Month: December 2025

Introduction

This year began with DEI being dumped on with some passion. I tried to formulate a defense over the subsequent months, but I found myself agreeing that DEI was in dire need of being rethought. It just wasn’t professional enough. This applies especially to disability inclusion. 

Disability inclusion has become more of a cultural movement with a focus on identity. That’s not a space I want to play in. I spent a good deal of the year getting clarity on my position. I just don’t share any passion for disability as an identity. I don’t have any issue about those who do, but it is essential that advocacy in the workplace be clearly delineated between those things that are the legal responsibility of an employer and those which are not – and may be subject to negotiation. 

My context is specifically the NSW public sector. This is important because legal responsibility for ensuring staff with disability have their rights honoured will vary from state to state or country to country. 

This distinction between responsibility to uphold rights and any other activity surprised me when I came to realise it. It hadn’t ever been explicitly raised since the time I joined a disability ERG in July 2010. 

There has been a singular level of confusion about the nature and role of a disability ERG – among ERG members and among the leaders of organizations that host them. 

Getting clarity on this has been my biggest achievement of 2025 and I want to reflect on that below. 

The impact of the absence of clarity. 

Legal responsibility for ensuring staff with disability have access, are included and are treated fairly is a novel situation, relatively speaking.  NSW’s Disability Inclusion Act was enacted in 2014, though federal legislation has been around much longer. Organizations have acknowledged their responsibility but not articulated it in a clear and consistent manner. Disability ERGs were created to participate in an organization’s efforts to meet this novel responsibility – and then things became very unclear. How much energy should be put into it?

Failure to make a great deal of progress became the norm. Driving disability inclusion in the workplace wasn’t seen as urgent. It was enough that change was underway. Slow resistance-ridden change became accepted.

Legal responsibility lurked in the background, largely unacknowledged and certainly unspoken. Organizations that are stretched in terms of staffing and resources will not bring the subject up and maybe hope it isn’t mentioned too loudly. Disability ERGs, accustomed to inertia, and generally with no enduring cultural memory, lack clarity on their primary role. 

That role is to engage with their organization to work collaboratively on helping it meet its legal obligations to staff with disability. This must be done respectfully but persistently. 

Disability ERGs may, of course, engage in other activities, but never at the cost of carrying out their primary function. This distinction is critical because it then means that a disability ERG can negotiate for the resources it needs to meet its objectives. Negotiations without clear objectives never succeed. 

It would be nice if an organization had a clear mission about meeting its legal obligations to staff with disability but the messy reality of today’s workplaces is that there are so many other things competing for attention and resources that having the cognitive bandwidth to keep a focus on a theme like disability inclusion is near impossible without allies and confederates. 

It is little wonder that disability as culture and identity has become popular. It looks like progress. It can feel emotionally rewarding and create good feelings. But the hard work of keeping one’s organization attending to its legal obligations gets lost. 

That loss is about memory. In July 2010 our newly formed disability ERG was lavished with attention and resources. The ERG was mandated by our then CEO. He left. The original HR staff who were genuinely enthusiastic supporters moved on. Most of the original ERG members departed in a radical restructuring. By the time I became ERG lead 6 years later I was the only original member left, and there were only 2 people in HR who were at that first meeting.

There was almost nobody to ferry the memories and stories to those who would be needing them.

The power of having goals and a strategy

In June 2023 I was given the opportunity to act as a consultant and coach to my former employer’s ERGs. I had left the department in June 2021. This opportunity stretched over 2 years on a casual basis. It put me in a fascinating position. I had to examine my time as a disability ERG lead to understand why I had been successful. That was quite a journey and took me way longer than I expected. I was good at what I did, but I was also very very lucky. 

My goal was to end the suffering of staff with disability. I talked with members who told me horror stories of discrimination, bullying and abuse. I developed a strategy after hearing Kate Nash’s keynote speech at the 2018 Australian Network on Disability Annual National Conference in Sydney. Kate was founder and CEO of PurpleSpace. My colleagues and friends are fed up with me talking about Kate, but her presentation was my road to Damascus moment – and I won’t downplay how transformative it was.

She introduced me to 2 vital ideas – a methodology that she called Networkology and the truth that disability inclusion was always on. In 2019 the ERG was funded to run a 2-day planning workshop. We knew what we wanted, and we created a plan. It was ambitious, almost wildly so. It was endorsed by the department executive board later that year. 

We had something to aim for, a means of gauging our success or failure and what amounted to a contract with the department. These were critical ingredients in our ability to drive change. Our organization was receptive to our efforts. We had an accountable agreement, and we had to be up to the job. That meant being committed, disciplined and professional. If we were going to dare hold our organization to account, we needed to mirror the behaviour we wanted to see. 

The vital importance of relationships

I quickly learned, as a consultant, that only one of the ERGs had strong relationships with senior leaders. That was the disability ERG. It was as if what the other ERGs did didn’t really concern the organization in any serious way. 

