Disability Inclusion: Lessons from Strictly Come Dancing

On 3 December, the world marked the UN’s International Day of People with Disabilities. According to the UN, an estimated 1.3 billion people experience significant disability. This represents 16% of the world’s population, or 1 in 6 of us. I have been reflecting on which factors build disability inclusion and which ones can get in the way. As an employer of disabled people, it’s important to have a robust reasonable adjustments policy and to deliver on that in a timely and efficient way. However, I think we can also get stuck in a reactive response to disability inclusion and forget that fundamentally changing attitudes and expectations is a big part of the story. It’s also important to think about whose stories get told, who is prepared to listen to them and what we learn as a result.

Strictly Come Dancing, a celebrity dancing competition, has been running for 20 years on the BBC in the UK and has had its share of ups and downs recently in terms of the quality of care for contestants. What has struck me and many people in the UK this year, has been the inclusion of its first blind contestant, comedian Chris McCausland (spoiler alert coming if you haven’t watch the series yet!). Strictly has included disabled contestants in several series, including in 2021, when actress Rose Ayling-Ellis was the first deaf contestant to win the competition. Her routine in which she and her dance partner danced in silence as a tribute to the deaf community won a British Academy Television Award for must-see moment in 2022. Through the programme, she brought British Sign Language to a new audience. Following on from her, this year reality TV star Tasha Gouri took part as a cochlear implant wearer and there was little question about her potential as a deaf contestant to dance to an outstanding level. Expectations had been raised, perhaps due to the visibility and success of the previous deaf contestant and Tasha also got to the final through her absolutely standout dancing.

Chris McCausland was registered blind after losing his sight to retinitis pigmentosa in his 20s and 30s. He turned down appearing in the Strictly show more than once but took the plunge into the competition this year, as the series’ first blind contestant. From the start, he challenged expectations of what a blind person can achieve in dance. The judges were vocal about how little they had thought would be possible for him. He rarely received the very top marks each episode, but as his professional dance partner and teacher Diane Buswell pointed out, he couldn’t watch what his competitors were doing, learn the moves from a video or practice in front of a mirror (although he did quip at one point that this was part of his practice routine). Expectations were low and Chris consistently exceeded them. The public vote is a huge factor in the programme and he was saved a couple of times from being in an elimination dance off due to the high level of support for him.

As a story, it’s perhaps not surprising how it ended. Chris sped through to the final, featuring one dance with a ‘black out’ sequence when the whole auditorium was plunged into darkness, echoing Rose Ayling-Ellis’s emotional stand out moment of silence. When it came to who was going to lift the ‘glitterball’ trophy after the public vote, not many were too surprised – Chris and Diane were the worthy winners. Tears and jubilations all round!

However, what were our expectations at the start of the series and would reasonable adjustments have helped to adjust those as well? Chris turned down the chance to dance with a silent audience so he could better hear instructions from Diane – he wanted to be buoyed up by the electric studio atmosphere, just like the other contestants. He’s made the point in interviews since, that it’s not blind people that need inspiring. According to him, the biggest benefit to everybody is to change people’s attitudes to disability. He achieved what he did because he worked extremely hard, had innate musicality and courage and was blessed with a talented teacher. Most of all, he was given the chance to participate in the first place. He made the point that disabled people can of course defy expectations but, importantly, with opportunity and the right support in place. Reasonable adjustments can provide the right support – but the opportunity has to be there. In 2025, I would like to see this at the top of every employer’s agenda to create more of those opportunities. The results may well defy your expectations.

IGPP Race Inclusion Event, May 2022

In May 2022, I joined the IGPP Race Inclusion Event.

According to IGPP, a BITC Report showed under-representation of minority ethnic groups in employment still remains an issue, and minority groups only take 6% of high-level positions in the public sector. Increasingly, more organisations have reported ethnicity pay gaps, with the majority of ethnic minority employees still earning less than their white counterparts overall. Furthermore, according to a Route2 study (2020), 37% percent of minority ethnic workers have been bullied, abused, or experienced racial discrimination at the hands of their employer. 19% have experienced discrimination in the form of being denied training or promotion.

The Second Annual Race Inclusion and Diversity in the Workplace 2022 event provided organisations with practical and actionable insights to determine the next steps in their race related inclusivity and diversity journey. Through a combination of policy updates and case study examples, delegates received a range of information on topics such as encouraging company-wide inclusive leadership, addressing ethnicity pay gaps, attracting, recruiting and maintaining ethnic minority talent, and developing new models of diversity practice.

