From Affliction to Asset: A Framework Built From the Wins and the Losses
- dougkatz8
- 1 day ago
- 12 min read
PART 2: Value-maxing as an ADHD Subordinate
This is part two of a four-part series on ADHD, leadership and organizational dynamics.
Part one was about the team — how to add value as a peer, build currency horizontally, and stop performing as a normative version of yourself that was never going to hold. This one moves up. The relationship with the person above you. Same wiring, higher stakes. Because the person above you controls your terrain, your tasking, and your trajectory.
With peers, relationship currency is important. With leaders, it is essential.
I’m not a clinician. Everything here comes from the wiring.
Every relationship runs through value. The currency you build with the people around you — peers, collaborators, stakeholders — determines the latitude you have to operate on your own terms. In a leader-subordinate relationship that dynamic intensifies. The person above you controls your terrain, your tasking, and your trajectory. The currency you build with them isn’t just useful. It’s the difference between being deployed correctly and being plugged into whatever role needs filling.
Keep the ledger positive and your wiring becomes invisible as a deficiency. Performance is the best camouflage there is. But that only works if you’re deployed correctly — and if you’re not burning out chasing approval from someone who never understood how you’re built.
The ledger doesn’t care how hard you worked. It doesn’t care how many walls you ran through or how many times you said yes when you should have said no. It only registers what landed. And for someone wired like me, enormous effort can produce far less than it should — not because the capability wasn’t there, but because the effort was pointed in the wrong direction, at the wrong tasks, for a leader who never asked what you were actually built for.
That’s not a performance problem. That’s a deployment problem. And unlike most deployment problems, this one can be shaped from below — if you understand that relationship currency is the mechanism and value is how you build it.
Everything that follows is in service of that.
I want to tell you about two very different experiences of being led. Not because the contrast is comfortable, but because it illustrates everything about what this relationship can be and what it too often is.
My battalion commander at Fort Carson saw me clearly in a way that I didn’t see myself at the time. He identified that my wiring aligned most strongly with high-variance, field environments — where the chaos was real, the stakes were high, and the ability to hold multiple problems simultaneously and move on all of them was an asset rather than a liability. He didn’t need me to tell him. He saw it. He placed me accordingly. And the ledger stayed positive almost by default because the terrain matched the wiring.
I didn’t fully understand that until years later. It wasn’t until I was in a position to mentor my daughter as she moved through the Coast Guard Academy that I went back and reread my old Officer Evaluation Reports. I read them through a completely different lens — the lens I didn’t have when they were written. What I saw stopped me. My battalion commander knew me better than I knew myself, at least within that military framework. And I realized something that has informed everything I’ve written in this series: I was working on instinct, not on a plan. The results were there. The self-awareness wasn’t. I was succeeding without fully understanding why — which meant I couldn’t replicate it deliberately, and I couldn’t protect myself when the terrain changed.
That’s what this series is trying to give you that I didn’t have then. The framework underneath the instinct.
Corporate America was a different experience entirely.
The leaders I worked for weren’t bad people. Most of them weren’t even bad managers by conventional standards. But the model they operated from wasn’t built around leveraging the individual strengths of the people on their teams. It was built around replication. Do it the way I did it. Follow the framework. Fit the mold. The objective was to fill a role — not to build a dynamic team that leveraged what each person actually brought.
I remember sales leadership at different levels who would tug their ear and point to their mouth. Use this instead of that. Technique over understanding. Script over concept. It was well intentioned and it was completely wrong for how I’m built. Because a high-variance mind doesn’t just need to know what to do differently. It needs to understand why. Give me the concept and I’ll execute it and build around it. Give me a script and I’ll follow it badly and resent it.
My response to that model was a cycle I’m not proud of but I’m willing to name. I took it silently. I tried sincerely. I failed miserably. And I felt a bit resentful. Then the next manager arrived and the cycle repeated.
The problem wasn’t effort. The problem was that I was executing someone else’s model with my wiring and it was never going to fit. The overhead of performing as someone I wasn’t consumed most of what I was actually adding. The value was there. It just never had room to compound.
The first obligation of a subordinate with this wiring is self-knowledge. Not the clinical version — not a checklist of symptoms and accommodations. The operational version. Know where you thrive. Know what burns you out. Know the difference between a task that activates your wiring and one that drains it while producing the illusion of productivity.
That self-knowledge is the foundation of everything else in this piece. Without it you can’t communicate authentically. You can’t shape your own deployment. You can’t build currency deliberately. You’re just reacting — to the role as defined, to the leader’s model, to whatever gets assigned next. And for someone wired like me, reacting without a framework is how you end up taking it silently, trying sincerely, and failing miserably on repeat.
Self-knowledge without boundaries is incomplete. And for someone wired like me, the boundary problem has a specific shape.