Part of the problem was that ERG leads were elected and mostly came from the lower echelons of the organization’s hierarchy. There are 6 grades below executives – 1/2, 3/4, 5/6, 7/8, 9/10 and 11/12. The 11/12s are usually managers. The 9/10s are senior project or policy staff and may also be team leaders. The lower grades rarely have a high level of autonomy or regular contact with executives. But ERG leads were often 5/6s or 7/8s, sometimes even a 3/4. 

The issue here isn’t about the capability of the leads but their habits and reflexes when comes to interacting with executives – deference was common. 

I was a 9/10 but I had a lot of experience interacting with executives over the years – sometimes positive but often contentious. I also had a substantial background engaging with business and NGO heads. I was completely comfortable developing strong relationships with senior organizational leaders. That made a huge difference in how I went about building alliances. I had no interest in becoming a manager or an executive. I enjoyed ‘hands on’ work. But it meant that I also had to ‘sell’ ideas to decision-makers. So, it matters a great deal who gets to be an ERG lead. An ERG must have a sense of the impact it wants to create and then ensure that people in key roles can deliver. 

My background was unusual. It included contract management and license compliance visits to services and businesses. By the time I became a founding member of the disability ERG I had been restructured into an office-based role after 17 years in frontline field-based roles. 

In a sense I was the right person at the right time. No ERG or organization can rely on luck. It is critical to have a clear strategy about how to position the ERG to be most beneficial to the organization and its staff. There must be no gap between those interests. A disability ERG’s members have rights that an organization is legally obliged to ensure are honoured. The ERG is thus perfectly aligned to meet the needs of both. But it needs the capability to do its job well and the support and engagement of the organization to ensure it benefits from what the ERG does. 

Stripping things down to the bare essentials

The consultancy taught me one critical thing. Nobody had a clear theory of what an ERG is – nor its role. This finally struck me as weirdly irrational. Think about it. A disability ERG is created because its members have unmet needs – to which they are entitled under law.  Neither the ERG nor the organization sees this as a reason to collaborate in a disciplined, strategic and skilled way to address those needs. 

The ERG brings a unique perspective – lived experience of inaccessibility, discrimination, unfairness, bias, bullying and so on. It can also report on what works and what does not, and identify choke points – systems, processes, policies, cultures or individuals. 

That should be gold to an organization seeking to meet its obligations. 

The ERG must be represented by confident, insightful, mature people who have a high level of credibility within the organization, and amongst its members. 

Nothing above is obscure, esoteric or weird. Yet it is rarely found. This is because it is rarely sought – by the ERG or the organization. 

In the NSW public sector, the reason for this is that thinking about ERGs ended quite quickly after an initial flurry of seemingly sensible guidelines were created. The key idea seemed to be that an ERG is a staff association – like a social club – not a critical collaborator in assisting an agency to meet its legal and moral obligations.

The consultancy taught me the importance of reviewing habituated behaviour and thought – of going back to basics and challenging foundational assumptions. I think I got more benefit from the experience than those who paid me. 

There’s an understandable resistance to learning. We innately avoid cognitive effort unless we feel under threat. Jobs are often about maintaining rather than chucking out all your assumptions and rethinking what you thought you knew. I have done that over the past few years because I had to so I could deliver the service I had been engaged to provide to the standard I demand of myself. The receptive got that benefit.

Conclusion

I have been reading on organizational behaviour, management and leadership theories since 1987 – not in any structured way. I just wanted to try to understand why managers and executives behave the way they do. I have Masters and Masters Honors degrees in Social Ecology.

I acknowledge that my curiosity isn’t shared by all ERG leads. I am not trying to pressure anybody into nerdy behaviour. But there’s a simple compelling truth that is unavoidable. It is that a disability ERG can be a vehicle for collaborating in bringing about vital change that will end the suffering of its members. Or it can be a ‘feel good social club’. 

I say ‘suffering’ intentionally and with no hint of dramatic inflation. Some readers will know instantly what I mean. Others may not. In 2019 I took 6 disability ERG members to a presentation before our organization’s board. They were chosen because they had ‘horror stories’ to tell. They told of discrimination, abuse and harassment that should not be real in a contemporary human services organization. The board was stunned. It didn’t know. That event set in train actions that are still echoing through the organization. 

There have been remarkable changes for the better in that time. But there are still cruelties being perpetrated. This is the nature of who we are – as individuals and in organizations. 

One day we may get to the stage when nobody is being abused, and everyone is held to account – by themselves and the culture they work in.

But you have to have a passion for that. What’s yours?

Personal accountability has been the persistent theme in management and leadership texts over the past decade or so, but until that translates to an organization’s cultural value backed by action it will stay a good idea that somebody else should make real.

A disability ERG, living up to its potential can contribute to bringing that reality about. 

For 2026 I hope the smoke and dust from the assaults on DEI settle and we understand that business as usual is not an option. Strong change is needed – informed by clear thinking and data and inspired by some inspirational and insightful thinking. Be a part of that.

