July 2017

By S.Barton Cutter Originally printed in www.careersingovernment.com In recent years, much emphasis has been placed on hiring and retaining talented professionals with disabilities. And, great strides have been made to provide reasonable accommodations where needed to ensure these individuals are able to perform their jobs optimally. For years, however, success in the professional realm has been linked to an employee’s ability to minimize, or outright hide their need for accommodation. And despite recent efforts to shift this perception from a sign of weakness to enhanced efficiency, unconscious bias still remains. This is true both on the employers end, and on the parts of professional with a disability. Today, we have an opportunity to shift the paradigm from viewing accommodations solely as an individual need, to a call for inclusive culture. Through this lens, accommodations become the means to enhance engagement and collaboration across organizations while still empowering the individual with the tools needed to excel. A central component to creating this inclusive culture for organizations is the capacity to self-reflect. And, coaching can be crucial in setting the stage for this skill. I see this regularly in my role as accessibility consultant with The Coaches Training Institute and in my own coaching practice. Co-Active Coaching holds that how you show up is as important as what you do. In designing accommodations, this means not only addressing what professionals need to perform, but also exploring the softer elements of fostering engagement, expression, and collaboration. Thus the focus of accommodation design broadens to empowering the team as a whole. Engaging inclusion within your organization starts with three easy steps. Establishing Agreements In inviting our colleagues to articulate their own vision for how the culture could better support them to thrive in their work, they can collectivity design agreements about how the team […]