Turn Your Disability Into an Advantage as a Business Leader

Summary:
Being blind or visually impaired doesn't have to be a barrier when you become a supervisor or manager of staff members who do -- or don't -- have a disability, if you follow these nine guidelines for effective leadership.

Build Skills as A Doer

Prepare Yourself as A Leader

Make the Break Between Doing and Managing

Establish Understandable Roles and Clear Lines of Authority for each Staff Member According To Their Interests and Experience

Use Teamwork to Capitalize on Strengths, Compensate for Weaknesses

Be Visible (and Aware of Perceptions)

Take Risks on Behalf of Your Staff

Show Appreciation, Celebrate Accomplishments

Cultivate an Effective Relationship With Your Boss


These nine guidelines come from my 36 years of experience in corporate communications -- from newsletter assistant to vice president -- for a Fortune 500 company. They are also based on my experience as a person with a disability who walks with crutches and speaks with difficulty.

I have had cerebral palsy since birth. No, I'm not blind -- yet -- but I think what I learned by taking risks and making all kinds of mistakes along the way is applicable to emerging leaders with all types of disabilities.


Build Skills as A Doer

Here's what I think is needed in business today: a committed person with proven leadership qualities and proven hands-on skills within a specialty occupation. That type of person will always be in short supply.

Why? Not everyone has the temperament to be both an effective leader and an effective practitioner. It takes time and commitment to develop both. But, the most effective leaders have somehow managed to acquire both sets of skills.

You can learn to become a doer and leader simultaneously, but you can seldom become an "official" leader without first becoming a doer. In a corporate setting, proving yourself as a doer is an essential first step. So, first cultivate patience and a bent toward deliberately honing your hands-on skills.

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Prepare Yourself as A Leader

Leadership is a deliberately honed set of skills that a person usually doesn't acquire without effort. Watch the leaders you admire. Discover why they are effective. You can then develop your leadership skills by trying these suggestions:

• Take courses in supervision, leadership, teamwork and interpersonal communication on a routine basis as part of your intentional learning efforts.
  
  
• Volunteer for leadership roles both in and outside your organization and local community.
  
  
• Add books about leadership to your reading list.
  
  
• Keep notes and files about what works and doesn't work for you.
  
  
• Discover and cultivate your leadership style.
  
  

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Make the Break Between Doing and Managing

Depending on the size of your staff and your organization as well as where you are in your personal development, you eventually need to separate your work into three categories: doing, managing and leading. Senior-level jobs entail much more leading than managing or doing. The majority of the work in mid-level jobs is managing people, programs and resources. Entry-level jobs involve mostly hands-on work.

Building a career around hands-on work is a viable option today. There are many meaningful, well-paid jobs in the new economy that do not require high-level managerial or leadership skills. But, if your career goal is a management and leadership position, you will need to make a break at some point in your career from purely hands-on work by following these tips:

• Keep track of how much time you spend doing, managing and leading in your daily planner.
  
  
• Make sure your job description accurately reflects how much time you are actually devoting to each of these three types of work.
  
  
• Gain experience in managing and leading by volunteering to work on special projects, special teams or work groups within your organization or within your community that will give you managerial and leadership experience.
  
  
• Document that experience for your boss and incorporate it into your updated resume.
  
  
• Think in terms of your organization's big picture and contribute your ideas, when it's appropriate, about how your job can help the organization realize its vision.
  
  

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Establish Understandable Roles and Clear Lines of Authority for each Staff Member According To Their Interests and Experience

Once you're in charge of a team, you'll likely find most of your time is spent initially on managing instead of leading. Clarifying roles, for instance, within your team is a managerial activity for building the platform from which you can exercise your leadership. Your role is to help manage relationships among the people on your staff -- not necessarily to manage individuals. Here's how to do that.

• Learn how to write an effective job description.
  
  
• Learn how to delegate authority and what can be delegated and what cannot.
  
  
• Build lines of authority that give staff members a great deal of autonomy but allow you to maintain control.
  
  
• Help the entire team understand those lines of authority.
  
  
• Update both job descriptions and lines of authority as your needs change.
  
  

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Use Teamwork to Capitalize on Strengths, Compensate for Weaknesses

Here's where your disability can be a source of strength for your team, but be careful because there will likely be someone within or outside your team who will, in some way, try to test how vulnerable you are due to your disability and how you handle that vulnerability. Here's what I recommend in building your team:

• Explain and interpret the organization's mission, vision and goals in terms that are meaningful to members of your team. This is a key skill in an era of "no corporate secrets."
  
  
• Use yourself (and your disability) as a example for your team of how to capitalize on strengths and compensate for weaknesses in helping your team carry out the organization's mission.
  
  
• Assign responsibilities according to individual strengths and interests instead of standardized, fill-in-the-box functions.
  
  
• Use those assignments as career development opportunities for those involved.
  
  
• Prepare for the end-run from someone within or outside your team who may challenge your authority because you appear to be vulnerable due to your visible or hidden disability (see Related Link).
  
  

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Be Visible (and Aware of Perceptions)

Now we're getting down to the nitty-gritty. These may be tough recommendations to carry out, but they are essential:

• Speak on behalf of your team in public and private venues, even when it may take extra effort due to your disability.
  
  
• Delegate responsibility for key spokesperson roles to another on your staff only when you have made it clear to staff inside and outside your team that you are tapping an inherent strength that individual possesses.
  
  
• Establish one-on-one relationships with key leaders in other segments of the organization. Network. Resist the urge to hide behind your desk or inside your cubicle.
  
  
• Exchange ideas with those key leaders about what is needed for the organization's continued success.
  
  
• Offer potential solutions to ongoing problems to others within the organization that are a product of your team's creativity and communicate those activities (and the feedback) to your team members.
  
  

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Take Risks on Behalf of Your Staff

Here are four tangible ways to demonstrate to members of your staff that, yes, you are an effective leader:

• Establish a channel of communication with the next level authority above you.
  
  
• Communicate your team's needs and positions on key issues both vertically and laterally within the organization.
  
  
• Document how you are speaking on behalf of the team and the results of those efforts.
  
  
• Put your team's needs and your organization's needs in perspective for your staff.
  
  

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Show Appreciation, Celebrate Accomplishments

This is the fun part of being a leader. You'll reap big benefits by remembering to:

• Express appreciation to individuals within and outside your team who, due to your disability, support you on the job through accommodations and day-to-day help.
  
  
• Show appreciation to other departments and organizational leaders who have helped your team meet its goals.
  
  
• Celebrate individual and team accomplishments in small ways that are significant to the team.
  
  

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Cultivate an Effective Relationship With Your Boss

A leader also cultivates an effective relationship with his or her boss. I've found there are four essential guidelines (there are probably more) for cultivating that relationship:

1. Share job descriptions and lines of authority and how they work together to carry out the responsibilities of your function.
   
   
2. Describe briefly how your team is helping achieve important organizational goals.
   
   
3. Make known outstanding accomplishments of individuals within your team.
   
   
4. Support your boss (always) in person, at meetings, within your organization and in public. That doesn't mean you won't disagree with your boss or have frank discussions with her. At the end of the day, your boss needs to know that you are on her side.

Becoming an effective leader with a disability requires a commitment to follow the same tried-and-true guidelines people without disabilities use. The difference is in learning how to turn your disability into an advantage through nuance and honesty with yourself and your colleagues.

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