Introduction

I seethed through the CBC’s 2025 Massey Lectures. They were on human rights. The speaker talked about the “promise” of human rights. But it’s not a promise.  The lectures are a stark and sobering reminder of the degree to which the hoped for uptake of human rights has failed to match that hope and intent. But is this about ‘broken promises’ or unrealized potential?

The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, are huge steps forward for all of us. But they are not magical incantations. They are sets of values that can be used to guide our conduct toward others – if we commit to them. 

Many of us do so to a large degree because we are innately disposed to be kind. But it is unlikely we can recite either body of rights. We all know they are there, but they are not central to our thinking.

Our governments may act to confirm that these rights are endorsed on behalf of the nation. But acts of ratification do not ‘trickle down’ to individuals as guidance for conduct. 

We like to talk about what we have a right to when it serves us to do so. But it’s not like the UDHR is taught in schools to ensure it is the foundation of our civil culture. We use the term ‘rights’ in our everyday language, thanks to the UDHR, but it’s mostly in a self-serving sense. Way back in circa 1992 I walked into my workplace’s staff room. Somebody had put up a poster asking for support for a campaign to assert the rights of children to have pocket money paid from the public purse. I tore it down. Nobody complained. Neither was there any discussion about whether such a right might be granted. It was simply asserted – as if that was sufficient to make it real.

The existence of a statement of rights is an invaluable foundation, but what exactly is my responsibility in relation to it? 

As a person with a disability that places me in need of adjustments and accommodations I feel somewhat supported by the knowledge that I have rights that are asserted on my behalf and framed in legislation and policy. But how does that work for me? 

Below I want to reflect on how realistic it is to expect that a declared right has any actual value, and what we can do to strengthen it. 

The limits of influence

When I was with my former employer- a NSW government department – I signed a Code of Conduct. In one sense it was a contract. But in 19.5 years I never came across an instance of any one being held to account for breaches of the code, despite numerous instances of misconduct being known. The Code of Conduct was essentially an undertaking to honour the rights of fellow staff members and community members as well as responsibilities to the government as a public sector employee. The government has put a lot of effort into developing a model Code of Conduct as a document. But very little is done to promote it as a guide to conduct. For example, the NSW government has an annual survey of its public sector employees – the People Matter Employee Survey (PMES). It nowhere mentions the Code of Conduct. 

The whole sector data on the 2025 PMES is instructive. A key metric is “Action on survey results”. The rating is 35%, the lowest across the 22 key topics surveyed. The point of the survey is to identify areas where staff see a need for improvement. That’s not an encouraging response. But 81% staff rate ‘Ethics and Values’ positively. This is the highest score of the 22 key topics.

There are ways of interpreting these results. I will suggest one way in the context of my argument. A score of 81% looks impressive, but that’s 19%, nearly one in 5, who aren’t impressed – and they are more likely to be the more thoughtful and discerning staff members – to whom ethics and values matter a lot. And the fact that 65% don’t rate the chances of anything changing because of the survey is compelling.

My point is that when a sophisticated contemporary workforce in an ‘advanced’ country is this sceptical about whether fundamental values, rights and dignities are honoured, I’d say we have a problem. Despite all the principles and ideals espoused, despite ratification of UN generated rights statements, despite legislation and policy affirming a commitment to ensuring essential rights are honoured these scores tell us something isn’t working.

This isn’t a criticism of the NSW public sector. It isn’t doing anything wrong. In fact, it is doing a lot of things right. This reflects human nature. There are innate limits to how we behave without very specific actions to modify our behaviour. This is a way more complex situation than we generally appreciate. We want to do better, but we make a mess of making that happen.

We are naturally inclusive and exclusive

The thing about asserted rights is that they contradict some of our instincts and affirm others. It has been acutely observed that we are functioning with Stone Age minds while living in the Space Age. We are still unconsciously obedient to reflexes and instincts that are perfectly suited to a tribal setting. But they cause problems in large, complex and pluralistic community environments. We are not aware that we are unconsciously including some folk while, equally unconsciously, excluding others – all based on baked-in biases – and not the perfectly good reasons we tell ourselves.

We have a natural psychological capacity to be personally concerned about the welfare of around 150 people. That’s about the ideal size of a tribe. Beyond that we just don’t have the emotional or cognitive capacity. This isn’t a new problem. The Christian Bible’s The Parable of the Good Samaritan demonstrates how old it is. The simple fact that it is a famous parable should remind us that we have an innate capacity to ignore those in need, or who have their rights violated.

Psychologists talk about in-groups and out-groups. We all have them. We privilege, and are biased toward, our in-group members. In extremis we can be quite cruel toward out-group members. There’s plenty of useful content on the internet about this idea. Here’s something from Psychology Today.

The point of the Good Samaritan story is that we must make a conscious effort to care for out-group members. The fact that they have rights declared in their favour, with which we agree (in principle), isn’t sufficient to overcome our adverse biases. We deal with this, in part, by not actively engaging with ideas that bring this tension between principles and biases to mind.

