How to Turn Neurodivergent ‘Challenges’ Into Leadership Superpowers

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Hannah Clark: I am not sure if this will surprise you, but ADHD is overrepresented among product people, and particularly leaders. And the more we learn about the common traits of ADHD, the more it makes sense. ADHD is correlated with strategic, big picture thinking, exceptional problem solving skills, charisma, and high levels of comfort in complex and ambiguous situations. Sounds like someone you know, right? But while all these traits tend to steer people with ADHD into product management and leadership roles, these amazing gifts come at a cost that can erode our productivity, confidence, and wellbeing.

My guest today is Frankie Berkoben, an Executive Coach for Overwhelmed and Often ADHD Leaders in Tech. And I’ll be honest, this interview has been one of the most personally impactful conversations I’ve had in a very long time as someone who lives with ADHD myself. And if you’ve listened this far into the episode, it’s probably safe to assume that you do too. So if that’s you, this episode is going to make you feel so seen and validated while offering practical tactics for working better with ADHD—including the other ADHD brains on your product team. Let’s jump in.

Oh, by the way, we hold conversations like this every week. So, if this sounds interesting to you, why not subscribe? Okay, now let’s jump in.

Welcome back to the Product Manager podcast. I am so excited to be here today with Frankie Berkoben.

Frankie, thank you so much for joining on me, joining me today.

Frankie Berkoben: Oh my gosh, Hannah, I’m so excited to be here.

Hannah Clark: Me too. Almost too excited. Can you tell us first about your background and how you’ve arrived in your current role?

Frankie Berkoben: Gladly. As you mentioned, I’m an executive coach for leaders in tech, so often extremely brilliant, often ADHD or some form of neurodivergent, and navigating this tension between massive potential high capability.

And inconsistent performance. And I come from a background in engineering consulting and I was a classic overachiever academically, and I was fine on the outside, but constantly questioning why it felt so difficult to stay consistent or motivated, like the gold standard is co consistency. And now I coach other people through the shift that I made myself, which is going from trying to fix my brain and seeing me as the problem.

To recognizing a, like a wider perspective that maybe there’s a mismatch in needs and capabilities. And so designing a life that works with my brain rather than trying to be someone and operate differently than I do, that’s what I help other people with. So going from shame, overcompensation, and coping mechanisms that work in the short term, but not in the long term.

To being able to trust my decisions, my, the way I operate, my strengths and my clients include directors, VPs, and C-suites and startups. Many of my clients were at Google Meta, Airbnb, and even the Biden White House. And what I’ve noticed. And this is leading to part of our conversation really, is that the gifted ADHD traits, the kind of twice exceptional high capability, but also sometimes low execution is the same.

Oh, sorry. There were these really strong overlaps between situational performance challenges in stressful leadership positions and permanent challenges with executive functioning. So that’s something that I’ve been really having more conversations about this past year and I’ve expanded my coaching practice.

I don’t just serve neurodivergent leaders because what impacts all of us, some of the time IE when we’re stressed, et cetera, impacts some people IE people with ADHD or executive functioning challenges all of the time. So it’s the concept of universal design. If I give you plenty to work with there.

Hannah Clark: Absolutely. And yeah I’m already feeling like I might end up getting a little emotional during this conversation because this is a topic that is so near to my heart, even nearer to my brain as somebody who was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 20 years old. And it completely changed the trajectory of my life, my career for the better.

But it’s also an ongoing, I think for most folks who are neurodivergent or who have ADHD or some other kind of difference. That there is an ongoing journey to manage what that looks like for you in your career. And yeah it’s just like a constant thing that, that’s interesting to learn about, both from the perspective of someone who might be neurodivergent, whether or not they know it.

And for those of us who are working with neuro divergent people and trying to understand better what their patterns are and the reasons why that inconsistency might be manifesting in performance. So anyway, to kick us off, let’s talk a little bit about some specific examples. What are some traits that you see that are connect the dots between, these, what we see as strengths of having ADHD or that we kinda associate with product leadership, as well as the sort of yin and yang, like the challenges that kind of come along with those things?

