Introduction
I have been listening to podcasts on training and DEI from the Neuroleadership Instituterecently. Both made the critical point about building habits – learning habits and inclusion habits. As a rule, you build habits through repetition and reinforcement. And you get neither from doing a one-off course.
I am not a fan of e-learning. It has some use when conveying specific skills – so long as you quickly practice them and continue to do so. I did a lot of ‘courses’ when I was working fulltime, including a pilot disability awareness course, which I failed. This pilot required participants to read a section and then get a passing grade on a quiz before they could progress to the next section. One early section had a quiz statement you had to agree or disagree with. The ‘correct’ response was to agree. The statement said something like People with disability are not limited in what they can do because of their disability. I disagreed. I could not progress.
There was no way I was going to agree because this was a bs statement. There are so many jobs I can’t do because of my disabilities. It had no place in any disability awareness training in my view. And I have huge issues about the idea you can ‘train’ anybody to be inclusive. You ‘train’ yourself through intentional repetition and reinforcement, so long as you are motivated to do so.
Organisations can make available opportunities to engage with the theme of disability awareness and encourage staff to take them up. But nothing like that can be sensibly called training. Sure, you can ‘educate’ – as in providing information and creating opportunities for ‘action learning’. But that’s not training in any sense.
Below I want to reflect on my own efforts to develop a decent degree of disability awareness.
Having a disability isn’t an assurance of inclusivity
I have mobility and manual dexterity disabilities, so I am inclined to be empathic toward people likewise blighted (yes, having a disability can be a blight – something that has a “severely detrimental affect” [OED]). But the idea that having one disability somehow makes you magically sensitive to all is just silly.
When I became Chair of the DCJ Disability Employee Network (DEN) I was swiftly informed by my blind and deaf colleagues that I had not a clue about what I needed to do to ensure they were effectively included in what the DEN did. We hadn’t even gotten to their workplace experiences. They were trying to be fully included in the ERG set up to support them.
I had to break my exclusive habits, and that took close on 18 months of repetition and reinforcement. I was highly motivated to learn, and as I did learn the scenarios that I encountered became more varied and complex – and this made the depth of my ignorance ever more apparent.
The idea that a manager, no matter how well-motivated, can be ‘trained’ into being inclusive of people with disability with one course is a fantasy we must dispel. The best an e-learning course can do is introduce some basic ideas which then must be employed and developed into a practice via repetition and reinforcement.
I do so wish we can all move on from the fantasy that learning is about only cognitive input (the information silver bullet fallacy). We must engage emotions and excite commitment via a desire for repetition and reinforcement if learning is to stick and evolve as a changed behaviour.
To become more disability aware, I think you also need engaged empathy. That is, you need to be motivated to be empathic. That’s a personal choice. An organisation can encourage and facilitate the development of empathic response, but it cannot ‘train’ it into being. You can’t mandate empathy.
Some lessons
Toward the end of 2018 I was playing around with ideas that led to the development of the DEN’s Roundtables (structured and facilitated presentations by around 4 staff with disability on their lived experience of having a disability in the workplace to groups up to 20). I asked 4 DEN members to sit down with half a dozen managers for an unstructured chat about being a person with disability in the department. Three managers later told me that they had recently attended a disability awareness training session provided by the NSW Public Sector Commission but found our exercise immensely more rewarding.
Disability awareness isn’t about information, but awareness which triggers a desire to know more and to be more empathically responsive. You can’t ‘train’ for that. It is a personal growth ‘journey’ and not about information harvesting. You can stimulate an empathic response through exposure to lived experience stories. You can encourage staff to be more empathic by modelling behaviour which is inclusive and kind. Workplace cultures are essentially influenced by how leaders behave. They can set an empathic person-centred culture – or they can impede it and even discourage such a culture from emerging.
In 2019 I participated in a presentation on disability awareness to a group of Directors and Executive Directors from my department’s Corporate Services division. I was one of 3 speakers, apart from our Executive Champion. We spoke of our experiences of living and working with disability. Later 10 members of the audience volunteered to be Disability Champions.
The other speakers were a deaf member of staff and a blind staff member. Both spoke of how they struggled to give their best effort because of exclusionary barriers, and their desire to feel included as a staff member with a sense of rightful belonging and an equal opportunity perform at their best.
That experience demonstrated how it was possible to have a potent impact through talking about lived experience of exclusion in an open and non-blaming way. When I left the Chair role in 2020 the DEN had over 30 executives and regional managers as Champions. In 2024 that number stands at 47. That is an impressive number of senior staff who have expressed a willingness to be more engage disability awareness and equity issues. It is a potential yet to be fully explored. I think we have needed to develop a more sophisticated and nuanced appreciation of how influential champions can be. I have explored this in past posts and will be looking more deeply in coming posts.