In the same way that a Code of Conduct should be the guiding principles that influence our conduct at work – but isn’t – declarations of human and disability rights should also be guiding principles – but aren’t. Neither Codes of Conduct nor declared rights are intentionally employed as guides for conduct at work, save, maybe, in a scant few instances. We do not teach the UN’s declarations on human or disability rights in schools – an unfortunate oversight, given the way our communities are evolving. Unless, of course, the omission is intentional, albeit unspoken, because actively promoting rights would cause cognitive stress and upset our comfortable habit of over-estimating how good we are at just about everything we do. That’s a handy conceit in a tribal setting because it means there’s always somebody willing to try to take down a mastodon. A dead mastodon is always worth a few dead heroes.

There is a naïve belief that the mere assertion of rights imparts ethical forces that are transmitted by some mysterious process of moral osmosis into our minds where they take up residence. They are expected to then radiate into the world and shape how we act. But if we are morally insufficient that radiation is blocked. The remedy is to repeat the attempted transmission. 

This may seem an unkind characterisation of a noble hope. But it is intended to demonstrate that the mere presence of a noble thought isn’t sufficient to transform our consciousness or conduct. We are better off seeing acknowledgement of a right as a good seed that we can nurture into a behaviour. But that act of nurturing can’t be an unconscious performance. It must be deliberate and conscious. We have no choice, if we want to honour rights, but to do so consciously and intentionally.

Rights on demand?

On the Australian Disability Pride website there’s a passage about “demanding inclusion”. This adds another dimension to our understanding of rights. Can we demand them? Maybe, if they are enshrined in legislation and an organization has a clear duty to affirm and protect those rights.

But individual citizens are a different matter. We are under obligation to respect the law, but do we want to live in a culture where we might be prosecuted or sued because we are perceived to have violated a human or disability right?

This is an interesting dilemma. Do we enforce honouring rights we collectively agree on? Even though our governments may ratify rights assertions do we have the right, as individuals, to dissent? Do we have a right to simply not honour a right because a person is a member of one of our-groups? There a clue in the language used in the UDHR.

In preamble to the UDHR we can read the following – The General Assembly, “Proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.”

In Article 1 we find “…should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” In Article 2 we find “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms…” 

There is no basis for demanding inclusion or anything else. The rights are a standard to which we should strive.

Conclusion

I am a member of my local council’s Access Reference Group. I am constantly impressed by the council’s commitment to disability inclusion. I am reminded that while that commitment is unyielding the means to respond to need isn’t sufficient to meet all the access needs. That just isn’t going to happen quickly, or even in the foreseeable future. It is an ongoing commitment that requires considerable effort to assess needs, identify priorities, plan, obtain funds and execute projects. That it’s happening at all is good. It is the best we can expect – and I am grateful.

A right is a stated principle. It is not a magical incantation. It is something we value as an ideal and then aspire to realize, through willed purposeful actions. To get from where we are now to where we want to go will take shared intentional effort in building our own self-awareness about how and why we include or exclude, and act kindly or coldly. Can we bring ourselves to be Good Samaritans all the time?

I will close with a quote from a friend who has been subject to violation of his rights more frequently than should be tolerable. They wrote, “A belief or practice in standing up for one’s rights, or for the rights of community, the public, comes at a cost. Such actions can lead to being viewed as a threat, a risk, particularly by those in management who do not have that same personal or professional values.”

This is the perspective of a public sector employee. This raises the question about whether they work in a rights honouring culture – and if not, what went wrong?

There is little point in celebrating declarations of rights if we do not affirm them in demonstrable ways in our home, in our workplaces and in our relationships. Violation of rights is routine within our spheres of influence. But how often do we take a stand? How hard are we prepared to work to overcome our inherited reflexes and biases?

Rights are not a “promise”. They are a hope that we must work at to make real.

Introduction

DEI is taking a hammering and people are asking questions about the role and value of ERGs. Should they be discarded? I think they have a critical role to play provided that certain conditions are met. Below I will discuss why I think this and what those conditions are.

I am a former New South Wales public servant. I have worked in 4 departments, the last one for 19.5 years in roles related to disability to June 2021. In 2008 I contracted GBS and acquired a major mobility disability and a lesser manual disability. In July 2010 I became a founding member of my department’s Disability Employee Network (DEN). In November 2016 I became DEN Chair, a position I held for 3.25 years. In late 2016 the DEN’s membership was severely depleted because of a restructure, and the remaining members were frustrated and dispirited. I took the DEN in a radically different, and highly successful, direction.

On the strength of that success, in June 2023, I was invited to support the leads of the other ERGs in my former department. Over the next 2 years I had to figure out why I had been successful, what ERGs were about, and what they could achieve. I was useful to some ERG leads and of no use to others. 

You really don’t know why you are good at something until you try to help others to get good at doing the same thing. You can’t replicate your success in another person. Success isn’t just about one person. It has multiple elements that must come together. And how that happens is way more complex than is imagined.