People with this wiring are often pleasers. Not by choice — by design. The rejection sensitivity is real and it runs deep. The need to be valued, to be seen as committed, to avoid the discomfort of disappointing the person above you — those aren’t character flaws. They’re features of the wiring. And in a leader-subordinate relationship they create the perfect ingredients for a trap.
The pleasing instinct says yes. The task obsession grabs hold of whatever yes committed to and runs with it. And the rejection sensitivity makes it nearly impossible to go back and say this is too much. All three working together don’t produce dedication. They produce a slow build toward burnout that looks like high performance right up until it doesn’t.
The inability to say no is not a work ethic. It is a liability dressed up as one. So you say yes. To the assignment that doesn’t fit. To the timeline that isn’t realistic. To the third priority that competes directly with the first two. You say yes because no feels like failure and failure feels like confirmation of every doubt you’ve ever had about the wiring.
What actually happens is this. You over-commit. The ledger fills with obligations you can’t fully service. The quality of your best work drops because the overhead of your worst assignments is consuming the bandwidth your strengths need to operate. And eventually — not gradually, but suddenly — you burn out. Not from lack of effort. From too much of it pointed in too many directions at once.
There is a specific kind of leader who sees your wiring clearly and uses it against you. Not always deliberately. But the effect is the same.
At one point in my corporate career I was managing the lending function across more than 36 branches. That was already a full mandate — the kind of scope that demands constant prioritization, rapid context switching, and the ability to hold a large number of moving pieces simultaneously. For someone wired like me it was genuinely activating. The complexity suited the amplitude.
Then the organization consolidated. Leadership rotated. And in the middle of that instability I was assigned the private banking sales force as well — including integration and full management responsibility. The scope effectively doubled. The resources didn’t.
I asked for help. Not once performatively — genuinely. What I got back was something less than a no. Not a clear answer. Not a plan. Just enough to keep me moving forward without resolving anything.
Looking back I understand what was happening. My leader knew my wiring. He knew I wouldn’t quit. He knew that the same amplitude that made me valuable in that role also made me incapable of walking away from it. And he kept adding weight because he understood — consciously or not — that the wiring would absorb it.
That’s exploitation. Not malice necessarily. But exploitation. The distinction matters less than the outcome — which was burnout, a damaged relationship with the organization, and performance that never reached what it should have been at exactly the moment the expanded role demanded my best. The ledger didn’t just flatten. It went negative in ways that took time to recover from.
Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then. Asking for help once isn’t enough when the leader understands that you won’t give up regardless of the answer. The dynamic subordinate has to be emphatic. Has to make the cost visible — not as a threat, but as operational intelligence. Here is what this load is doing to the quality of what I produce. Here is what you are losing by not addressing it. Here is the trade-off you are making whether you acknowledge it or not.
That conversation requires currency. It requires a ledger positive enough that the leader has to take it seriously. And it requires the self-knowledge to recognize exploitation before it becomes burnout — because by the time burnout arrives the damage is already done.
Every yes to the wrong thing is a tax on the right things. Protect the ledger. Even when — especially when — the wiring is telling you to absorb more.
Here’s what most leaders don’t realize — and what most people with this wiring don’t say out loud: every team needs a Chaos Ambassador.
Someone who doesn’t just tolerate volatility but functions better inside it. Someone who reads a deteriorating situation faster than anyone else in the room and moves on it before the team has finished processing that something is wrong. Someone who thrives precisely when the stable, process-driven model breaks down and the script stops working.
That’s you.
I discovered this accidentally. There were moments in corporate America where the organization was understaffed, overstretched, operating under conditions that a properly resourced team would never have faced. And those were paradoxically the moments I performed best. Not because I enjoyed the chaos — but because the chaos demanded exactly what my wiring naturally produces. The environment stopped rewarding the replication model and started rewarding amplitude. And amplitude was the one thing I had in abundance.
A well-resourced, stable organization running a clean process doesn’t always create the conditions where this wiring activates fully. That’s an honest and important thing to understand about yourself. You are not built for calm water as a permanent state. You are built for the moments when calm water becomes rough — and the people around you are looking for someone who knows how to navigate it.
You may not use the words Chaos Ambassador with your leader. You probably shouldn’t. But that’s the role you’re built for. And part of managing up authentically is helping your leader make that connection — without necessarily handing them the vocabulary.
They don’t need to understand your wiring in clinical terms. They need to understand that when things get hard and fast and unclear, you are exactly who they want in the room. That’s the business case. Build the currency first. Then make it.
Most people with this wiring spend their careers showing leaders what they think they want to see. I did. For longer than I should have.
It makes sense as a survival strategy. The rejection sensitivity is real. The fear of being misread as difficult, inconsistent, or not leadership material is real. So you perform the version of yourself that fits the model — measured, predictable, normative — and hope the leader figures out what you’re actually capable of before the gap between the performance and the reality becomes impossible to maintain.
