The Inclusive Management Strategy

Engineering Culture Change for Employees with DisAbilities

Camelia M. Fawzy, Brenda Shore

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781787541979
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

Every person has the potential to contribute to an organization as long as they have access to the right opportunities and connections, yet it sometimes is all too obvious that the stigma associated with a person's disability can have a negative impact on their ability to develop healthy work relationships with peers and supervisors. This situation can only be remedied through effective change management, a systematic approach to designing, implementing, and measuring progress on unique culture-change goals.

Here Camelia Fawzy and Brenda Shore draw upon more than 40 years of research and practical business experience to support leaders and managers' efforts in transforming organizations and providing inclusive work opportunities for people with disAbilities (PwDs). What Fawzy and Shore offer is The Inclusive Management™ Strategy (IMS), an innovative approach to evaluating culture-change needs and to designing and implementing change solutions that address unique needs in order to create authentically inclusive social work-environments for PwDs. They address stigmatized differences associated with disabilities that lead to reducing fear, resentment, and anxiety in the organizational climate, ultimately arguing that culture change can only be achieved when most of our employees are engaged in a mind-change process, a conscious effort to change stigmatizing views associated with differences that need to be accommodated.

For the practical, implementable plans of action it offers, The Inclusive Management Strategy is a must-read for managers and supervisors involved with policy, decision-making, strategy, and daily accommodations for PwDs.

Part I

Respecting DisAbilities

Chapter 1

Defining DisAbilities

It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision.

Helen Keller

Change is happening, and you have a choice. You can join the movement and adapt your organization to take advantage of it or trail behind and risk dealing with legal claims, public relations issues, and unhappy and disengaged employees. This may sound hyperbolic, but in fact, the way in which your organization’s culture adapts and embraces people with a disAbility will define its future. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2018), in 2017, 18.7 percent of persons with a disAbility were employed. That number will continue to grow as the unemployment rate declines and more qualified people are needed in the workforce. You are in a position of helping to make this change a positive one for all employees.

In this book, we are using real-world examples to provide you with insight and guidance on what to do; and what not to do. To get started, let us meet Jean, a human resource (HR) professional, who has hired Anne, a person with several differences that qualify as disAbilities. Note that you may see some new terms, or an altered way of spelling specific words. Recognize that this is a way to emphasize a different perspective and add depth to the meaning of a word. One example of this is disAbility as we see each individual capable of doing many things in the work arena and that is where we want to put the emphasis.

Discussion #1: Jean’s story

Can we start with you, Jean? Why did you choose to join us for this learning journey?

Hi, I am Jean. I started in Human Resources many years ago and I am now the Chief Human Relations Officer in my company. In this role, I develop and guide the organization’s human relations strategies, including making sure that our employees engage in developing healthy relationships with each other, despite socio-economic, cultural backgrounds, diversity of thinking, or other factors that make us unique. Several years ago, our executive team decided to hire Anne, a person with significant developmental disAbilities. Although in the beginning her employment created a lot of disruption in our organizational climate we are very excited to see the positive impact this decision ultimately has had on so many in our company. However, to get to this point we worked hard to handle all kinds of challenges associated with her employment. I am here to develop a better understanding of culture change combined with our experience to make sure that we avoid mistakes in the future and new employees with disAbilities are welcomed from day one.

You mean that she was not welcomed from day one? Why did your company hire her?

She was certainly welcomed by our leadership team and all of us who knew her from a fundraising event we’ve been sponsoring for years. The fundraiser brings together people with developmental disAbilities, organizations that support their employment, and companies like ours, committed to demonstrate the values of social responsibility. Five years ago, during our company’s rapid expansion, we were approached by one of those nonprofit organizations looking to find the right employment opportunity for Anne. Our leaders met her at these events and decided to hire her if she was supported with initial job training and we could offer a good job match. After a thorough hiring and training process, she met all the qualifications and was hired as a receptionist. Unfortunately, her first supervisor and some colleagues were not happy with the decision and did not welcome her to their team. We eventually learned that her supervisor believed her employment decision was based solely on our need to comply with ADA, while some of her co-workers thought it was a new initiative as part of our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) efforts.

Well, you cannot blame them for thinking this way since until recently, most people with disAbilities (PwDs), especially those with developmental or mental health related disAbilities, were offered employment based on those two main reasons. However, we believe change is happening and there are many new programs being implemented as part of a nationwide effort to bring PwDs who are able and willing to work, into our organizations as equal contributors.

