You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (25 page)

Watch Your Intensity Level:
ADD adults can be intense, passionate and single-minded about personal interests. If you’re not careful, you can scare a calmer person to death!

Be cautious when you find yourself discussing one of your favorite subjects or pet peeves. If you find the other person mentally or physically backing off, lighten up! Tell a joke, ask a question or change the subject.

An ADDer can get carried away with a topic because of his intensity. It can also cause a more general problem that pervades the whole relationship. He often overwhelms other people with the ferocity of his friendship. He might shower a friend with sincere but excessive flattery that leaves her feeling embarrassed or wondering if he’s really teasing. As Ken does, he might get physically too close, oblivious
of the other person’s need for space.

Slow Down:
Even if an ADD adult is adept at verbal and nonverbal communication, he can have difficulty maintaining a friendship over the long haul. He doesn’t want to wait for the
natural progression of phases in developing relationships. He may not be attuned to the pacing and gradual easing into involvement, trying to get too close, too fast.

If this is
a problem for you, it may help to keep a diary or calendar that tracks your behavior in friendship-making. Don’t just pick up the phone to call your new acquaintance until you check your journal. Pencil in when you make a contact and jot down notes about the encounter, paying particular attention to the other person’s response. Indicate in your journal a date for your next contact, and don’t call
or drop in before that date!

In the next chapter we move on to the workplace. Although our focus will be on issues of relating and communication, we’ll also do a brief task analysis. We’ll look at some of your
jobs on the job
and offer some suggestions for improving your skills in some of them. We’ll also look at your
relationship to your job
, to help you analyze any failures you may be experiencing. This analysis will include the important question: Are you failing on your job or is your job failing you?

Chapter 7
The Art of Relating: Getting Along on the Job

C
areers can be made or destroyed based on how well we get along with other people on the job. There are elements of both one-to-one relationships and group interactions. The one-to-one relationships of employees aren’t close friendships but require similar maintenance over time. Likewise, the group interactions of employees are different
from social gatherings in that they are ongoing.

In the one-to-one relationships of friendships you can choose the people with whom you’ll share your time and personal involvement. The same is true of the social gatherings you attend—you can choose to skip a party if you aren’t crazy about the people who will be there. But you can’t choose the employees with whom you’ll interact and you can’t
choose the meetings you’ll attend. You have to interact with your coworkers in a variety of settings.

The workplace is a social arena and arguably a political one as well. Success on the job requires good interpersonal relationships and an ability to understand the “politics” within the work setting. These dynamics create some unique problems for an ADDer with shaky communication skills. With
her friends, she can count on a degree of understanding about her ADD. With her colleagues, she has to manage her deficits with great finesse.

As an adult with ADD, your success in the work world is also largely dependent on how well you get along with your job. Because of your particular deficits and differences, you have to carefully build a safety net for your job as you do for the other parts
of your life. Are there some strategies you can use to improve the quality of your work? How can you make your job work for you? Is your job the best match for your particular abilities and disabilities? In this chapter, we’ll expand our discussion to include these specific aspects of job management.

Act III: Getting Along on the Job

Diane

Diane found her niche in sales and quickly became a
top saleswoman. Single-handedly she increased the sales volume of her department after being on the job only a few months. Her hard work and talents were rewarded with large commissions, bonuses and a promotion to the position of Sales Manager.

Three months later, Diane started taking aspirin on a daily basis and considered getting back into therapy. She recently found a crumpled piece of paper
on the floor and is trying to figure out what to do about it. The paper is a caricature of her drawn by one of her salesmen. In the picture she is towering over her sales force, clutching a huge megaphone in both hands. Words are shooting out of the megaphone and raining down like fireworks on her “subjects” below.

Notes: Act III

Diane is a hardworking, energetic and creative ADD woman. She’s
an excellent employee whose performance has been noted and rewarded by her superiors. So what is going wrong for her?

There are probably a number of explanations for the problems Diane is experiencing in her job. The most obvious is that her
managerial skills aren’t as good as her selling skills. Selling a product isn’t the same as selling people on one’s ideas for managing a sales force. Diane’s
social deficits may have caught up with her. Although she rose rapidly to an administrative position, she is learning that staying up there is tricky.

Diane’s impulsivity may play a role in her problems. She is a can-do woman who is used to getting the job done—now! When her salespeople don’t solve problems as fast as she does, she grabs her megaphone and starts issuing directives. She greets
a question about her policies as a hindrance to her sales figures. She can’t understand why some of her employees refuse to work the same fifty or sixty hours she does every week. She rants and raves that she has to do the work or it would never get done.

Synopsis: Act III

The work environment is a minisociety governed by rules formulated to protect the rights and establish the responsibilities
of the people who work there. The relationships in a work environment are affected by the positions people hold, individual personalities and job responsibilities and multiple interpersonal relationships. Although ADD adults may have some unique problems in this work setting, they are only one part of the equation.