An effective ERG can be invaluable as a part of an organisational ecosystem. But for it to become that there must be an agreement on what an ERG’s purpose is and how it is going to deliver on it. As a rule, organizations do not understand what ERGs are or what they can do.

Below I offer a theory of an effective ERG based on my experience with my department’s DEN, my subsequent work with some of the department’s ERGs and four years of research into DEI, ERGs and why disability inclusion is so hard to make happen to the extent we desire. This research took me into evolutionary anthropology and psychology, social psychology, organisational behaviour, leadership & theories and neuroscience.

Essential context

My experience of ERGs is confined to the New South Wales public sector. Hence what I say isn’t to be read as being descriptive of a universal situation. However, I do think that the principles and issues I discuss here will be familiar.

My focus is entirely on problem-solving. During my term I neglected celebratory events until the IDPWD in 2019. I had to manage my time and influence, and there were enough unmet needs to keep my attention.

I am aware some ERGs are primarily about celebratory and promotional activities. The same principles I discuss here are relevant to them. 

Some essential personal background

This is important because being an effective ERG lead requires a person to be aware of their strengths as well as areas where support or mentoring are necessary.

My lived experience of disability has had an impact on how I see disability inclusion. I have listened to speakers who say they are comfortable living with their disability. I envy that. I acquired my disabilities as a mature adult. They are a pain in the arse. I spent 15 months doing physiotherapy after 3 months in an ICU paralysed from the neck down. That was a sobering time that forced me to face how much my life had changed. I know what I have surrendered. There are so many things that I could no longer do. Hence, I have a focus on problem solving and getting outcomes. 

I know others have had way more catastrophic events that have left them with a greater level of disability. How people respond to such life events varies. In the 10 months I was in hospital nobody asked me how I was coping. Rehabilitation didn’t include consideration of my psychological state. So, I came to the DEN lead role with little tolerance for half baked responses and not caring about how DEN members were suffering physically and psychologically.

My work history includes times of intense engagement with disability – in psychiatric hospitals, in Veterans’ Affairs and as an employment officer. My other roles were mostly about engaging with external stakeholders in the private, public and community sectors as a service provider and working in compliance monitoring and contract management. This background developed my skills in negotiation, conflict resolution and relationship building.

I had some experience in management and as a team leader, but I didn’t like it and preferred frontline roles. I liked the challenges of making good stuff happen for people. This turned out to be a critical part of my development as the DEN lead. DEN members were suffering abuse, bullying, discrimination and neglect and I was focused on delivering outcomes that ameliorated their situation. 

What an ERG is not

In the NSW public sector ERGs are modelled on staff associations or social clubs. They were assumed to be separate amateur bodies run by volunteers. 

The DEN I joined met quarterly for full day meetings. Members from out of town had travel and accommodation costs met. The meetings were well catered as well. 

HR provided an excellent secretariat service and HR staff attended the meetings with genuine interest. All the members had to do was elect a chair for the meetings every couple of years, come to the meetings and participate in occasional consultations and research. Disability inclusion was finally on the agenda and stuff was happening, albeit slowly. This was where things went bad from the perspective of DEN members.

There were several problem areas:

• Even though there was a significant backlog of unmet access, inclusion and equity needs, disability inclusion was now competing with other priorities for a share of a constrained resource pie.
• There was no mechanism through which a staff member with disability could seek redress for discriminatory or abusive behaviour against them and there was an unwillingness for such a mechanism to be set up. The DEN terms of reference specifically prohibited agitating on behalf of a member.
• Even though staff with disability experience actual physical and psychological injury because of inaccessible workplaces, dangerous or unsuited working conditions or behaviours (mostly by team leaders, managers or directors) against them that cause distress and stress, issues were not treated as work health and safety concerns.

Promises of inclusion were not delivered because the culture had not changed to any significant degree and the initial prioritization of disability had backed off after 3 years as it became just another theme to add to a wish list.

The early DEN was a passive advisory body and was effective in that capacity. But nobody knew how to evolve it into a useful body representing the interests of its members.

A DEN isn’t like a social club where volunteer amateurs donate their time doing things in favour of staff with disability. The present chair of my former department’s DEN struggles to get the time away from their formal role to attend to DEN related tasks.

What an ERG is

I was leading the DEN in the old ineffectual way, although I was making some progress because I had a Deputy Secretary as the DEN Champion who was committed to disability. As well, I had the department’s Secretary’s full and active support. In May 2018 I attended the Australian Network on Disability’s (AND) annual national conference where the keynote speaker was Kate Nash, founder and CEO of PurpleSpace. Kate ran a workshop on Networkology the next day.

To say that I walked away from that experience radicalised feels mild. I took away two lessons. Disability inclusion isn’t just 4 times a year, and there’s a methodology, a theory. At the same time, I had been transferred to the DEN Champion’s division where I was left free to put as much time into redeveloping the DEN as I needed. This was up to 3 days a week. This extraordinary opportunity lasted 19 months.

