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  1. Ripples

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    Ripples forming on the surface of water.

    Ripples

    Celebrating a decade of disability leadership

    By Christina Ryan DLI CEO

     

    How do you measure the ripples that a single thought creates?

    A decade ago I had an idea. What might happen if we created a space where disability leadership was given the attention it deserved? What might happen if disabled people had somewhere to go for their leadership development that wasn’t just a once off program or a passing government policy, but a constant presence?

    What might happen if we put the two words disability and leadership together in a sentence?

    Ten years later we are starting to find out, but we’ve only just begun.

    It is easy to quantify the hundreds of disability leaders who have attended Disability Leadership Institute programs and coaching. It is easy to count the number of members the DLI has welcomed in a decade. It is also easy to count the growing number of organisations who have come to the DLI searching for disabled talent for their vacancies or asking for an inhouse leadership program, but none of these tell us what change has happened or the impact that the DLI has made.

    How far does a ripple go when a small pebble is dropped in a wide ocean?

    How much light does a tiny spark create in a very dark night?

    The real impact of the Disability Leadership Institute is unquantifiable.

    The term disability leadership has gone from nonexistence to being used widely by community, government, business and academia. Using those two words together has also sparked conversations and awareness, leading to more and more organisations delivering in house disability leadership programs and searching specifically for more disabled talent.

    Organisations tell the DLI that their disability leadership programs have resulted in growth in the number of people being openly disabled at work. When being disabled is a criteria for participation, people feel valued by their employers and there is suddenly a reason to be open. Rather than disability being all about the organisation and its statistics, it becomes about career paths and being wanted.

    How do you measure the career impact for people who have undertaken DLI programs or coaching that changed their perception of their career to understanding that senior leadership was possible for them? Where are they all now?

    Something the DLI never planned for is the DLI members community. Ten years ago the idea of having a self funded professional network of disability leaders was laughable. Half of all disabled people survive on welfare and don’t have enough money to live on. The half that are in paid employment are often on low incomes or insecure incomes with little money to spare. Yet, somehow, the DLI membership has grown into the largest professional network of disability leaders in Australia.

    The DLI members community stretches across all Australian states and territories, with several international members because there is no other organisation like this anywhere on the planet. DLI members are at all career stages, they come from a very diverse range of professions and industries, and they have one thing in common – they are all disabled people who have finally found somewhere that they can connect with other people like them. People who have gone from being the only one in their workplace to being part of a community of professionals facing similar challenges, a similar sense of isolation, and have faced the same barriers to career advancement.

    The DLI members community has become a powerful professional network that has connected people who would never otherwise have met. Those connections resulted in a collaboration that changed the Fair Work Australia resources on disability, produced partnerships between entrepreneurs to work with some of our leading universities on access planning, and provided countless openings for positions on boards. DLI members have introduced each other to organisations and resources that have changed career directions and provided speaking and profile opportunities that led to advancement.

    Through the DLI members community there is a growing expectation that disabled people should be appointed to executive level and board positions. DLI members alert each other to opportunities, have coached each other in applying for jobs, and helped each other prepare for interviews.

    Disability leadership has also become a field of research, particularly by disabled academics and policy specialists. As increasing numbers of disabled people move into professional spaces and advance to senior positions, there is a growing awareness that the way we do leadership is different. This matters and it needs to be understood and documented.

    How do you measure the impact of the ripples created by a single idea a decade ago?

    The DLI dropped a pebble in an ocean. Its first ten years saw the ripples created embed the concept of disability leadership, open a space, and establish a community. Now DLI members are riding those ripples into new oceans and changing the way leadership is understood.

     

    Sign up for regular updates from the Disability Leadership Institute. 

    Christina Ryan is the CEO of the Disability Leadership Institute, which provides professional development and support for disability leaders. She identifies as a disabled person. 

     

  2. Burden

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    Several mules carrying heavy loads up a mountain path.

    Burden

    The real burden of disability

    By DLI CEO Christina Ryan

    Disability is prominent in headlines and news feeds once again. Conversations are broad ranging from NDIS to workforce, from the ever present “inclusion” to perennials like access and public transport. And then there’s the seemingly endless demands of more and more consultations.

    A word that frequently appears in the public domain when discussing disability is burden. The “burden” of disability. As if it is a burden on others to be around disabled people, to employ us, include us, consider us as part of the community. To spend a portion of the tax pie on disability services and supports. As if it is a burden to have us in the room as equals.

    The real burden, however, is experienced by disabled people. It is a burden to operate in a world that is far from built for us and where disabled people are often an afterthought. Where systems and processes forget that not everyone is generic.

