Disability special report

In this three-part report, we look at how coaching can be used to support disabled people. Two coaches and their clients – one a deaf UK-based coach and the other a Greece-based coach with no disabilities – share their experiences and reflections. And David Clutterbuck offers guidance on using mentoring with disabled people

PART ONE : MISSED ABILITY?

Disabled people are just like other people. Why offer them particular support as a group? The short answer is because it could help unearth talents that employers are unaware of, says deaf coach, Jane Cordell

When I started coaching in 2008, it was with disabled future leaders. I knew that each person who came through the door was disabled like me. In fact, it was a prerequisite for the leadership Empowerment courses organised by Royal Association for Disability rights (RADAR) on which i worked. As a coach, however, you may not know if someone has a disability. Disclosure is a personal decision. And in an increasingly hostile economic environment, a disabled employee may avoid disclosure fearing for their job security.

How do you see us?

Disability makes many people feel awkward. Disabled psychotherapist Andri White¹ outlines four ways of seeing disability, only one of which – the social model – assumes shared responsibility for any barriers or perceived difficulties preventing the person living life to the full.

Then there’s the very old moral model (the impairment is the disabled person’s fault), the tragedy model (the person is a helpless victim of circumstance who must be rescued) and the medical model (the person is ‘broken’ and should be fixed).

It’s easy for people to slip subconsciously into one of these approaches and, as a coach, allow the model(s) subtly to affect how you coach the person. Equally, it can be difficult for a coach not to start creating a paradigm around visible disability, with inner dialogue such as, ‘I must focus on ignoring her blindness/deafness/wheelchair/assistance dog etc.’ Most coaches will know how well such an approach foregrounds the very thoughts you’re attempting to dispel.

However, why should we even look differently at disability? My answer is that as a group, disabled employees offer skills and talents above and beyond what you could expect, but that to bring them out, those concerned often need the encouragement and confidence-building that coaching can offer.

Same difference

My small-scale reflective research, comparing the 60 per cent of people I coached who had a disability, with the 40 per cent (mainly civil servants) who did not, suggested that this group:

Start out with higher levels of self-awareness (possibly due to others’ responses to their disability and the need to redefine themselves or clarify their identity as a result)

Have the scope to achieve more in a short period of coaching than their able-bodied cohorts.

The Employers’ Forum on Disability estimates there are more than 6.7 million people of working age in the UK who have a disability of some type – about 18 per cent of the working population.

Employment levels in this group are much lower though – about 50 per cent compared with non-disabled (80 per cent).

The proportion of people I coached who had a disability was roughly five times the expected norm, all other things being equal.  What this means is that those who obtain work are often unusually determined, resilient and, in some cases, over-qualified, for the jobs they get. If you expect to encounter difficulties or prejudice when applying for a job, you are likely to keep your expectations ‘realistic’ (often ‘low’). RADAR’s research, Doing Careers Differently, provides ample evidence of this.

The question is, by viewing disabled employees primarily or solely via the physical or human support they may need, are employers missing a trick?

There is much talk at the moment of the importance of people skills and emotional intelligence at work, particularly in the service-oriented UK labour market. If you consider the skills a disabled person might need to even reach the labour market, you end up with an impressive list:

• problem-solving
• communication skills
• self-awareness
• patience
• negotiation
• speedy analysis of risk
• emotional maturity
• understanding of others’ perspective
• sensitivity
• resilience
• creativity in developing solutions.

In spades

One challenge as a coach is to enable the person to see they have these skills, to value them and to present them positively to others.

I remember one client presenting her achievement in customer service (98 per cent satisfaction and targets achieved) as if it were nothing. I asked what level her employer required. She said “80 per cent”, then laughed. It was as if she had never heard her own achievements out loud before.

Creativity, the final point in the list, is important too. It is easy to fall into assumptions about how things are done, thereby missing an alternative that might be better.

For example, I coach with a third person in the room – a lipspeaker who makes spoken language accessible to me. The dynamics are different, but a deaf coach cannot screen out information. They must pay attention to every visible syllable, and the way in which it is relayed. As a deaf person I am also highly attuned to body language and its useful non-verbal messages. So you could view deaf coaching as almost a contradiction in terms, or you could see it as a particularly attentive type of coaching.

I was struck by the answer a high-powered colleague in one of the leading management consultancies gave, at the height of the financial crisis, when I asked what her greatest challenge was. She replied, without hesitation, “Finding and retaining the best talent.” If you are an in-house coach, or coach co-ordinator, it would be worth asking the following questions:

• Do we know which staff are disabled?
• What provision, if any, are we making to foster the talent this group may hold?
• How might coaching develop that group’s talent and confidence?
• How are disabled staff approaching challenges differently and how, as an organisation, could we learn from them?

You could find that you unearth some well-hidden treasure.

1 Therapy Today, June 2011

On the RADAR

John Manning attended the 2010 Leadership Empowerment event organised by RADAR (Royal Association for Disability Rights). This consisted of four monthly events each month in spring 2010. They included inspirational speakers, workshops and a 30-minute coaching session for each participant, plus four telephone coaching follow-up sessions. John, who is in full-time employment, decided to attend the event to develop his personal legacy and clarify his goals to be able to achieve this.

When John started coaching, he explained how the various challenges he was facing made him feel pulled in several directions. There was an issue he needed to handle at work related to his disability, a difficulty with his home which required long-term planning and demands on his private time all vying for the time he needed to achieve his personal dream of starting a non-profit accountancy business to benefit the charities he hoped would be his main clients.

One of the main areas we worked on was prioritising and creating the right type of time and space in which John could work towards his goals. A crucial issue was finding physical space separately from the rest of his busy life in which he could work on developing his private business. Once John had made this a personal priority, he felt he started to progress and found other activities could fit better around this. We also looked at negotiating flexible time with John’s managers. He focused on how to communicate his needs clearly – making it difficult for others to refuse his suggestions.

As a result of his work on the RADAR course, John started his accountancy practice part-time with the support of a group of professionals. He has actively participated in disability networks that will help his business venture on a reciprocal basis, published an article fulfilling his legacy, given presentations in Manchester, Leeds and Blackpool, and was invited to 10 Downing Street in October 2011 as part of a RADAR initiative. He said: “All this has been achieved since the last workshop in May 2010. By October [2010] I was making a profit in my business and further developing my customer base.”

Support needed

Deaf coach Jane Cordell used to be a diplomat with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Last year she lost her appeal against the FCO for discrimination. The FCO had ruled that the reasonable adjustments required for her to take up the post of deputy head of mission in Kazakhstan were too costly. The Equality and Human Rights Commission slammed this move by the Employment Appeals Tribunal as sending the message “that disabled people should not expect to get to the top of their profession, if they have significant support needs”, calling on the government and employers “to develop new and creative ways of delivering support for disabled people”.