In September 2018 I called for volunteers to join the Guidance and Action Team (GAT) – an idea I had just come up with. Things were happening quickly and I needed help and lived experience insights. I got 15 responses from metro and regional offices. Together they represented a spectrum of disabilities, and they were uniformly very unhappy with how they were treated as employees. I required GAT members to be strictly professional. In fact, I said we were a quasi-business unit whose role was to consult with the department on the needs of staff with disabilities and to collaborate on having those needs met.

At the end of February 2019, I presented to the board with 6 colleagues from the GAT with the worst stories of discrimination and abuse. The board was shocked. The GAT speakers felt heard for the first time. Things then really started happening. 

In August the GAT was funded to run a 2-day facilitated planning workshop. The resultant plan was put on a spreadsheet and presented to the Board in November, along with good news stories about staff whose work lives had been transformed in the meantime, and a selection of problem areas that needed executive attention.

At the end of 2019 I was invited to join the Disability Inclusion Team and given responsibility for the department’s Disability Inclusion Action Plan (DIAP) and the department’s participation in AND’s Access & Inclusion Index (A&I Index). Neither of these two activities had a single person actively engaged in working on them. I ensured the DEN was embedded in both the DIAP and the A&I Index, so we had an integrated strategy to evolve policies, systems, practices and culture.

My successor DEN chair was offered this role as a full-time role in September 2020, and after I quit the Department in June 2021 they took up responsibility for the DIAP and the A&I Index.

That’s a great story and I am proud of what I achieved. But more importantly we can see the essential elements of an effective ERG:

• An engagement with senior leadership earning their trust and support as a partner.
• A team of subject matter experts acting in a professional manner.
• A clear contract with the organisation and an accountable plan of action.

The things that made this a successful approach are critical:

• The government had a policy of ensuring that the composition of all agencies’ staff reflected the community they served.
• The department had legal and policy obligations to ensure staff with disability had assured access to what they needed to perform their roles, and to ensure they were free from discrimination, bullying and abuse.
• Responsibility for disability inclusion sat wholly with the department. It could not pass it on to amateur volunteers, but it could work with staff with disability prepared to offer additional professional subject matter expertise while juggling their primary role responsibilities.
• Senior leadership wanted to honour those obligations and was prepared to be adventurous and innovative to make it happen.
• The DEN and senior leadership had a strong, open, honest and trusting relationship. They worked together.

The DEN had only one function – to support the department in meeting its legal obligations to its members. It did this through professional and collaborative action.

On the matter of not intervening in individual issues I developed a strategy of identifying system, procedural and responsibility failures which I drew to the attention of the organisation’s leadership, using an individual’s situation as an instance. I could then work with key managers and executives to sort the situation. This worked very well. There was one instance when the secretary rang a recalcitrant line manager and ‘had a chat’.

Employee leadership

ERGs are described as ‘employee led’ and this has created major problems. It suggests that the interests that the employees have are not in tune with their employers. But if we see that the interest is in ensuring the employer has capacity to meet its legal obligations this puts a very different light on the matter. 

I was a union delegate many years back. The union and my employer had a relationship that was mutually antagonistic, reflexively so. I went to a union training session on negotiation techniques, and it actually taught escalation to conflict as a first step – as if the only option was to threaten. This was nuts. I started reading the Harvard Business Review from the department’s library to get a better understanding of management. I wasn’t aspiring – just trying to understand. The union’s approach was ignorant, reprehensible and incompetent. I quit being a delegate. I also later quit my membership of the NSW public sector union for similar reasons. 

In 2025 employee leadership isn’t about challenging or threatening hierarchical management but about taking the lead on addressing concerns an employer may not be aware of and may not have been able to act quickly on. Managers and executives often misrepresent realities under their responsibility. As a result, the most senior levels of organisational leadership have not a clue about what goes on – especially when it comes to discrimination and abuse. Staff who are subject to such misconduct have nowhere to turn and if they lodge formal complaints, they are frequently victimised and punished. The more determined resort to legal action – and suddenly the organisation pays a lot of attention – but this time to defend the perpetrators. This is in-group bias at its worst.

I have heard remarks that some organisations, disappointed with what’s happened with DEI and ERGs, want to do away with both and leave it up to the organisation’s staff to ‘do the right thing’. In most cases that is either naïve, intellectually lazy or morally repellent. Going back to how things were is no answer. DEI must be fixed and ERGs must be rethought.

In the context of Disability ERGs, the nature of disability must be reviewed and rethought. My personal view is that I deal only with disabilities that are relevant to the workplace and which are actual disabilities requiring adjustments and accommodations. In the current climate of identity politics there are questions around ND that must be resolved on the basis of clear and credible evidence and not popular political passion. This is the organisation’s responsibility and not something a disability ERG has any business getting involved in. The ERG’s function is in assisting an organisation to meet its legal obligations, not to define them.

Two areas where Disability ERGs go astray

Leadership

There is a myth that an ERG lead must have a disability. Obviously, it would be preferable, but what is the sense of sacrificing capability for a lived experience that can represent only a small number of people.