    Where the public discourse descends into the dangerous domain of vilification. When nobody seems to notice that all the words they use to demean each other, all the words of hatred and insult are words about being disabled.

    The real burden is:

    • Turning up for your new job as an accountant and being expected to work extra voluntary hours supporting your employer to build a more accessible workplace.
    • Spending valuable time every day contacting your local government to fix access around building sites and infrastructure projects.
    • Being expected to write an endless stream of letters making formal complaints about processes that prevent you from participating in work and community.
    • Getting your body corporate to understand that you have a right to use the facilities where you live, just like all your neighbours.
    • Being told that making an event accessible costs too much.
    • Raising a concern about access and then being left off the invitation list because you are a troublemaker.
    • Not going to office drinks because someone forgot that you are also part of the team and the venue isn’t accessible for you.
    • Being treated like a 12 year old when you are one of the oldest people in the room.
    • Not being able to get on the bus because the wheelchair bays are full of luggage or prams.
    • Giving up a much loved job because they rearranged the office without consulting you and you are no longer close enough to the toilet.
    • Having to pay twice for everything because you need support.
    • Having policy and decisions made about disability without any disabled people being in the room.
    • Finally getting into the room only to be told that you are taking up too much space.

    Amongst others.

    Disability can be an endless stream of “extras” – a constant presence of being overlooked, forgotten, sidelined, underestimated. Of being done “for” not “with.”

    The real burden of disability is that nobody is doing this deliberately. The burden is having to respond to very nice, well meaning people who simply forget that their world doesn’t work for you. That their decision making processes don’t factor you in. Of living in a constant loop of retrofitting and fixing.

    The real burden is continually being polite about being forgotten.

    This article draws on conversations with disability leaders, and DLI members, over the last decade. Thank you to all of them for their perspectives. 

     

    Sign up for regular updates from the Disability Leadership Institute. 

    Christina Ryan is the CEO of the Disability Leadership Institute, which provides professional development and support for disability leaders. She identifies as a disabled person. 

     

     

     

  3. Human Not Robots

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    A line of boxy worker type robots with 6 wheels following each other.

    Humans not robots

    time to reclaim human

    by Christina Ryan, DLI CEO

     

    Productivity growth is lagging, and yet organisations keep approaching work in the same way that they have done for decades. At the same time there is a move away from diversity and inclusion as if that is part of the problem, rather than a potential solution.

    Fundamentally, work still follows the model set out several centuries ago where people have a workday of set hours, attend a generically designed workplace, work on achieving outcomes, then go home. Furthermore, workplaces have become places where people of similarity clump together in groups of people just like them; people from a similar background, cultural grouping and similar pathway of education and attainment, because that is what is considered “qualified” for the work being done.

    While remote work has shifted the dial over recent years, physical workplaces are still designed a certain way and with expectations that most workers will attend them and be productive in them. Yet large numbers of people find modern workplaces difficult to work in.

    It’s time to pause and consider what might happen to productivity if workplaces were designed for the humans in them. To consider what might happen to productivity if diversity really was allowed to be diverse, if people could operate in the way that best suited them.

    How much might innovation and productivity lift if we stopped expecting humans to become robots?

    A key question for modern workplaces is: who decides what they look like? Who makes the ultimate decisions about the design of “work” and workplaces? It appears these crucial decisions are made by people who look the same as the people who have always held decision making positions. If the final decision makers are the same sorts of people who have been making the decisions since time immemorial how will anything ever change?

    Disabled people are rarely in those corridors of power. Rarely in the big corner office. Rarely in the cabinet room. Rarely approving the design, layout, and budgets committed to constructing how humans work. It should come as no surprise, then, that those workplaces often don’t work for people who operate differently, including disabled people.

    Big open plan offices, shared desks, bright lights, phone calls in the open, strict parameters on operational hours, might suit those drawing up budgets and doing office planning, they might achieve good looking bottom lines, but rather than suit humans they end up turning us into robots.

    As humans move more deeply into the 21st century, perhaps it’s time to allow ourselves to be more human in how we work and to recognise that it might, just might, contribute to productivity if people are working in ways that suit the people who are doing the work.

    Sign up for regular updates from the Disability Leadership Institute. 

    Christina Ryan is the CEO of the Disability Leadership Institute, which provides professional development and support for disability leaders. She identifies as a disabled person. 

  4. Staying

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    A large deeply rooted tree with massive spreading branches, it is covered in lichen and moss.