Frankie Berkoben: Yeah. Let’s focus more on the strengths to start off with and then the challenges will inevitably pop up because we have a negativity bias, as problem solvers. Really? So what I see in terms of like really exceptional product thinkers and leaders is that they’re interdisciplinary systems thinkers.

They are capable of putting themselves in other people’s shoes and behind their glasses, to see from multiple different lenses and to be zoomed out in a way that you can see the big picture. You can see how things are interconnected. And there’s like a real richness and nuance and ability to hold that complexity too, of seeing everything everywhere all at once.

But being able to also see the patterns in it and seeing so that’s one thing is the interdisciplinary systems thinking rather than one narrow silo or niche or one single perspective, call that stakeholder empathy, call it system thinking like there’s a lot there. There’s also the really high emotional intelligence.

Commonality is not necessarily prescriptive and it is tied to empathy, but it’s also around communication and understanding and like having a spidey sense for what’s going on for other people or how a user might be experiencing something that you know, so that getting into people’s stories.

Without getting flooded by them is part of that. And I mentioned, comfortable with complexity, like seeing the big picture, but being comfortable also getting into details when necessary. So often extremely strategic but able to mess around in the details too. Also, there’s this really compelling presence, the, you might call it charisma.

Or, influence without authority or any of those sort of buzz phrases is, when you believe in something, when you see connections other people don’t. When you care about the people involved with that, high empathy and intelligence, the emotional intelligence, it means that you are able to paint a picture and tell stories that bring people on board.

So it’s that emotional in depth intelligence. People respond with emotion rather than they respond to facts. So that often comes in.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, that all resonates deeply. I don’t wanna say that’s an exact profile of me, but I definitely identify with many of the themes there. And I see that also in some of yeah I feel like specifically ADHD, I can’t speak to all Night Neurodivergence, but it’s a not so secret society in which a lot of us recognize some of these traits and others intuitively.

Yeah they can be such an immense strength. I think a lot of us build our careers based on some of those really amazing strengths, and yet there’s also these challenges that come along with it with executive function. So let’s talk a little bit about executive functioning. First of all, I’ve heard you describe it as the brain’s C-suite, which I think very cute.

How would you describe, what is executive functioning and what are some of those invisible differences that impact how neurodivergent and neurotypical people often operate in the workplace?

Frankie Berkoben: Yeah, executive functioning. There are plenty of different definitions for it, and it’s not always clear, but an operational definition is it’s the set of cognitive processes in your prefrontal cortex that help us execute executive functioning.

Translating intent into action. And it’s the ability to zoom out, figure out what your needs might be to ideate and problem solve, like how to get those needs met. It includes prioritizing planning, task initiation time and energy management, or regulating your focus and attention and the awareness of enables us to course correct too.

And executive functions are often. Talked about in either early childhood contexts or deficit based contexts such as remedial academic coaching or disability accommodations, and really only when something is going wrong. But, and this is what I care really strongly about, is to bring this concept and an understanding and awareness of what executive functions are and how they vary because they are context dependent.

And knowing how they vary for all humans. When we’re tired, when we’re stressed, when we’re, when we’re sick. Like all these things are impaired situationally or temporarily. And knowing how the neurodivergent population has managed to mitigate some of these things in a more permanent or temporary way can really help all of us up level in terms of performance and in many ways.

You can think about your, the executive functions as your brain’s PM too, like your, like triaging requests and allocating resources and managing stakeholders. Sometimes internal, like we have competing priorities too and, adjusting our course and strategy and regarding, the second part of that question about invisible differences that impact.

How neurodivergent and neuron normative people operate. That’s a really hard question to answer ’cause it presumes that there are differences. What impacts some people all of the time impacts all of us some of the time. And what makes ADHD and executive functioning challenges so relatable is because we all experience them to some degree or another.

And it is no secret that we’re living in an increasingly stressful, volatile, ambiguous, complex world, and we’re close to our threshold of what we can manage at any given time, whether it’s the sheer amount of data and information that we’re trying to cram into our heads, or the speed at which we’re expected to switch tasks and things like that.

So I think that the invisible differences are really just about intensity and persistence of some of these things. If analysis paralysis is something that only impacts you on a Friday afternoon or the after the end of the long week rather than every single day from the moment you get up to the moment you go to bed, then your tactics are gonna be different.