As the DEN lead I got an education about the lived experience in the workplace of staff members who were deaf, blind, autistic, had degenerative diseases and wheelchair users. Having a disability myself meant I could resonate with stories of existential loss and concern, but not the specifics of lived experience – which I needed to know. People who were sensitive, empathic and compassionate could represent the needs of people better if they also possessed the capabilities I discuss below. Among the disability leads I know these capabilities are scarcely encountered. Before I acquired my disabilities, I had worked in 4 roles that gave me frontline connection with people with disabilities. I was good at defending their needs and rights then. Disability is so complex that no one person with a disability can ‘represent’ all.

It is by far preferable to have a disability ERG lead who has the requisite capabilities, and possessing those capabilities must be not negotiable – unless a candidate for a leadership role is assessed as capable of developing them under a genuine mentoring program.

A constant problem in the public sector is that ERGs are elected, and this commonly results in junior staff with none of the critical capabilities and a reflexive deference to senior officers becoming leads. These elections are a legacy of thinking an ERG is like a social club. Usually there is no capability requirement, and no selection criteria. Candidates write pitches to members and members vote with no critical sense of who they are preferring. I was surprised to discover how few ERG members vote – often less than 10%.

When I became DEN chair it was because the incumbent chair had quit the department and I was the deputy chair. The first time I sought election I didn’t get anywhere at all. I am not having a gripe – just making a point. But, to be fair, back then being DEN Chair wasn’t much more than chairing a meeting 4 times a year.

A few years back I watched a webinar featuring ERG representatives from the HSBC Bank in Australia. They described how the ERG lead roles were subject to competitive recruitment. The webinar was disappointing in that the host, who had no evident ERG experience, didn’t draw out critical insights. But we did learn that the lead roles were high status and that the ERGs were well resourced. Evidently the bank’s leadership took the groups seriously and they delivered benefits to staff members and the bank.

I think that who leads an ERG matters hugely to members and the organisation. So, leadership roles must be filled by a competitive recruitment process in which decisions are made by an equal number of ERG and organisational representatives. Of course, this means that being an ERG lead is seen as a high-status role that contributes to career progression. This might entice executives with disability out from behind their camouflage.  

Being an ERG lead is a very hard job, and the better you are at it the more skilled you will be. So, if you want a very effective ERG, you need a skilled and sophisticated operator.

What is critical here is that the organisation is as invested in the effectiveness of the ERG as its members are. And this is a problem for both the ERG and the organisation. This was a weakness in my situation. I had strong relations with the Secretary, 2 Deputy Secretaries and a key Executive Director. But we were in an innovation phase, and we didn’t get the opportunity to lock in an understanding of what we had created. In fact, it took me several years after leaving the department to make sense of what we had achieved and why the advances we made were vulnerable to the decline that followed on.

What we had created wasn’t a system, process or an assured part of the culture. While the benefits persist to this day, the methodology has not. It is only over the past 12 months that this has become apparent to me.

What we failed to do was develop a theory of the ERG’s relationship to the organisation’s legal responsibilities, how the ERG worked with the organisation and how it should function. We had all this in our heads; we just didn’t formalise it.

Structure of the ERGs

An effective ERG is a novel thing – an innovation. So those involved in leadership must be capable of stepping outside the business-as-usual frame. And here I mean not just ERG members but organization’s executive leaders as well. 

The old idea of a staff association or social club supposes that being ‘employee led’ means that the organization is hands off. But if an ERG is understood as a de facto business unit which collaborates with the organisation in meeting its legal obligations, there is an implicit ‘leadership’ relationship. I don’t mean in a command-and-control sense.

Here my use of the term ‘de facto business unit’ might cause some confusion. As DEN lead I created a relationship with the department that had a professional connection with other business units. We weren’t a business unit in any formal sense, but we behaved as if we were. That gave us credibility and accountability. We had a mission the board signed off on, and our job was to deliver on it in collaboration with other business units.

Since then, I think a more formal set-up is preferable. What we had been doing was experimenting. What we did worked very nicely. But there were vulnerabilities in the model. Innovations must become established. That has risks as well. Repetition dulls the innovative spirit. This is why the spirit of an employee-led ERG must be retained. The ERG must retain the capacity to call out the organization whenever it tries to dilute or duck its obligations – which is inevitable. That’s just how organisations are.

I was recently talking with a friend who was preparing to defend his PhD thesis on whether a quality management system can improve public sector agencies. He introduced me to the quality management system ISO9000 which has 49 quality activities. One is “empower people to determine constraints to performance and to take initiatives without fear”. This is precisely what an effective ERG must reflect.

My preferred Disability ERG model is what I call peer-to-peer. It is a voluntary relationship between ERG members and organizational leaders in which the ERG members are subject matter experts in terms of lived experience of disability in the workplace and the organizational leaders bring expertise in organizational operations and governance. Together they collaborate on helping the organization meet its legal obligations toward staff with disability.