    Staying

    Moving to a new job is high risk

    by Christina Ryan DLI CEO

    The decision to apply for a new job and progress your career is an exciting one. Recognising that it’s time to stretch yourself into a bigger skill set and explore new fields and ways of doing things, should be something everyone experiences.

    What happens when it’s too much to contemplate? When progressing your career or changing jobs, for whatever reason, is something that fills you with trepidation and exhaustion?

    Starting a new job is a major event for any person, but for disability leaders it can be particularly complex. For those who require adjustments, including flexible arrangements, it can also be a time of apprehension and doubt.

    Recent discussions with disability leaders have pointed to a common concern; changing jobs means leaving the arrangements already in place and starting all over again. Repeating the long labour of being granted hard won adjustments or flexibility, and the even longer labour of educating your colleagues about specific measures you might need – like captions in meetings, larger font emails, or quiet zones and muted lighting – so that you can do your job effectively.

    Disability leaders talk about wanting to change jobs, yet to change jobs is to risk losing the mechanisms that have been put in place, and which may have taken months or years to establish.

    Additionally, changing jobs also means moving further into the unknown and potentially experiencing unsafe conditions in the new position. It is a high risk business, and the more senior the disability leader the greater the risk. Few senior disability leaders are open about their disabilities, and a move is a big gamble that can be career ending if the new workplace isn’t supportive.

    Being open in one workplace doesn’t mean it’s safe to be open in the next workplace, but once that door has been opened there is no going back.

    Moving jobs means revisiting the need to build trust, the emotional labour of educating colleagues about disability and about your disability specifically, and it can also mean enduring quite intrusive questions and an expectation that you must explain your personal circumstances and justify why you need solutions that are different to what is currently available.

    In recent conversations, a number of disability leaders have shared their decision that now is not the time to dive into this uncertainty, and they have made the difficult choice to stay in a position that is limiting their career advancement. They know it will take substantial time and energy to go through a transition process, on top of the usual shifts in routine that a new job presents to everyone. That level of effort is only possible when there are no other major challenges going on, and for many disability leaders there are often other major challenges going on.

    Disability leaders are faced with two stark alternatives: take the big risk to follow your career and hope your vital workplace arrangements can be locked in without too much effort or stick with what you know even though it might be career limiting.

     

    Thanks to the many DLI members who shared thoughts and experiences for this article.

    Sign up for regular updates from the Disability Leadership Institute. 

    Christina Ryan is the CEO of the Disability Leadership Institute, which provides professional development and support for disability leaders. She identifies as a disabled person

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  5. Invisible

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    A person wearing a red top is obscured by a plastic sheet covering their head and shoulders.

    By Christina Ryan DLI CEO

    Disability – out of sight, out of mind. Historically, and in many societies, disability has been stigmatised, shamed and shunned. In western cultures disabled people have been segregated into institutions, locked in back rooms and attics, so that the community could forget that we existed, and we didn’t embarrass anyone.

    This is still the case in many cultures today, where disabled people are kept hidden away in back rooms, or denied schooling or employment, and kept away from community engagement.

    Accompanying this discomfort about disability, people developed euphemisms. Words that could be used instead of the big awkward disability word. Most of these words have entered common usage and are still with us today – differently abled, special, etc.

    One of the most popular euphemisms for disability is the word inclusion. Inclusion means nothing like disability, yet it has often been used interchangeably with the word disability to mean the same thing.

    In the early part of the 21st century, disability rights activists started insisting on the use of the word disability. This insistence has since become a key plank of the disability rights and disability pride movements. Disability activists are openly disabled and proud to be who we are. We no longer accept being hidden away in back rooms or institutions, drugged and kept quiet. The fight to end such practices continues, but it is now well underway.

    More crucially this century, disability rights are now covered by an international treaty that has become one of the most supported within the international rights system.

    As part of the insistence on disability being more open and disabled people being considered part of the broader community, disability rights activists also insisted on the establishment of government policy units focussed on disability, and on having disabled people working within those units. More recently there have also been ministers for disability, though it is still rare for these ministers to be disabled people.

    Having open conversations about disability within government and having disability on the political agenda have been instrumental in outcomes like the NDIS, the National Disability Strategy, and the increasing realisation that disabled people must be part of the public discourse on disability.

    Despite these gains, it is vital that we remain vigilant. Recently, several major federal government initiatives were rebadged to remove the word disability and returned to the use of euphemisms. Specifically, that old favourite: inclusion.

    In the early part of this century the word inclusion was often used to replace the word disability and slowly but surely this meant that disability policy was sidelined and forgotten. It slid off the agenda, got wrapped up into broader policy areas, and was consigned to the outer fringes of public discourse. Using euphemisms allowed people to forget that they were working on disability. Slowly but surely, disability became invisible.