Jason Ghaboos, Deputy Director of Civil Service Inclusion discussed how he wanted people from diverse backgrounds to thrive in public service. They have set up a new strategy to tackle bullying, harassment and discrimination and aim to recognise talent from wherever it comes. They also want to move away from siloed D&I to a mainstreaming approach which is evidence led and delivery focused.

The Civil service is focusing on key aspects of the employee lifecycle, using data and evidence from those areas. For example, they know that they have better representation of ethnic minority staff in lower grades than in higher grades. Their key priorities are recruitment, progression and lived experience and have found that talent programmes, sponsorship and mentoring are effective.

Embedding sponsorship for ethnic minority staff helps to remove barriers to progression, although so far this has worked best when it’s informal. They have learnt to establish clear expectations, set up good matches and track impact. Data dashboards help to understand recruitment gaps and sharing lived experience tackles myths and equips and empowers line managers.

They are keen to walk the walk, not talk the talk, and Jason Ghaboos feels that the horizon has much hope. To tackle the devastating effect of discrimination and work place culture, we must be proactive, constantly campaign and take action. They plan to embrace pay gap reporting and aim for measures that are successful and sustained.

Dr Darren Ralph, West Midlands Police, spoke about intersectionality and overlapping systems of oppression, such as class, gender and race. There is not always protection in law for intersectional identities and it’s hard to know where to start and stop with policies. That’s why we tend to put people in boxes when we formulate policy.

Shumailla Dar, Harrow Council, discussed wanting to provide a voice to ethnic minority staff – previously they had just one employee group that covered everyone. This has created a space for honest and constructive dialogue. Remote working allowed for more confidential discussions via Teams. Not all workers had devices, so they did do some face to face meetings, plus drop ins for front facing workers.

They commissioned an independent review and internal data collection exercise on workforce profile and gender and ethnicity pay gaps to identify trends, including a staff race survey plus 1:1 interviews and focus groups. The report and the response from the council was published. This has been a useful blueprint for future work on EDI to make sure the workforce represents the community it serves.

Raising the profile of black staff was very important for example by marking Black History Month with webinars, the Steven Lawrence Day and flying the Windrush flag. A listening exercise by the EDI team has led to putting new policies and interventions in place, such as a race equality action plan, guidance for managers, a zero tolerance statement and anti-racism training. They have set up a diversity talent programme to accelerate progression at all grades, especially to first leadership positions.

Bell Riberio-Addy, MP pointed out that while voluntary ethnicity pay gap data sharing is helpful, only 13 of the FTSE 100 revealed their figures. Overall, the ethnicity pay gap is about 2% but this is much wider for certain groups e.g. Pakistani/Bangladishi, black men. In his view, not providing mandatory pay gap information should result in fines.

Darrell Coker from Flair summarised where we are today in terms of race equity. He outlined some common mistakes in EDI practice and recommended four steps to racial equity. He sees a number of pitfalls that organisations fall in to when trying to address this.

Pitfalls:

• Grouping together EDI initiatives e.g. surveys
• Focusing on the wrong types of data (or no data at all) to measure progress and understand pain points. For example, diversity of representation is just one of the parts of racial equity. Some of the most diverse organisations still have issues with behaviours. How do we capture the views of those who don’t engage with focus groups?
• Poor prioritisation of solutions

For Flair, there are four key steps to addressing racial inequity.

• Discover where racial inequality exists e.g. by listening to lived experiences
• Understand what interventions are needed and how to apply them
• Demonstrate commitment by benchmarking and tracking progress over time
• Benchmark your progress year on year and how you compare to other organisations

The tools you can employ through Flair are:

• Question – using science backed surveys e.g. levels of racist behaviour
• Compare – using smart dashboards e.g. strengths and improvement areas
• Solve – drill down into the improvement areas using suggestions for actions taken by other organisations
• Repeat – track year on year

Discussing race equality at work

Equality data is not always something that people feel comfortable to share at work, particularly when it comes to mental health. Disability and faith or belief are particular areas where people feel their data might be used against them, especially if they have experienced harassment or discrimination in the past and don’t know where the data is going. Organisations need to build trust and provide strong stories around evidence based policy to support data sharing.