Your awareness and suggestions and expectations of what will or won’t work, and therefore the value judgments that you place on all the people who aren’t able to overcome more pervasive analysis paralysis are slightly different. So it’s more to do with how often and how much does this impact rather than does this impact you at all?

Hannah Clark: I’m already really appreciating the nuance of these responses because when I think about myself as an interviewer, especially, sorry, this is like a little meta moment, but when I think about, sitting down to write interview questions for something, I often will think of a question and I feel like the question’s often pointing to a very specific or direct answer.

And what I really appreciate about this, that I really recognize as a trait in ADHD folks is that there’s. It’s always an, it depends. There’s always such a vast gray area to explore. So I appreciate, and I think this might be a theme throughout as I’m asking you things that there is so much a gray area that I think is an un.

Maybe an under-discussed strength of ADHD is to be able to really interpret and kinda expand a situation and think, oh, it’s not really black or white, or, there’s not really one specific answer or one way to describe this situation. It’s very contextual. It’s, and. All these different factors make us very good leaders in that we’re able to identify the strengths of the people and the resources around us and make a judgment call based on all of these things in combination, rather than this is uniformly a good or bad thing based on, prior data that’s not really relevant to this situation.

So anyway, this is an aside because I’m recognizing and I really appreciate being able to dive into these questions in a more nuanced fashion. But anyway, moving along, ’cause I could, I feel like all of these questions could be their own podcast. Speaking of resource allocation issues, when we think about executive functioning challenges and trying to reframe some of those challenges as away from this idea of it being a personal failing ’cause I think that, I think one of the things that we often will struggle with, which kind of comes at the crux of this conversation, is trying to step away from taking some of those challenges personally and finding ways to be constructive about addressing them.

So when you think about how you approach dealing with clients and reframing that mindset, how do you kind of position that change in mindset around taking away that, feeling of how you function is your fault, and thinking about it more in terms of, how do you frame it in a way that’s constructive and that helps us to seek and balance our, what our needs are and how to address them.

Frankie Berkoben: There are two things. So first we start with. A lot of high performers and a lot of leaders who are extremely capable but have inconsistent follow through for whatever reason, are very hard on themselves. So busting down the walls of self-judgment that are often seen as necessary to push and to achieve, and to provide the business case and the ROI for self-compassion and not being a jerk to yourself.

And what’s possible when you work with, rather than trying to force yourself to be someone or something that you are not. So there’s the self-compassion piece, first of all, and the analogy that really resonates with a lot of people is there’s this sense of being a square peg, trying to fit into a round hole.

I think of it actually more as a star shaped peg where we have. Amazing. Like we’re a lot in many areas. If if you do a, an assessment, you’ll have a spiky strengths profile, either all or nothing in different areas, often known as a spiky strengths profile. So you’re a star shaped peg, tried to fit into a round hole, and some places you are too much.

Your most brilliant attributes may be seen as threatening. Or as too much or not necessary. You’re like, you’re delivering a Ferrari when what we need is a some form of Toyota, or there’s other areas where you are not meeting the bare minimum, and that might be around follow through and administrative tasks or some of the things that are reliant on memory and doggedness and willpower and just like getting through them.

And so how do you fit a square shaped peg into a round hole? What are the options? You sand down pieces of a peg or you stretch pieces of it to fit, or maybe you nudge the environment. Maybe we adjust the environment. So there’s, it’s in order to sparkle and to shine, and for your strengths to be not only tolerated, but acknowledged and celebrated that it’s not just about changing the peg, but it’s about changing the whole.

So it’s not just the individual. Also the environment and conversations need to happen about whether that is something that either party can do, and it doesn’t have to be just about, say, disability accommodations, because what we’ve noticed in the concept of universal design is that if you design for the edge cases and remove friction points for edge cases, often that will improve outcomes and experiences for people in the middle of the bell curve too.

So having a more flexible working environment, which accommodates executive functioning challenges and variability and smooths removes the friction, helps everybody. So I would say the scars shaped peg round hole also helps you see, oh, I’m, maybe I wasn’t meant to be here, or in order to be here, these are my needs that need to be met.

