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Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neuro-developmental condition that has frequently been pathologised in career research and broader society to date. The study seeks to reframe such assumptions through a qualitative positive-focused exploration of career stories of ADHD adults, elicited through a strength-focused technique with wide applicability for coaching and other career-based development activities.

Situated in a strength-focused coaching psychology paradigm, the authors undertook semi-structured interviews with 17 participants, using an adapted feedforward interview technique (FFI) rooted in positive psychology (PP), to investigate individuals' strengths and successful career experiences.

Narrative thematic analysis of the transcripts identified two core themes: “the paradoxical nature of strengths” and “career success as an evolving narrative”. The participants described how they have achieved career success both “in spite of” and “because of” ADHD. The use of the FFI demonstrated a helpful and easily taught method for eliciting personal narratives of success and strengths, an essential foundation to any coaching process.

This research provides a nuanced overview, and an associated conceptual model, of how adults with ADHD perceive their career-based strengths and experiences of success. Further, the research shows the value of using a positive psychological coaching approach when working with neurominority individuals, using a successful adaptation of the FFI. The authors hope that the documentation of this technique and the resulting insights will offer important guidance for managers as coaches and internal and external career coaches, as well as providing positive and relatable narrative resources for ADHD adults.

Despite similarities, research across family business and business advising forwards contradictory conclusions when considering family business advising. The authors seek to integrate these literature and in doing so uncover both the hurdles facing family business advisors attempting to adapt tools developed in corporate advising to the family business context as well as the potential for greater integration of these streams in ways that contribute to both family business and advising research and practice.

Primary data were collected both in the form of a survey questionnaire and website marketing content. In the survey, 47 family business advisors evaluated the distinctiveness of their family business clients across structural, cognitive and relational social capital dimensions. Motivated by unexpected findings, a content analysis of advisor websites uncovered specific marketing themes that illustrate the divides between family business advising and scholarship.

Family business advisors reliably acknowledge structural and cognitive social capital as preeminently characterizing the distinctiveness of their family business clients. Expanding on this, the authors’ findings suggest that the urgency signaled in advisor marketing via their websites may inspire tactics misaligned with the long-term time horizon typically characterizing family businesses strategy.

The few family business advising studies that exist predominantly consider post-hoc evaluation of advising by family business clients. The primary data the authors collect are unique in the literature in that the data detail how family business advisors perceive and engage with potential clients.