The fear of being impolite can get in the way of discussions, particularly about identities that you don’t share yourself. It helps to give managers a framework on how to do this so they can create psychological safety where difficult conversations can take place.

Others urge being realistic about target setting – only try to ‘eat the elephant’ in small chunks! Set up milestones on your way to the big targets. For managers, the top priority for recruitment is often speed and then they will then lament the resulting lack of diversity later. Be wholistic and strategic in your approach, rather than flip flopping between priorities from month to month.

The panellists recommended prioritising your actions based on evidence and don’t wait for platinum data before you start. Lead by example, be the change you want to see because this can lead to a ripple effect. Be brave!

Coaching skills for managers (also works with teenagers)

I recently attended an extremely early morning mini workshop on coaching skills at the British Council with Margot Day. Working across time zones is stimulating but sometimes leads to some rather early starts!

What is coaching?

Margot introduced us to what coaching is – and isn’t. Coaching is definitely not psychotherapy or telling people what to do. It does not involve addressing a skill or knowledge gap through training, nor is it mentoring. Mentoring and coaching are often used interchangeability, but mentoring is more about sharing your personal knowledge, advice and experience with a mentee.

So what is coaching, now that we know what it isn’t? For Margot, coaching aims to stimulate critical and creative thinking. “Coaching is about deep listening skills and asking powerful questions,” advised Margot. “As a coach, you will address the area that your coachee needs to help them get unstuck. It’s not about focusing on the topics that interest you.”

Finding a coach that works for you can take trial and error. It is probably worth booking a few ‘chemistry’ sessions with 2 or 3 coaches to find someone you click with. I found my own coach through a careers event at CamAWiSE, the Cambridge network for women in Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths and Medicine in industry and academia. Looking for support on how to take my next career step, I was impressed by my coach’s ability to focus in on the consistent themes in my outwardly rather random career path.

Coaching as a manager

According to Margot, coaching as a manager involves cultivating a growth mindset as well as developing a skillset. Managers can opt to take a coaching approach with their team members to help solve issues that crop up. In a coaching conversation, it is important to ask rather than tell. Instead of jumping straight to providing an answer, ask about what worked or did not work last time a similar problem arose? Aim to have coaching conversations with your team members at least once a month, so that you can build on progress. Remember that giving someone the answer to a work-related issue may be a temptingly fast way to address the problem, but the next time a similar challenge comes along, you will need to get involved all over again. Taking a coaching approach to problem solving can save time in the long run and lead to greater empowerment and career development for your team members.

Coaching models

There are several coaching models that you can follow as a manager. GROW, or T-GROW, created by John Whitmore is one of these. The key parts of GROW are:

• Establishing the Goal
• Checking the current Reality
• Exploring Options
• Identifying a Way forward

You can also add T for Topic at the top of the conversation, to set up the initial focus for your discussion.
When establishing the goal, it’s important to ask lots of open questions. What does success look like? What is your SMART objective? When you move on to understanding the current reality, don’t let your coachee get stuck in their description. Get the information you need to understand the situation and then summarise it back to them. Once you have established the essentials, move forwards to exploring options.

The coachee should be the one who comes up with the options for resolving the issue, not the coach. Prompt them by asking what else they could do, if they get stuck for ideas. Ideally you are looking for 3 possible solutions. Keep pushing for innovative answers and then ask them which one they would like to move forwards with first. Let the coachee choose their preferred option, not what you think is the right one! The next step is to discuss an action plan towards realising the favoured option. Help them to identify what resources they might need, explore what might go wrong along the way and what strategies they might use to address this. How would they de-escalate a difficult situation if it occurs?

Making coaching work

Margot warns that most managers will revert to ‘telling’ rather than coaching at first – it’s pretty engrained for most of us! Just remember to stick with open ended questions and have a kick start question tucked away – “and what else?” is a good one. Starting with a “what” question is usually a helpful way to encourage open responses.

Another question model you can use is TED:

• Tell me more… e.g. about what happened
• Explain to me… e.g. what happened, what was the impact
• Describe for me… e.g. the situation, the outcome you would like

Encourage your coachee to focus on the real challenge in a situation, such as a looming deadline. Ask one question at a time and avoid ‘machine gun’ questioning. This is particularly important for neurodiverse staff who may need additional time to process a question. Leave plenty of thinking time and listen deeply to the response. Don’t assume what someone’s answer will be.