To provide some background, let us discuss some history. The beginning of the antidiscrimination movement in employment in the United States started in the early 1940s when “The Fair Employment Act” (Executive Order 8802) was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to prohibit racial discrimination in the defense industry. Following the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, the disAbility community advocacy efforts paid off with the enactment of The Rehabilitation Act of 1973, extending protections to people with intellectual, developmental, and mental health related disAbilities. Soon after, in 1975, the first law to guarantee public education for all, including children with disAbilities, was enacted; in addition, in 1990, the Americans with DisAbilities Act (ADA) was signed as the first law to address discrimination against individuals with disAbilities, including those joining the workplace.

As laws advanced, the HR department worked to keep up with the changes. No longer was the HR representative identified in a paper-pushing role; rather, it was necessary to understand the laws and provide guidance to the management team on how to make sure that the organization was legally compliant. This marked the starting point of HR’s influence on leadership and culture, moving from a focus on aligning employees’ values and skills with organizational values and needs, to a focus on complying with the many regulations needed to improve the discrimination situation faced by many at that time.

Laws such as the ADA are still needed to address the stigma influence on hiring decisions but need to be, ironically, somewhat ambiguous in nature since they must allow implementation flexibility at the state level. As a result, the enactment of the ADA without clear implementation mandates also marks the starting point of emerging, unhealthy, and confusing organizational cultures and climates. Individuals began to dispute some of their colleagues’ positions within the organization as hiring decisions move from a primarily merit-based skill or knowledge-matching process to include demographic-based hiring criteria and meet legally mandated diversity quotas. Daniel Bell (1999), a student of post-industrialism, posited that while the original intent of Affirmative Action (AA) legislation was to eliminate discrimination, in fact, “the principle has changed from discrimination to representation” (p. 417). Even though for-profit entities that are not doing business with the US government are not required to follow the AA in hiring and retaining certain “minority quotas,” societal pressure compels HR and top-level executives to increase such “numbers” in their workforce. In return, this pressure pulls decision making away from purely meritocratic values on which the US society was built on. As a result, confusing perceptions of others’ skills and abilities create an uncertain environment in which employees’ decisions to engage in building relationships is skewed toward those that look alike, think alike, and offer a sense of comfort in perceived commonality. Ultimately, while complying with well-intentioned laws, the HR professionals can, albeit unintentionally, hurt their organization’s ability to develop its social capital, and benefit from the diversity that those employees bring into the workforce.

The ADA was intended to protect individuals with a disAbility from discrimination in the workplace and since its inception, the number of claims filed under the act show a steady increase (EEOC, 2018). Without the ADA, however, there was no way of knowing how many people were facing discriminatory actions. The more we know the more people can claim there is an issue. On the other hand, there are more violations today than in the past, because there are more individuals who qualify to receive accommodations under the ADA. Even with the high number of claims, however, only a small percentage qualifies as valid. This suggests that HR professionals may not be able to reconcile the diversity value brought in by employees with disAbilities and their need for accommodations. For purposes of discussion related to our main topic – that is PwDs in the workforce – diversity value is specific to the gains obtained by having employees with disAbilities and having a culture to accommodate their contributions. Extending the value of diversity to include all classifications of people is just as important to the authors but not the primary focus of this work.

Questions associated with what qualifies as a disAbility, as a reasonable accommodation, and when and who should bear the responsibility for providing them, means that the HR, the manager, or both, are only exacerbating the sense of uncertainty and anxiety felt around the employment of PwDs. This uncertainty further adds to disruption in the organizational culture from which no one benefits. We are going to argue for a more holistic approach to re-balance the focus on social capital-organizational values alignment and move our HR departments beyond compliance and confusion.

Identifying who is responsible for ensuring that a person with a disAbility is treated fairly and fully integrated in the social fabric of an organization is difficult. We know that it is everyone’s responsibility. We should all accept ownership in developing a culture that accommodates the PwD and associated changes needed to support engagement in healthy relationship development. To aid those who interact, care, or want to know more about working with a person with a disAbility, we have developed this book as a teaching tool to provide practical management solutions that will facilitate efforts to develop a healthy culture for all employees, supporting the learning and sharing that are critical to our organizations’ ability to adapt, and remain sustainable in a fast-changing society. Fig. 1 depicts the pendulum between compliance and job-skills needed to develop an Inclusive Management Structure. We will continue to use this figure as we add other dimensions to our discussion.