And to be here, I need to cut off the thing that makes me if I need to file away or hide or even masking, hiding or code switching in order to fit in. That is a huge emotional load to bear day in and day out, as well as cognitive load. So then positions it as a fit issue rather than a deficiency.

Hannah Clark: This is an interesting question too, because I feel like, as you mentioned, we’re in an increasingly volatile environment. Whether that’s, when we think about the business landscape or the political landscape, or just the global landscape, there are so many different things that we’re just simultaneously trying to compute and manage at the same time.

Along with that, our environments are also shifting around us. So I can see there being many instances in which an environment that felt like a really snug fit at one point has now itself changed at the times, and there can be this disconnect between. What we’re able to bring to the table or feeling overloaded by the speed of change or by the demands that change management might have on a person.

And then the, the trying to reconcile that with how the environment has changed and whether or not those supports still exist for you or whether that fit still is there. I feel that there’s a lot of dissonance happening around us in which we’re really feeling that additional pressure of, I want to rise to the occasion because that’s.

How I identify myself, how I feel about myself, and yet it’s increasingly more difficult to interpret like, how do I do that? And is that something that’s within my grasp? So yeah, this is, I think this is another kind of one of those gray area situations to interpret that. It’s it’s not just that we’re not alone, and it’s not just that we may not be a fit for the environment, but that all of our environments are inherently changing and that this is a time, I think that’s especially challenging not just for people who have ADHD but for all of us who are trying to reconcile like our existing habits and our skill sets with this world that we’re in. So this is, this is an interesting kind of tangent to to get into.

Frankie Berkoben: Yeah. So we’re evolving as well. Our awareness evolves and something that I do see a lot is that for people who are recently diagnosed with ADHD.

The awareness of what this actually means and the awareness of what they no longer have to tolerate in terms of, oh, I don’t have to do it a certain way. There is a way that works for me that I can do. And so there’s a strong overlap at one point in time between your needs and the envir, what the environment can give, but it may shift.

So there’s no longer an overlap in the Venn diagram as either your awareness of what your needs actually are. They may have been the same all along, but maybe your needs have changed, your awareness has changed, or your needs themselves have changed. You’re in a different position. Lots of people like are going through additional caregiving responsibilities with elder care and also childcare, especially towards like senior leadership positions.

So there’s also a change in your environments, which means, yeah, a difference in your needs. Even if the organization has remained the same. So you’re right, like the shades of gray or even between black and white, there are many colors. It doesn’t have to be gray.

Hannah Clark: Yeah. Yeah. I suppose that’s true. But yeah I think very validating to hear that said out loud that.

There are many ways that our environments can change and that, our feeling overwhelmed as we attempt to meet them isn’t necessarily a personal feeling. It’s a, as a part of the evolution that I think all of us are trying to endure. At the same time, I do wanna shift gears a little bit towards a topic that I think is really fascinating, which is systems thinking.

We just had a great conversation with Cheryl Kaba, who’s the author of closing the Loop Systems, thinking for Designers. It really reminded me of a conversation that I’d had with you prior about systems thinking being something that tends to be, not necessarily an inherent trait of ADHD people, but it seems to be a lot more present among those who have an ADHD kind of way of thinking.

And I really believe in that as it being a real strength. And also something that kind of, to your point earlier about it being a little bit different from some of the more linear ways of thinking, can. Really effectively leverage and to really be able to bring people into the story that you are able to tell effectively, inconsistently.

So how would you describe that thought process? Let’s assume that we’ve got a listener who is very linear in their way of thinking. How would you describe that kind of more nuanced systems thinking or I think you had some other words for it. And are there any ways that you’ve seen this work in action of how people have been able to leverage this, or maybe clients have been able to leverage this way of thinking in their organizations?

Frankie Berkoben: It’s the big picture, seeing the big picture, the perspective, it’s multiple dimensions, multiple factors, multiple axes simultaneously. It’s not just a two by two. And it’s seeing interdependencies, being able to think from first principles. Seeing nodes in a system and then how they’re connected and being able to interpolate, not just extrapolate, but in multiple different layers and complexities.