    The heavy use of euphemisms, like inclusion, two decades ago means that disabled people are now well behind other marginalised communities in reaching equality. It has taken twenty years of hard work to reclaim government and public focus, to be remembered and recentred within our own space. It has taken twenty years of hard work to support governments to get more comfortable using the word disability. To acknowledge us, to be openly working towards disability equality.

    By returning to the word inclusion, by reverting to euphemisms for disability, this hard work is now in danger of being lost. Disabled people are in danger of returning to invisibility in public policy or programs. This is unacceptable.

    Words do matter. Using the word disability matters.

  6. Meaning well doesn’t equal inclusion

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    This month we are revisiting an article from February 2020:

    Meaning well doesn’t equal inclusion

    Real inclusion takes action as well as good intentions.

    by Christina Ryan DLI CEO

    A group of disabled people in a circle at a conference. Some are in wheelchairs, they are talking together.

    It’s unusual to meet someone who doesn’t think it’s a good idea to employ disabled people, or to be working towards an inclusive workplace.

    So, why is it still so hard to find good workplaces that are inclusive where disabled people feel comfortable and stay for the long haul? Why have the statistics on disability employment stagnated for decades, or gone backwards?

    Because everybody thinks they’re doing something, and very few are.

    Disability Leadership Institute (DLI) members recently shared their experiences of workplace inclusion. They identified that workplaces still aren’t getting inclusion right, with a continuing lack of real action, and despite many workplaces claiming they are inclusive.

    There is no doubt employers mean well, but is meaning well enough to get inclusion over the line? Unfortunately not. Meaning well doesn’t equate to action, and it is real action that is needed.

    DLI members had several comments and suggestions for getting inclusion right across a range of workplace touch points. Many of these suggestions come from managers of teams, CEOs, and highly qualified disabled people struggling to find work. All the suggestions are from disabled people as both practitioners of inclusion and participants in inclusive processes.

    Inclusion needs to start at the beginning, during recruitment, and continue as an ongoing focus for management and leadership every day. Complacency is not an option. Never assume your organisation is fully inclusive, nor that you have no further work to do. There is always more to be done, just as there are always more ways of being inclusive, because diverse people are diverse and each person must be treated as an individual.

    Recruitment:

    • Contacting people before their recruitment interview, or appraisal process, to ask what adjustments need to be made and then making those adjustments
    • Making sure interviewers can respond to questions about workplace adjustments at interview
    • Ensuring interviews are accessible so that people can focus on their interview and not their disability needs
    • Ensuring people are confident and comfortable asking for adjustment during the recruitment phase, this means having an accessible recruitment process
    • Providing questions before interview, meeting interview panel members beforehand, or not even having a formal interview process
    • Openly seeking disabled people for your workforce

    Human Resources:

    • Ensuring there are disabled people working in human resources, and valuing the expert contribution of those staff
    • Asking all staff how they like to work/communicate and then creating shared profiles with that information, so everyone knows that everyone one else has particular strengths and preferences
    • Collecting data on diversity numbers and length of employment, including how many people openly identify as disabled

    Management:

    • Taking organisation level policies and applying them at team level
    • Ongoing conversations amongst team members which may lead to flexible work arrangements on where and how work is done
    • Doing regular things like staff meetings and team gatherings in open reflective ways

    Leadership:

    • Leadership leading by example, making sure all team members are checked on as part of daily routines to avoid exclusion and cliques developing
    • Maintaining an open conversation about gaps in inclusion and openly working to address those gaps
    • Workplaces claiming to be diverse should be planning, providing funding and seeking counsel for success in diversity, just as they would any other part of their business mission

    Finally, and rather obviously: having more than good intentions by actually employing disabled people. Many organisations say that employing disabled people is a good thing to do, yet half of all disabled people remain unemployed.

    Clearly good intentions are not good enough. Workplaces need to mean it and that means action.

    Action starts from recruitment and continues throughout the organisation as part of daily operations. Action means policies, processes and an ongoing conversation about what inclusion looks like for this team.

    Action also means management openly taking responsibility for addressing inclusion gaps as a leadership example.

    Inclusion will look different for every team, because every team is different; however, there are some structural underpinnings that can be considered for any organisation that wishes to be inclusive, as well as being seen to be inclusive.

     

    Thanks to the many DLI members who shared thoughts and experiences for this article.

    Sign up for regular updates from the Disability Leadership Institute. 

    Christina Ryan is the CEO of the Disability Leadership Institute, which provides professional development and support for disability leaders. She identifies as a disabled person