Let’s stop in and see how our HR professional, Jean, is doing based on our recent overview.

Discussion #2: In the beginning

Jean, would you agree that those who initially had difficulties welcoming Anne did not believe that she was the best person for the job?

Yes, it was hard for the supervisor and colleagues to believe that a young lady with Down syndrome would have the skills required to fulfill the receptionist job responsibilities. For a while, they had a hard time seeing the benefits that her employment brought to our company but in HR, we knew that we made the right choice and she was a very good match for her position.

Mary Parker Follett, a pioneer of management and organizational development, influenced generations of researchers and theorists with the concept that we should harness the benefits of human diversity while managing the relations formed by employees in the process of fulfilling their responsibilities. In this book, we incorporate Follett’s advice to develop processes that will allow HR professionals and organizational leaders to refocus their attention from the individual employee as a human capital resource to the person as part of an organizational network of relationships. At the relationship level, our employees can experience prejudice, resentment, stereotype threat, dissonance, desire to learn about each other or to isolate, empathy, and other emotions, which ultimately can result in alienation, conflict, or inclusion.

Fig. 1: An Inclusive Management Structure Where There is a Balance between What is Legally Required and What is Operationally Needed in the Workplace.

Follett’s contribution to management theory was recognized by President Theodore Roosevelt who valued her advice on matters related to managing non-government organizations. Unfortunately, for others in the business world, it took almost 100 years to see her ideas taking shape in organizational development and transformational leadership theory (Nelson, 2016). The Inclusive Management Strategy™ (IMS), introduced in this book, is much influenced by Follett’s vision. Specifically, managers should act as transformational leaders responsible for engaging employees in learning and capitalizing on each other’s differences while pursuing change as a process of co-creation dependent on individuals’ unique perspectives (Follett, 1995). However, people carrying stigma associated with their skin color, socioeconomic background, health conditions, or with disAbilities have no opportunity to contribute their perspectives when others do not believe in their potential. Changing negative perspectives and beliefs about one another happens through a learning process that provides those stigmatized a real opportunity to fight the negative stereotype, frequently associated prejudice.

The time has come to transform our human management processes from a transactional view of relationships to a more integrative view in which differences are valued and will benefit our organizations. Our professional experience and academic research show, unfortunately, that this is easier said than done. A 100 years later, after Follett first made her observations about the value of diversity, we still need to tackle the elephant in the room: how can our employees learn from those whose differences are viewed through a highly stigmatizing lens? How can we value the differences of a person with disAbilities when we may perceive them as less educated or less capable than the typical hire?

Differences and DisAbilities

A positive view of diversity in the workplace assumes that the differences brought in by employees have value and contribute to a collective creative capacity. But is this assumption transferrable to differences brought in by PwDs? So far, the disAbility label acts mostly as a barrier to employees’ ability to see people’s differences as potentially contributing to that creative capacity. We argue that yes, there is an increased understanding that leads to change in people’s perspective of abilities despite their disAbilities and when authentically included in our organizations, their contributions are valuable. We know that not all disAbilities are visually identifiable, and no two people, even with the same medical diagnosis, experience life the same. Rather, some disAbilities are hidden while others are more obvious, some are formally identified, and others go undiagnosed forever.

Without dispute, the contributions of Howard Hughes, Abraham Lincoln, Andy Warhol, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Darwin, George Gershwin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Einstein, and Betty Ford are accepted as valuable. What you might not know is that all those incredible individuals, like many others not included in Claudia Kalb’s (2016) book “Andy Warhol was a Hoarder,” were able to contribute despite differences that would currently label them as “with disAbilities.” Today, Einstein might be labeled as high-functioning autistic; Gershwin could be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); Darwin may be treated for extreme anxiety and panic attacks; and Lincoln for depression. Fortunately, the characteristics that would label them as PwDs today, did not prevent them from succeeding and contri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I: Respecting DisAbilities
• Part II: Culture Change = Mind Change
• Part III: Fairness and Threat – the Gatekeepers
• Part IV: The Transformational Learning Structure = A Mind-Changing Mechanism
• Part V: Empowering Learning Structures
• Part VI: Conclusion
• Appendix ADA, an Attorney Perspective
• References
• Index