You can see emergent patterns rather than what’s in front of you. So it often looks like seeing risks or consequences, or even possibilities that are two or three orders separated from what is right in front. Especially when it comes to long-term strategic thinking. This is a real asset when it comes to, in the moment, get stuff done.

That can provide a lot of friction. There are two other aspects. One is the why and the intuitive piece, so I’ll go with the why first. Understanding the why. Is essential for many of the clients that I work with who identify as systems thinkers. It’s understanding well within all of this, what exactly are we trying to do, because it can be very overwhelming to see everything ever all at once and how it’s interconnected on different timescales and different dimensions, and that propensity towards diversity of thought and and perspective can also leave you spinning. So having a clear why that is, is essential there. And so advocating for that or having that provided is a way to work with the differences and people, how people think. There’s also the intuition. This is to do with different processing modalities, how we take in and internalize, and then communicate and socialize information that when we’re communicating with others, often it’s verbal.

Communicating verbally is a form of linear communication because there’s a beginning and a middle and an end of a sentence. Ideally, if what you’re seeing is multidimensional or how you’re understanding it is maybe doesn’t lend itself to one. Linear sentence or communicating, conveying in words. There are different types of communication that have to happen, but also it’s a felt sense or it’s a visual and different people experience it differently.

It may be like a spatial thing, and so the challenge, the friction point is often trying to translate. This nonverbal understanding into words so that other people can come along with you so that other people see what you’re seeing. Other people feel what you’re feeling. Other people understand what you understand.

So there’s a translation element there, which takes time too. So effective ways for systems thinkers to leverage this power of thinking. Only about 25% of the world’s population are probably systems thinkers or network thinkers or global thinkers in terms of seeing the interconnectedness of things is conveying, like narrating their thinking, saying, here’s what I’m seeing.

Here’s the downstream risk, here’s the trade off I’m seeing among other things. And so using visual metaphors. For visual artifacts, systems, maps, and diagrams. As I said, we have visual metaphors also really help storytelling too, if there’s an analogy, is very helpful ’cause it helps open up what can be tunnel vision for linear thinkers who are getting things done and then they’re not distracted, they’re not seeing what’s beyond the scope of their focus.

Is helping put that into context. So ideally there is a yin and yang between operators and doers and strategists and thinkers, and there are different time skills on which people work. And so the people that have been most effective, the clients that I’ve worked with that have been most effective at communicating this, have learned to ask to slow things down so that they get to the why.

Rather than jumping straight into the solution, I need the big picture before I can jump into the details. They leverage other forms of communication and mapping, so visual mapping and metaphors and then also the communicating and narrating their thinking to provide context for what comes to them intuitively.

Hannah Clark: One thing that jumps to mind when you mentioned, these nodes of thinking is this, I think almost stereotypical notion of an ADHD person trying to tell you a story about something that happened in their day. Invariably, it starts the way that any story starts and then it begins to bounce into these micro tangents that to the person telling the story adds rich context to help you understand exactly, why is this person in the story relevant?

Why is this thing that happened three weeks ago relevant to the story that I’m telling from today? And there’s all of these little things that pop up in the conversation that are very much a part of the system that the person is trying to communicate to you, which is really, but. Sometimes to a listener, it can be so overwhelming to try and digest and download all of these micro tangents.

That seemed to be completely irrelevant to what the person’s trying to communicate. And so I think therein is that frustration of trying to communicate all of this rich context and information and how these things are interlinked without overwhelming the listener and overwhelming the person who you’re trying to communicate all of it to.

And so I, I can really appreciate this idea of using metaphors is something that I’ve really glommed onto. I think a lot of folks have called me up for being a little bit over the top with my metaphors. Also using these kind of visual aids to be able to help people follow your train of thought without either of you getting lost.

So yeah, I really endorse, maybe overly endorse those tools. But yes I think that these are some of the really effective ways that people can leverage these strengths and use organizations. One, one of the things I think I’m interested in exploring is how do we manage. The desire to communicate.

As you mentioned, being able to see things maybe a few steps down the line. When we are at a level of influence that isn’t, we’re sometimes communicating all this information can almost undermine us. I’m having a hard time articulating this, but I’ve recognized situations throughout my career, especially when I was more junior, when I would feel like I was seeing the logical conclusion of a specific initiative.