“There should be no assumptions, no judgement and no advice,” summarised Margot. “You can also listen to what is not being said, by observing body language,” she continued. “It’s very difficult not to judge, because we can all imagine what we would do in a situation and we have a tendency to think that we are right!”

Margot’s top tip for coaching is to listen to understand, not to be understood!

In future, I am definitely planning to take a more consciously coach-like approach to management conversations. The same day as the course, I had a golden opportunity to try it out when my teenage son brought a problem to me that he’d been struggling with at school. Instead of immediately dishing out probably bad advice and roundly telling him what he should do, I listened more deeply and prompted him with open questions. To my surprise, he opened up much more and came up with several clear solutions on his own, ones I would not have suggested. Clearly, this is a skillset that I could use beyond the work environment. I’m still going to be telling him exactly when to go bed though, that is not an open question situation!

Improving equality data disclosure – how, what and why

This week I joined enei and their Behavioural Insights Team for an overview on diversity monitoring and ways to improve the quality of organisational diversity data.

For many of us working in equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI), understanding the impact of equality action plans is key to honing new approaches to tackling underrepresentation and discrimination in the workplace. Equality data, such as information on the demographics of our staff, is essential for identifying gaps in areas such as recruitment, pay and progression and assessing the impact of the actions we take to address these. In many organisations, disclosure rates for protected characteristics such as race or ethnicity, sexuality or religion can be extremely low.

The enei Behavioural Insights Team explained the importance of data and diversity monitoring before going on to consider the steps that can be taken to help improve participation levels by staff. In their experience, when employees have not acted on invitations to provide their diversity data, in the vast majority of cases this is due to practicalities. For example, the process to provide details may be unclear or difficult to find, or the questions and categories may be confusing. Many internal campaigns to improve disclosure of personal data focus on changing attitudes towards data collection, rather than addressing the key pain points in providing the data. It is also important of course to give clear reasoning on why data is being gathered to address attitudes, but this can be a relatively small reason for data not being provided. The greater the atmosphere of trust within an organisation the better but it is important to also remember that employees have every right not to share their data if they choose.

ENEI’s recommendations for collecting data are:

• Communicate. Speak to staff to understand their concerns about data disclosure and how this blocks their behaviour
• Keep it simple. Prioritise and address concerns as succinctly as possible while remaining transparent, for example by emphasising that few people have access to the data. Communications should be as short and clearly written as possible, sent out by a person not a general account. You can provide additional information as links
• Make it direct. Make the ‘call to action’ very prominent, link the disclosure to a particular campaign if there is one and always give a deadline (even if this is not a real deadline)
• Remove frictions. Make the disclosure process as easy as possible, for example include the link in an email and try the process out yourself to test it.
• Send reminders. Most people will click on the link straight away, or not at all. Send some reminders at different times but allow people to unsubscribe so they are not overwhelmed or irritated
• Use standardised questions (or test them first). The Office of National Statistics questions and responses have been heavily user tested, so it is good practice to use these, especially for a more nuanced dataset on disability. For outside the UK, you should comply with local legislation and use question sets that reflect the local community.

Reminding staff to provide data is just one side of the equation. You should also give careful thought to processes for monitoring and analysing that data.

The enei’s recommendations on getting data monitoring right are:

• Consider frequency. Establish the appropriate frequency for meaningful insight on progress for your organisation. For example, you might want to carry out an annual deep dive analysis of all data, but take a light touch approach for more monitoring regular processes, such as recruitment
• Expertise. Ensure that the people analysing the data have the right quantitative analysis skills and understand the EDI challenges well enough to interpret the findings in a meaningful way. Analysis should take account of trends, significance and benchmarking.
• Accountability. Accountability and responsibility for moving the needle on equality data should run right through from senior leaders with overall responsibility, to managers implementing actions at local levels.
• Action planning. Use insights from the data to inform and revise your EDI action plan on a regular basis
• Feedback. If you run staff surveys or gather EDI data, make sure you feed back to your employees in a timely way on what you have discovered (in an anonymised way), including how you will respond to these findings and when.
• Evaluate. Use data to understand the impact and progress of your EDI initiatives. Make sure you give time for actions to take effect and cross check your data from more than one source, for example by gathering qualitative data such as from focus groups, as well as quantitative data.

Following these common sense approaches can give a significant boost to the quality and quantity of your organisational data as well contributing to the effectiveness and impact of your EDI initiatives.