over the line. You probably derived fulfillment from achieving these things and the promotion is, to a certain extent, a recognition of your accomplishments. But sometimes the things that we’re best at can, perversely, start working against us instead.
This isn’t just true of individual contributors, it happens at all levels of leadership. I’ve worked with managers of managers who made it a core part of their role to have an open door policy so that the boots on the ground staff could have access to their support if they really needed it. As a second level manager, this was achievable. Yes, their workload was intense but they knew how important it was to be there for their people. When they got promoted again? Suddenly something that had been a vital part of their role became untenable.
Whether the thing you excel at is producing reporting or supporting each individual in your department, the problem comes from how you’ve come to define what success looks like. It’s a definition that was reinforced; you performed to a high standard in your prior role and were rewarded for it. But the problem comes when you measure your performance at this higher level of seniority in the exact same way.
Delegation feels so hard because it’s giving up control over the work that you’ve come to recognise as your definition of success. So let’s talk about how to reshape that definition of success so that delegation doesn’t feel like an opposing ask.
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Losing Visibility
Part of the reason why it’s hard to embrace a new definition of success is because it often doesn’t look as tangible. If your job is to hit a sales target each month, success is literally a number in a spreadsheet. That number gets reported to your stakeholders and you get celebrated for reaching your goals.
If you now manage the team, you still have a number in a spreadsheet, this time it’s the combined number for the whole team, but there’s a subtle nuance. It’s not your job to reach that number. It’s to enable your team to get there.
Even in the sales example there is still a measurable marker of success but it’s not always that way. Leading a messy system change can take years with a long tail of reconciliation after the main work is completed. In these cases there’s no triumphant end you can point to that really fulfils that sense of achievement. It’s all a lot more nebulous. You can see why for someone who gets a strong sense of achievement from measurable progress, the temptation is there to hang onto the criteria you had before.
It's easy to get stuck there because the work you were doing still needs to get done so one of the challenges many of my clients have with delegating it is the loss of visibility. When they were the one pushing it forward, their stakeholders could see their contribution clearly. If they hand it over to someone else, they lose that visibility.
So here is a key distinction: You don’t need to be directly visible for that work. You want to be visible for your leadership instead.
Your peers and those more senior than you already understand this. They’ve made the transition themselves. They don’t need to see you personally doing the work to know that you’re contributing. Your visibility to them comes through the ease at which they work with your people, all driven by the problems you anticipate, the barriers you remove, the decisions you make and the results you achieve.
And for the people beneath you, what’s more effective? Being in the trenches with them or clearing the path ahead so it feels like less of a battle?
Leading your team doesn’t mean suffering with them. It means enabling them to do their best.
Thought clearing the path was a nicer metaphor to visualise than “in the trenches”.
It’s Quicker To Do It Myself
Part of why it’s so hard to give up control is because you work to a high standard. So often when it comes to a task you could delegate, particularly if it’s a high pressure situation, it can feel like the right thing to do to just get it done quickly yourself. However, the mistake here is sacrificing the long term performance for the sake of the short term.
Enabling your team to do their best isn’t just about the immediate day to day results. It’s about the team’s long term performance. Every time you pick up a task you could have delegated, you take away an opportunity for the person you would have delegated it to to grow.
And yes, I acknowledge that sometimes things are just that urgent and sometimes it is just a case of muck in and get it done. But if that becomes your modus operandi, you’re not actually leading your team, you’re just doing the work for them.
This is also a challenge because it runs counter to qualities you’ve probably prided yourself on in the past. Efficiency is generally a trait that is rewarded in the workplace. But as a leader you have to think of efficiency on a different scale, optimising between the long term and the short term to get things done.
One client I worked with created a motto for this. “What’s the long game?” She used it in moments where she felt the need to respond too fast, or to rush in and save a situation that she was worried might not go perfectly to plan. But even if saving your team comes from good intentions, it still prioritises the short term at the expense of the long term.
Sometimes the best way to enable your team is to give them the autonomy to be able to save themselves.
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I Don’t Trust Them To Do The Job Well Enough
But even if you recognise that your job is to enable your team, that your job is to give them opportunities for growth and to learn, that can still mean you don’t feel capable of delegating and the reason can be very simple: You don’t think they’re ready for it yet. You might be comfortable delegating small tasks but for anything important, you just don’t trust that they can do the job well enough yet.
This is actually one of the most interesting parts of working with AuDHD leaders: We tend to get stuck in black and white thinking without realising it. In this case it’s either: I delegate the task and risk them failing at it, or I do it myself and make sure it gets done. When phrased like that, it’s a no win situation.
But the possibilities open up when you challenge an AuDHD leader to find what’s in the middle. Because delegation doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It can be delegating areas within a larger project or if that doesn’t even feel possible, it can be delegating project stages.
In fact a great way to tackle the situation when you don’t think you can trust them to delegate a whole project or project stage is to delegate the plan instead. This can be an excellent first step because if you’re right and they do a bad job then it’s harmless. The plan just gets thrown away and you do what you were going to do anyway, just with the knowledge that they are not yet ready and you might need a different plan to prepare them.
The more likely outcome though is that it’s probably going to be a plan that somewhat works. That gives you a starting point at least and also gives you vital information about that person’s capabilities. In all likelihood, you’ll probably be able to trust them more than you originally thought, which is great news for being able to delegate in the future. It also gives you an opportunity to work through the plan with them and help them grow into the readiness that you want them to have. It just requires running an experiment.
Designing experiments is something I do a lot with my clients. It’s a useful way of gathering information in order to make better decisions without taking too great a risk.
How do I Learn to Delegate?
Like with anything that requires a step outside of our comfort zone, the answer isn’t with big leaps. Part of the reason AuDHDers make such great leaders is because they can see so many paths ahead and a big delegation you don’t feel ready for is only going to create anxiety from all the ways it can go wrong.
The best way to learn to delegate is therefore bit by bit. In baby steps. One person at a time, one project at a time, one stage at a time, running controlled experiments with outcomes you can observe to continue refining your strategy.
Along the way, if you encounter resistance from yourself when it comes to delegating, it’s useful to stop and ask yourself the questions:
Am I worried about losing visibility?
Am I thinking about the long game?
Is it that I don’t trust this person?
By working through the answer to those questions, it usually reveals the next area you need to work through to make this possible.
This post was a little bit of a departure from the usual format so I’d love to hear feedback and questions at leigh@ttncoaching.com. If you find yourself struggling with a similar transition, whether it’s delegation, impostor syndrome or something else holding you back, then this might be something I can help with. I’ve coached dozens of neurodivergent leaders at all levels of seniority to overcome their leadership challenges. Get in contact and we can discuss your unique situation.
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