That was a misaligned with the objective of the organization and trying to understand, or trying to communicate that to, the leadership that I was, reporting to. And I really felt like there was this judgment of that I was a little loony maybe, or that I was making a mountain out of a molehill or, I just didn’t really feel like I had the gravitas or.

Something wasn’t really clicking with how I was communicating these things, and invariably I was settling into this okay, we’ll just do it your way. And at that point, this is what I wanted to talk about was the why began to detach itself from the mission where the why that I needed in order to be motivated to feel invested and engaged in the work.

Because I didn’t feel like the why that I had in mind was the same why that the or the leadership maybe had in mind. It was really difficult to conjure that same buy-in. So there’s these like disconnects that take place where if you feel you can’t really communicate effectively and get on the same page, it can undermine that sense of why, anyway, this isn’t really a question I’m realizing, but how do you mitigate some of those communication problems?

Frankie Berkoben: Yeah, and there are two things that I’m hearing in what you were saying. One is. Seeing the consequences that nobody else sees and being a whistleblower and being labeled a problem maker, troublemaker, or the naysayer. And what’s often really infuriating is a couple of years down the line, people will be like, that thing that you said, it came to pass.

And you’re like great. But in the moment it’s an unpopular opinion. It’s an uncomfortable truth. People aren’t seeing it the way you are seeing it. And so the communication challenges are, especially if it happens in the moment, is trying to give yourself space to translate into their speak, translate into what they care about and the risk that you see, which you feel as a danger, as a real threat.

And you wanna have it out there, you want it to be said is. So there’s part of regulating your own nervous system so that you give yourself a beat, maybe a minute or so to sketch out what it is you want to say and how you want to say it so that then you can say it and articulate it in a way.

And also developing the courage of not saying everything to not over provide context, to not prove your worth. So that kind of risklessly prioritizing what you are, what you’re communicating. It’s a skill for some of us, it takes more work than others. And then the harder piece that I heard in there too was how heartbreaking it can be when you find out that your why, that you understood the team or the organization to be working towards is not the same according to other people’s view.

And that sense, losing a sense of belonging, losing a sense of purpose, and feeling like. You’re all working together towards the same purpose can be extremely demoralizing, especially when we have interest-based motivation systems. So this is where the role of dopamine and deficient dopamine reuptake, or I’m not a neuroscientist, but where lower effectiveness of dopamine is neurotransmitter shows up.

So people with lower dopamine effectiveness. Are more keyed into interest. The why has to resonate with them individually with their values. And the why can also mean belonging, but not at the expense of integrity. For many people who are more neuron normative or more subtle or grounded or privilege or however it is, but it can just be important space, motivation.

It has to get done and it’s important, therefore it shall get done, and that’s enough for me. It’s critical to have the shared buy-in and to feel like it is shared and that the why resonates for you at this point in time with your awareness of your value schema and needs. I just wanted to reflect that back because even though there wasn’t a question in there, there were two really important points around how we work with information and why it’s so critical to have interest be and why be part of that.

Hannah Clark: I’m seeing that as maybe being maybe a missing piece for a lot of folks who find themselves really stuck in the gridlock of, how is it that I just can’t seem to motivate myself to do the things that I know I’m beholden to do? And when I reflect back at my career and the past roles that I’ve held, I think that’s often where things have gone amiss, is when I felt like.

I no longer felt secure in the sense of what are we trying to accomplish here? What’s the mission? What’s the goal? Where am I headed? Where’s my team headed? And what’s the rallying cry that we can all get behind? That can drive us towards that together. So if we can prescribe anything, that might be one possible diagnostic tool is to evaluate, if you’re struggling with that, maybe there is a disconnect between where is that goal or do you feel that it’s very clear what everybody is trying to achieve and is the path to get there clear to everybody as well.

Yeah, this is interesting. I’m finding some therapeutic, so you mentioned also being comfortable with complexity and I really. Really like that term too. I think this is a very crucial product skill. It’s a crucial life skill, and it’s also huge strength in asset that we bring to teams that we’re part of.

How would you say we can be better leveraging that kind of comfort with complexity in a leadership role specifically? I think this is something that maybe we don’t leverage thoughtfully enough.

