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.