By Daniel Samosh

Many examples of leaders with disabilities exist. Helen Keller, the prolific author and activist, was deafblind. The 32^nd President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, had polio. And when we explore national-level data, it is clear that many individuals with disabilities now occupy leadership positions in organizations today. Yet, these leaders are largely overlooked in research, practice, and policy communities. This is problematic, considering that over 1 billion individuals have a disability and disability is often stereotyped as incongruent with leadership.

Prior research on this subject tends to emphasize overwhelming barriers, for example, of how persons with disabilities encounter “glass ceilings”, “glass cliffs”, and “glass partitions” (Braddock and Bachelder, 1996; Roulstone & Williams, 2014; Wilson-Kovacs et al., 2008). We know little about how persons with disabilities navigate these barriers to advance their careers and succeed as leaders.

In this research, I unpack the factors that facilitate, rather than hinder, career advancement and leadership among persons with disabilities. I interviewed persons with disabilities holding a range of leadership positions (e.g., manager, executive, mayor, business owner, and professor). Interviewees shared insights about their careers, emphasizing the varied barriers that they had encountered alongside their career development. The results include a rich understanding of the complex career paths that many leaders with disabilities take, illuminating the “how” of their career success.

Three factors were central to interviewees’ career success. Importantly, interviewees had the greatest chance of advancing their careers with these three factors in combination, not separately. Therefore, these factors are referred to as the “three-legged stool”:

• Career self-management strategies – behaviours and attitudes of the individual, such as engaging in self-advocacy and perceiving social barriers as contestable. For example, after encountering barrier after barrier, perceiving barriers as contestable challenges became very important to many leaders. One interviewee explained how they would respond to barriers: “It’s about seeing the barrier or the shortcoming and saying, Okay, that’s a challenge. To not accept others’ views of me. I’d much rather put out who I think I am.”
• Social networks – connections both inside and outside of the organization, such as inclusive managers, mentors, family, friends, and role models. For example, several interviewees shared how important supervisors and workgroup members were, specifically as they treated interviewees as people first and did not perceive impairment as a problem: “I was lucky enough that I had some really good supervisors and colleagues early in my career that were just logical and very practical in their thinking. And we would just naturally address barriers as they came up.”
• Organizational and societal factors – influences such as flexible and proactive employers, access to disability-specific career advancement programs and funding, and a visible, critical mass of leaders with disabilities. For example, many leaders’ careers were influenced by organizational practices and policies that inadvertently made it difficult for them to lead (e.g., the organization purchasing inaccessible management software). However, disability representation in leadership was highlighted as an important facilitator: “You need a critical mass. Otherwise people think … Oh well, [they are] the exception … as opposed to thinking… This is just the way it is. We are an inclusive and diverse workplace, and of course, people with all kinds of disabilities are going to move into leadership positions.”

Table 1. The Three-Legged Stool

In practice, this framework can be used by organizational decision makers and policy makers to ensure career advancement is disability inclusive, to the benefit of individuals and society. For instance, organizational initiatives could be designed to focus on supporting all three foundations of the stool, rather than attending to only one or two foundations. In this case, a leadership development program with an emphasis on career self-management strategies would not be implemented alone. It would be designed in conjunction with other initiatives that cultivate social networks (e.g., a mentorship program) and facilitate inclusion at the organization-level (e.g., updated accommodation and hiring policy as well as management training).

Although research on disability and leadership is limited, the three-legged stool provides an initial framework for us to go beyond barriers and conceptualize the career advancement and leadership of persons with disabilities. Career self-management strategies, supportive social networks, and organizational and societal factors are all required for career success.

References

Braddock, D., & Bachelder, L. 1994. The glass ceiling and persons with disabilities. Washington, DC: The Glass Ceiling Commission, U.S. Department of Labor.

Boucher, C. 2017. The roles of power, passing, and surface acting in the workplace relationships of female leaders with disability. Business & Society, 56(7): 1004-1032.

Roulstone, A., & Williams, J. 2014. Being disabled, being a manager: ‘glass partitions’ and conditional identities in the contemporary workplace. Disability & Society, 29(1): 16-29.

Samosh, D. 2021. The three-legged stool: synthesizing and extending our understanding of the career advancement facilitators of persons with disabilities in leadership positions. Business & Society, 60(7): 1773-1810.

Wilson-Kovacs, D., Ryan, M. K., Haslam, S. A., & Rabinovich, A. 2008. ‘Just because you can get a wheelchair in the building doesn’t necessarily mean that you can still participate’: Barriers to the career advancement of disabled professionals. Disability & Society, 23(7): 705-717.

World Health Organization. 2011. World report on disabilities.