Frankie Berkoben: There are several different aspects of this. One is. We crave certainty and we shy away from ambiguity. Like it is one of the things that leads people into black and white thinking and snap judgements and group think too is not hanging out in the not knowing.

So a key piece is to build in norms or space somehow in your processes and in meetings. For ambiguity to be held does both and many truths are possible at once. So it can sound kind of philosophical, but it’s also an essential part of what opens up creative thinking and brainstorming and challenging our assumptions because everybody’s coming in with different assumptions about how things should be or how things are based on their own perspectives and lenses.

Having rituals or norms or procedures that openly hold ambiguity and let people swim around in and add to the pool of shared knowledge. When you have someone who holds complexity easily, that poise can really steady the team from an emotional standpoint. It co regulates. Our nervous systems go down from red Alert to, okay, yeah.

Collectively we’ve got this. So it’s the team effort too. And part of that is, yeah, you do a landscape analysis, like you have time for that. You give individuals, but also, a collective adequate time to map the train, like surface hidden considerations and actually take time to really frame the actual problem rather than what you think the problem should be.

That’s a real asset here. And then encouraging, thinking out loud, specifically narrating, here are the trade-offs. Here’s what I’m thinking. I, if I look at this, then here’s, and again, it’s about threads in a common tapestry rather than jumping to one particular definition of what the problem is and isn’t of what the solution is and isn’t.

And then another part of this is. There are people who are extremely good at strategic thinking and complexity and big picture. They may not be good or skilled at some of the operations and do it work and the execution itself. So having, the whole good idea now you’re in charge, doesn’t always work.

So making sure that there are complimentary strengths because together are stronger.

Hannah Clark: This is reminding me a lot of a conversation I’d had a long time ago with Victoria Coup. We talked about it in the context of the product war room in the types that she identified are similar to what you’re describing here, where she mentioned some people she describes as the Pentagon and others, as the SWAT team and the Pentagon are the very strategic thinkers that really thrive on this idea of being able to solve a complex problem and that kind of that white space in between where we are and where we need to be.

And that is the area where they thrive. And then the SWAT team or the executors are really skilled. At just bringing the energy and dedication and focus needed to really execute on that plan and that you need a combination of both. And I think what I’m hearing here is that it’s important to be cognizant of where people on teams that you’re overseeing or that you’re part of, strengths are.

And, who can you maybe count on to do some of those more really execution focused tasks? And who can you count on to be a little bit more strategic and understanding how to, how does the problem solving piece need to be brought into the fold. And, have, or even understanding and recognizing how your plan to solve that problem needs to work or, how it needs to flow in order to work well.

And yeah I’m seeing echoes of that here that I think is really interesting. This this idea of who, like being aware of the strengths of yourself and others and being able to work together.

Frankie Berkoben: It’s also the difference between systems thinkers and millennia thinkers.

Systems thinkers tend to see big strategy. Linear thinkers tend to be the swap teams. Yeah and there’s also another trait of specifically gifted ADHD folk. So academically or intellectually well gifted in one area, but having challenges in executive functioning, which is that the complex things are easy, but the simple things are difficult.

So there’s an inverse correlation between complexity and difficulty. And most of the population thinks that simple equals easy, therefore, complex equals difficult. So if you are in roles where you have to climb the ladder and you have to excel at simple things, the doing, the execution focus, the tactics, the SWAT team pieces, but your skill is in strategy and in big picture and in complex thinking, and I.

Thinking across domains, then you’re going to be stymied. And so that’s a challenge that a lot of people have had to navigate and can be a great shame in terms of I’m highly capable, but I’m in a position like I’m in a role which doesn’t reward my strengths and is over reliant on things which are inherently more challenging.

So if we’re thinking hierarchical organizations. Where there’s a prove yourself so that you can climb the ladder. A lot of the lower performers in more junior roles could actually be incredible high performers in slightly senior roles. So there’s a structural and systemic challenge there.

That’s something that I do see a lot with gifted ADHD folk.

Hannah Clark: Yeah. I think it’s interesting to be thinking about that even, from the lens of hiring or putting a team together to be, thinking about knowing how, I think, knowing how I execute, what are the supports that are really going to enable the team to do its best work?