Attention, effort, and motivation
These days organisations are squeezed by pressures from all sides. The mantra ‘Do more with less’ is heroically repeated and staff volunteering their time to run ERGs are under especially pressure. They must be genuinely deeply committed to the cause. So, it is important to understand how best to support them. Training isn’t the answer. Improving levels of disability awareness takes a lot more.
Some for-profit enterprises take their DEI commitments seriously because it makes good business sense. DEI is a sophisticated and nuanced aspect of a business model, where seeking and retaining talent is an imperative. In the public sector, where there is no clearly accountable bottom-line, DEI is more often about compliance with law and government policy mandates. It is rarely resourced adequately and even more rarely understood as a legitimate workforce issue. WHS, retention of skilled staff, public sector social obligation to ensure representation of the community in its workforce profile are all relevant to staff with disability.
Development of disability awareness demands attention and commitment. And to have those you also need motivation. Compliance with law and policy excites only minimal and tokenistic responses. The actual benefit of inclusion isn’t usually assessed from the perspective of principles and moral imperatives – but in terms of compliance with law and government priorities. From a public sector position the impact of failing to be inclusive is rendered obscure because there is no accountable bottom line other than reporting in ways that can conceal the realities about failures to meet targets or standards. The resources needed to meet legal, policy and moral obligations are constrained by the constant squeezing of the public purse.
The motive for managers and leaders in a position to influence how disability awareness and disability inclusion efforts are realised comes down to a personal commitment. The effort required to become disability aware is significant. It is unlikely, often, that normal working hours are sufficient to do the work needed.
It is an extra burden to be taken on. Some managers and executives are highly motivated because of their personal experiences (having friends or family with disability, being a carer, or past work experience) to become disability aware in their workplace. For others without that close contact to the reality of disability the transition to disability awareness is more demanding. Something has to substitute for the motivational energy that comes from direct intimate connection with the human reality of disability – and that is sustained intentional effort.
Conclusion
Disability awareness is developed over time and only through repeated exposure at regular intervals. Its not the same thing as having information about disability. Being aware of something is not the same thing as having a relationship with it. The empathy and respect needed to ensure staff with disability have what they need requires ‘awareness’ in the widest meaning we can apply. Having an empathic relationship with them is essential. It acknowledges their lived experience, not just living with disability, but of inaccessibility and exclusion. It is the latter that is the most compelling, but often it’s the former that triggers awareness of how just how damaging the latter is to an individual’s wellbeing.
What we can do is:
- Create opportunities for authentic conversations between staff with disability and executives, managers, and peers in a way that encourages repetition of empathic responses and reinforcement of insights.
- Stop seeing disability as a separate category that requires special handling and start seeing it one aspect of the spectrum of being human which requires sometimes singular responses to address an inequity.
- Encourage a sense of universal diversity which dignifies every person with an expectation of respectful and empathic response when they need a non-ordinary response to address a short-term or long-term need to ensure their access to equal opportunity to do their best work.
- Discard the myth that we can train for empathy and respect and replace it with active engagement in the creation of an empathic and respectful work culture. This must be expressed at the top of any organisational hierarchy as a model to be followed. Executive leaders must understand that leadership includes intentionally setting cultural norms – as opposed to accidentally doing so.
It isn’t difficult to develop disability awareness, just demanding. Repetition and reinforcement are essential elements. However, it is far easier to achieve this when diversity awareness and inclusion are universal goals. That way you don’t have to believe a person with disability needs something different, or more, than anybody else. Equity isn’t about treating people as the same, but in the same way – with empathy and respect, acknowledging their individual attributes and needs.
We must ask, when we think about developing disability awareness, what is our goal? If it is to comply with law and policy providing training will create the illusion of compliance. If it is to engage with equity and access needs in a respectful and real way no amount of training can deliver that. That requires helping people to be as good as they want to be through authentic stimulation to change and grow.
Disability is complex and multi-faceted. It is neither reasonable nor realistic to imagine any leader or decision-maker can be across the spectrum factors that must be grasped. In many respects the idea of disability awareness is an unreasonable impost.
What is far better is creating a culture of empathic and respectful awareness of the needs of staff. The idea that there is a particular awareness for people with disability is misguided. There is a universal need to address issues of accessibility, inclusion and equity for all staff. That’s a more useful expenditure of effort and attention. But you can’t ‘train’ for this either.
We can intentionally create workplace communities that have a culture of inclusion and respect because it honours the needs of staff and meets the pragmatic needs of organisations to retain skilled staff in a kind and healthy workplace culture. Or we can do no more than is necessary to give the appearance of complying with legal and policy obligations.
We can choose to respond to the imperatives of the heart or stay in our heads. It’s our choice. There are no training shortcuts.