They rarely figure it out. And the gap always becomes impossible to maintain.
The authentic version is more useful to everyone. Here’s how I’m built. Here’s where I’m dangerous. Here’s how to point me at the right problem and get the most out of what I produce. That’s not a confession. That’s operational intelligence. And a leader worth working for will recognize it as the most valuable thing a subordinate can give them.
This is not about disclosure in the clinical sense. It’s not about asking for accommodation or explaining your diagnosis. It’s about making the business case for your own correct deployment. You’re giving your leader the information they need to use you well — and in doing so you’re adding value before you’ve done a single task. The intelligence itself is currency.
Go further than that. When you understand your own complementary wiring — when you know the people whose steadiness anchors your amplitude or whose follow-through completes what your pattern recognition starts — bring that intelligence to your leader too. Here are the people I work best with on this type of problem. Here’s the team architecture that gets the most out of what I bring.
That’s not weakness. That’s a force multiplier offering itself up deliberately. Most leaders have never had a subordinate do that. The ones worth working for will know exactly what to do with it.
Not every assignment will be calm water. That’s the reality of organizational life and pretending otherwise doesn’t serve you.
There will be moments when the tasking pulls you into unfamiliar water — roles or projects that don’t align with your strongest terrain, that require the kind of sustained, linear execution that doesn’t come naturally to high-variance wiring. Some of those moments are developmental. Some are just operational necessity. The dynamic subordinate knows the difference and responds accordingly.
When the assignment is developmental — when it’s deliberately designed to smooth an edge or build a capability you need — lean into it. Not silently. Not with the same cycle of taking it, trying sincerely, and failing miserably. With clarity. Go to your leader and name it. This is outside my strongest terrain. I’m committed to it. Here’s where I might need support and here’s how we make it work.
That conversation only lands correctly if the ledger is already positive. A subordinate with unproven currency who asks for support sounds like someone managing down expectations. A subordinate who has established themselves as a horse their leader can run — who has built the relationship currency through consistent value delivery — sounds like someone with enough self-awareness to make a difficult assignment successful. Same words. Completely different reception.
Build the ledger first. Then have the hard conversations from a position of strength.
The review cycle is where this comes together formally. Most people with this wiring dread performance reviews. The format tends to reward consistency and predictability — two things that don’t naturally favor amplitude. But reframe the review and it becomes the most strategic moment in your calendar.
Walk in with your own ledger read. Here’s where I was strong. Here’s where the terrain worked against me. Here’s what I need next period to keep the value moving in the right direction. Here’s the team architecture that gets the most out of what I bring. You’re not waiting for your leader to assess you. You’re coming in with your own assessment and shaping the conversation from the first moment.
That’s the dynamic subordinate. Not reactive. Not waiting to be led correctly. Actively building the conditions for it — one conversation, one assignment, one review cycle at a time.
Nobody chooses hostile water. But everyone with this wiring spends time in it.
The organizational environment that wasn’t built for your wiring — the stable, process-driven, risk-averse culture that rewards consistency over amplitude — that’s unfamiliar water. Cold water. Choppy water. The kind that looks manageable from the shore and feels completely different once you’re in it. And the instinct for most people with high-variance wiring is to swim harder. To out-effort the environment. To say yes to everything and run through every wall until the water wins.
That’s not survival. That’s exhaustion dressed up as commitment.
The dynamic subordinate goes into hostile water prepared. Not because the water becomes less hostile — it doesn’t. But because preparation changes your relationship to it.
The flotation is your framework. The self-knowledge, the authentic communication, the understanding of where your wiring creates leverage and where it creates drag. It doesn’t calm the water. It keeps you viable inside it long enough to do something valuable.
The gear is your relationship currency. Built before you hit the hostile environment — through consistent value delivery, through authentic deployment of your strengths, through demonstrating that you are the person they want when things get hard. You don’t assemble survival gear in the middle of a storm. You build it in calm water so it’s ready when you need it.
The beacon is the signal you send to your leader. Here’s where I am. Here’s what I need. Here’s how to get the most out of this situation for both of us. Not a distress call. An intelligence report. From someone who knows exactly where they are and what they’re capable of.
And the will — that’s the wiring itself. The amplitude. The refusal to accept the environment as a permanent condition or an insurmountable barrier. The same quality that makes hostile water dangerous for others makes it navigable for you — if you go in prepared.
Know yourself. Build the currency. Send the beacon. And trust the wiring that got you this far.
The water doesn’t have to be calm for you to navigate it. It just has to be worth crossing.
I am not a clinician but a person with a lived experience that I feel can help others and positively impact my fellow Children of Chaos. If this framing resonates, I speak on this. The Children of Chaos keynote is built for organizations, leaders, and parents who want to understand how high-variance minds work — and where they create disproportionate strength. Learn more at douglasmkatz.com/thechildrenofchaos
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