Or what kinds of supports might my team be lacking in order to support them to do their best work? So I think it’s interesting to be thinking about that in terms of how can we build teams strategically, not just because of someone’s specific competencies or knowledge in a specific area, but also what, complimentary skills might they bring to an organization or might or where, in the org chart, might their specific skillset best be leveraged.

So it’s, yeah, it’s interesting to think about things that way because when we really think about. What we’re talking about here is how do we really function day in and day out? And so it’s, it’s almost more impactful to be thinking about how do I know myself to operate consistently versus, what skillset do I know in, in more of an abstract context.

Ah, this is so interesting. Since we’re getting to time here, I do want to talk a little bit about your mission, which is bringing frameworks rooted in ADHD into conversations and workplace performance and psychological safety, and some of these really important and also very challenging and nuanced conversations that, like you said, we really need to be having more frequently.

So in your view, Frankie, what would it look like if organizations were being designed more, thinking about this metaphor of the, the star-shaped peg. Designing them for neurodivergent strengths and to accommodate for more diversity and how does, have you seen that in practice? Have you seen that kind of transition take place?

What does that look like?

Frankie Berkoben: Neurodiversity is normal. It just means we have differences in our patterns of thinking and our nervous system responses. And we know we are animals, not robots. So there is so much variability. And executive functioning challenges impact us all, sometimes more than others, to some extent more than others.

So a neuro inclusive workplace is just a human first workplace in many ways, and it’s designing for variability rather than conformity, and knowing that everybody’s capacity fluctuates. And so normalizing that and its flexibility for all and transparency and openness about needs. And this is where a lot of leaders do model that authenticity and transparency and lack of self-judgment around, oh, it’s the end of the day.

I’m not gonna be able to remember that. Would you mind putting that in writing or, it really helps if I had a visual to accompany this slide. To accompany this, it helps me remember better. There’s also, part of that is energy management rather than just time management and the scheduling around cognitive rhythms, deep work versus meetings, not having context switching take things off.

So a lot of companies have no meetings, weeks or no meetings, Fridays or that there are certain. Stays allocated for certain types of work. And there’s also different ways of engaging with more, like we are not just brains. We have bodies too. Tactile or in-person ways of collaborating or or things like that.

I’m not, sorry, I’m not going to wade into the return to office debate. But it is about making thinking and collaboration more visible. Not just in terms of endless slack pings, but maybe a shared source of visual truth. Visual mapping is so key for alignment and for helping people orient themselves to the big picture or the why and where you are in it.

And so that eliminates a lot of contest switching doubt. Wait, where are we again, like the memory pieces around that. And then also. We’re social creatures too, and having team norms that obviate the need for grit and willpower on an individual basis, and that might be co-working sessions or check-in rituals or shared planning tools that are not just you are having difficulty with this.

You are the one that has to fix this. Like that there’s a collective effort rather than, it’s the onus all being on the individual.

Hannah Clark: I can see all of these really working in tandem and I’ve seen them all individually leveraged in different contexts and those kinds of, especially more collaborative tools to foster a sense of community and shared accountability, I think can be really effective.

More so than we maybe give them credit for in really helping people to feel like they’re really an active part of a machine rather than just, the whole, the pressure and all the burden is on me. Really wish I could keep this conversation going ’cause there’s so much to dig into. But for those who do want to continue the conversation, where can people follow your work online?

Frankie Berkoben: Yeah, I would love to for people to connect with me on LinkedIn. Frankie Berkoben, B-E-R-K-O-B-E-N. Frankie, F-R-A-N-K-I-E, Berkoben. And do send me a DM and let me know what resonated from this conversation. This is a fantastic podcast and as you can tell, Hannah’s a fantastic host and this has been a wonderful conversation to have.

So just DM me and let me know what resonated specifically.

Hannah Clark: Thank you so much for joining me. It has been an absolute pleasure.

Frankie Berkoben: Thank you so much.

Hannah Clark: Thanks for listening in. For more great insights, how-to guides and tool reviews, subscribe to our newsletter at theproductmanager.com/subscribe. You can hear more conversations like this by subscribing to The CPO Club wherever you get your podcasts.