This model requires a clear shared understanding of the organization’s legal responsibilities and the creation of an accountable agreement to work toward ensuring these obligations are met. 

It should also include mutual mentoring obligations. This is critical because there is way too often an inclination to engage in entirely transactional engagements and not establish relations that develop insight and empathy.

The model is, however, primarily focused on problem solving.  The problems to be solved include:

• How to get the best insight to support effective design/redesign of policies, procedures or systems.
• How to get feedback on whether what is in place is working.
• How to identify and address unmet needs.
• How to identify and address non-compliance with established obligations, policies or procedures.
• How to effectively deliver awareness of disability inclusion obligations, policies and procedures to staff with disability, their team leaders and key decision-makers.
• How to deal with discriminatory and abusive arseholes. They are in every organisation and if they are in leadership ranks, they reliably get the in-group pass. That has to stop. 

The ERG’s leadership team might comprise 4 persons who have agreed attributes. Below are the 5 attributes I would look for in at least 2 of the members. I don’t say all 4 because this is an opportunity to develop ERG member with leadership potential:

• Negotiation and persuasion skills backed by political nous.
• Strategic analysis, planning and project management skills.
• Relationship building skills backed by effective emotional intelligence.
• Overall credible standing in the organization and a capacity to engage with junior and senior staff.
• An empathic connection with ERG members and a commitment to ensuring unmet equity, access and inclusion needs are addressed.

An essential consideration is that this leadership team must be taken seriously by the organization by recognizing it as a high-status career development role and membership of the leadership team is only via a competitive recruitment process.            

Conclusion

During my consultancy I was astonished to learn that there was no agreed vision of what the ERGs were about. Most were unable to articulate a value proposition. None could give an ‘elevator pitch’ on their value to members or the organization. And yet the leads all wanted more time. Even so, when they were asked for a strategic plan not all delivered.

What was clear was that the model the ERGs were based on was flawed, those who put their hands up be leads didn’t have the skills/experience to ‘hit the ground running’, and that there was no deep relationship between the ERGs and the organization. There was no agreed contract.

It would be unkind to put the onus for this situation on the ERGs. The department was very hands off. It didn’t have a sense of the value of ERGs to begin with. They seemed like a good thing as part of the general trend. The DEN was the prototype DEI ERG, and the other ERGs were modelled on it, but without a detailed analysis of why it had the success it did.

ERGs succeed or fail depending on the people involved. If neither the ERG leads nor the organization had an actual theory of what an ERG is, what it should do or what service it should provide, success will really be down to the random chance of the right people being in the right roles at the right time. 

When I quit the department, my focus was on the wider question of why disability inclusion was so darned hard. I had only dimly reflected on why I had been so successful – until this became an urgent need during the consultancy. I needed to know what the underpinning principles of my success were. Were they replicable?

I had been doing a lot of reading on leadership. Loretta Malandro’s Fearless Leadership was a huge inspiration. Looking back on my career I realised that I had a track record of leadership and innovation going back decades. It was modest stuff as things go for a front-line worker, but it was effective, though not always appreciated by my management.

And then I was in the right place at the right time at the 2018 AND conference. Kate Nash gave me a critical education and I ran with it. I was also blessed with having the support of the department’s Secretary, two deputy-secretaries and an executive director as well as support from the Manager Inclusion & Diversity.

When I say the 15 members of the GAT were the heart of the DEN, the responses I get suggest that I am just saying that because it’s the kind of thing one is supposed to say in a public performance of modesty. I am touched that people think this, but I do sincerely mean it. The GAT was a critical innovation, but as subsequent developments have shown, it must be employed in the right way.

I am conscious of the adverse feelings toward DEI and the wide belief that ERGs are of little or no use. The ones that do do good work are unlikely to be analyzed, but neither are the ineffectual ones. Because there is a widespread belief ERGs are ineffectual there hasn’t been any strong motive to research them. To be honest, that’s a fair assessment.

There is no theory of ERGs. When I went searching for one, I explored the NSW Public Service Commission’s pages on ERGs. The content was sensible enough but there was no guidance on context, nothing about the critical insights that are needed.

What is interesting to me is the level of resistance I meet to the idea that an ERG can be a professional and effective agent that partners with its organization to help it meet its legal obligations to its members. This resistance comes not just from organizations but also from disability ERGs. There is a lot of work involved, and a lot of skill required. 

If an organization is serious about ensuring equity, dignity and inclusion for its staff members with disability it must see that this is a complex and difficult task that requires competent professional input – from an ERG and the organization working together.

A competent ERG may be the only way an organization can meet its legal obligations.

Finally, DEI seems to me to be way more complex than many practitioners understand. The business of addressing real equity, dignity and inclusion challenges needs to be upgraded from well-intended sentiment to seriously skilled work.

A few years ago I developed the idea of a one year course – a Masters of inclusion – that could lay out the critical knowledge and skills necessary to do DEI and ERG lead jobs to the necessary professional standard to be effective.