Large, complex organizations have a great potential for breakdown. Many people
are part of work relationships and some of them also have ADD or other disabilities. This makes for some very interesting situations! Consider, for example:

The boss who never seems to listen and who asks the impossible of you.

The coworker who doggedly sticks to her job description even when deadlines loom and colleagues are desperate for help. The boss who continually makes his emergency yours.

The coworker who adamantly refuses to take responsibility for a screwup.

There isn’t much you can do about the hidden agendas of fellow employees. If you remember that you’re only one piece of the puzzle, you can view a situation from its proper perspective. When a work relationship unravels, don’t assume that it’s exclusively your fault—or your unreasonable colleague’s. Perhaps she’s struggling
with deficits similar to yours. As an adult with ADD, you should be sensitive to the needs of colleagues who might also have hidden disabilities.

What does all this mean for you? It means you really have your work cut out for you! To be successful in the world of work, you’ll need to review many of the things we’ve talked about in previous sections of this book. Review your inventory and pay
close attention to your balance sheet. It will be an invaluable framework as you begin to develop your management strategies. If Diane paid attention to hers, she might decide to give up the higher pay and executive title to do what she does best—sell products. Let’s take a look at some ideas for dealing with problems in the world of work.

Survival Tips: Act III

Rules, Procedures and Policies

Many ADDers hate to swallow these bitter pills; unfortunately, there’s no way to sweeten them! Unless you own your own company, you will be playing by someone else’s rules.

Much as you may hate your policy handbook, study it anyway. It outlines your company’s system of government and chain of command—such as who reports to whom and areas of individual responsibilities. It’s not a good idea to
leave this homework undone! Get very clear about where you fit within the overall structure, to avoid overstepping your bounds or failing to carry out your responsibilities.

Make Sense of the Rules:
Try to understand their rationale. When you’re away from work, talk with your spouse or a close
friend about them. Make a list of all the policies you disagree with and analyze each of them. Do some
have validity for the organization as a whole even though you personally disagree with them? If so, you may need to bite the bullet and learn to live with them, sigh!

Perhaps you can set up a reward system as a motivating tool. You may decide that not being allowed to listen to rock music in the office is totally unfair. You can’t change the rule, but you can reward yourself for following it
by treating yourself to a favorite tape during your break.

Question the Rules Carefully:
You’ve probably heard the adage “Rules are made to be broken.” We suggest you modify the words slightly: “Rules are made to be changed.” If a rule doesn’t seem to make sense for you individually or for the company as a whole, question it. Make sure your communication skills, particularly your listening skills,
are solidly in place. Think through the rule you’re disputing and approach the appropriate person with your question. And then
listen
.

If you receive the response “because I’m your boss,” you can forget about doing anything beyond swallowing your objections and toeing the line. On the other hand, if your superior offers information you had overlooked, thank her for entertaining your ideas. At
least you’ll have a reading on her as someone who is willing to negotiate. The door will be open for future exchanges.

Sell Your Ideas:
Although it’s unwise to challenge authority at every turn, questioning policies and procedures can be a positive quality. Just don’t move too fast. Keep your impulsivity in check and proceed s-l-o-w-l-y and tactfully. Don’t start shaking things up after you’ve
been on your new job exactly forty-five minutes!

No one in the company will buy your ideas if you are an unknown quantity. First, demonstrate your loyalty and dependability.
Work on building positive relationships. Spend time keeping a low profile and doing what you’re expected to do. Arrive at work on time, take one hour for lunch and not a minute more, and don’t take advantage of your sick
days. After you’ve earned the respect of your superiors and coworkers, you can start making suggestions for change.

If you have a great proposal, try it out on a trusted person in the informal office network to see if it’s workable. She can help you evaluate its merits and confirm that you’ve included all the necessary facts before you formally present it.

Letting the boss think she came up
with your idea is a time-honored method to facilitate change. A carefully conceived proposal that focuses on the benefits for her as an individual and the company as a whole, can also work. Make sure you do your homework first. If you come up with a new system for order processing without bothering to find out that the old one is your boss’s “baby,” you probably won’t be in her good graces!

Unwritten Rules, Procedures and Policies

You won’t find everything you need to know in the company’s policy handbook. Much of the vital information is unwritten and is part of an informal network of office politics. This network is the office grapevine that reflects the complex dynamics of the people who work together. It holds the inside information about the real power structure in an organization.
For instance, a secretary who isn’t officially high on the chain of command may wield enormous power. With detailed knowledge about the company and ready access to the boss, she may have great influence within the company. The real chain of command may operate through her, bypassing the vice president who is simply a figurehead.