Accommodations: With Barriers Broken, Brilliance Blooms.

Accommodations are not favors—they serve to remove barriers to success and help disabled employees perform their best. Yet, for many employees, receiving necessary accommodations is an uphill battle that might result in additional health or career?injuries. Employers often discourage employees from making accommodation requests, deny a significant percentage of requests, and may even retaliate.

Employers and managers who support accommodation requests, however, can truly help someone thrive.

The true stories below are excerpts from my book, The Canary Code: A Guide to Neurodiversity, Dignity, and Intersectional Belonging at Work. They illustrate just how much difference accommodations can make, and how managers can be change-makers.

DYSLEXIC AND SUPPORTED

In 2023, Charles Freeman FRSA was awarded an honorary doctorate in media from Solent University in the UK. As a media professional and executive director of Culture, Southeast—a nongovernmental entity supporting the UK Government’s

Department for Culture, Media and Sport—he worked to ensure the legacy of some of the most exciting, high-stakes sports and cultural events in the UK, such as the 2012 London Olympics, heritage film, and arts.

But in 1998, he had a crisis of confidence. After a year of working for Sport England and coming up with creative ways to fund underserved communities, he was promoted to the position of senior regional development manager. Around that very time, senior management introduced a new requirement of submitting detailed notes of all meetings. Simultaneously, secretarial/administrative assistant positions were eliminated, which meant managers had to generate the notes themselves.

Charles Freeman is dyslexic, and this requirement—and the resulting need to seek support and to get a new dyslexia assessment—reawakened his feelings of childhood trauma and struggling at school.

However, Charles’s boss David was very supportive. And when a new assessment confirmed that Charles was dyslexic, he received funding from the UK Access to Work program to pay for a support worker. This was a major win-win, because this funding also allowed Charles’s administrative assistant to keep her job and continue supporting him for the next 12?years through three jobs. And Charles could focus on the creative work he does best.

In addition, David also encouraged Charles to engage in job crafting and build his career on his strengths. A major part of this was getting a master’s degree in public policy at Birmingham University, for which Charles received a year of unpaid leave. His support—both the funding and the encouragement for job crafting—laid a foundation for a productive and successful career.

DYSLEXIC AND STIGMATIZED

Salomon Chiquiar-Rabinovich is the founder and co-chair of the Boston Bar Association (BBA) Committee for Attorneys with Disabilities, the chair of the Attorneys with Disabilities Section of the Hispanic National Bar Association, and a member of the BBA Diversity and Inclusion Section Steering Committee. He also served as president of the Massachusetts Association of Hispanic Attorneys.

Salomon is a highly skilled attorney who was diagnosed with dyslexia as a child and was not expected to complete school. Nevertheless, he persisted and obtained a law degree from Georgetown University through hard work and academic accommodations. Throughout his 30-year career, Chiquiar-Rabinovich succeeded as a lawyer with creativity and committed concentration. And yet he also faced stigma and discrimination.

Salomon needed the same type of administrative support that Charles Freeman received—yet Salomon was repeatedly refused this support, even though attorneys with other types of disabilities were provided administrative help. Eventually, Salomon hired his own support worker for a few hours a week—for which he was punished by first having his permission to work remotely suspended and later being fired.

Salomon continued practicing law at a different firm, but he also developed an even stronger passion for inclusion advocacy. He earned an additional masters’ degree in leadership with a focus on DEI from Boston College.

The contrast between Charles’s and Salomon’s stories underscores the importance of accommodations and the role of national-level differences in approaches to supporting neurodivergent and disabled workers. As Salomon put it,

“From the academic literature and my colleagues in the labor employment legal field in the UK, it is clear that they are much more advanced in their DEI achievements and strategies. Language differences are significant. For example, in the UK, they use “reasonable adjustments” instead of “reasonable accommodations.” The difference is not subtle and should not be lost in semantics. An adjustment could be compared to drivers adjusting their rearview mirrors or car seats. You adjust “simply because we’re all different, and you want to make your drive for your work comfortable so you can be productive.”

*****

I could not have made up these contrasting dyslexia at work stories if I tried. But there are many, many disability at work stories - and unfortunately, too often they illustrate the pattern of resistance faced by disabled employees. Employers often hide behind cost concerns and rigid "rules" to deny reasonable accommodations, perpetuating a cycle of exclusion.

To truly create inclusive workplaces, organizations must move beyond performative inclusion statements and focus on true change. This means, among other types of action, actively dismantling the barriers that prevent disabled employees from thriving. Supporting people with job-matching and job-crafting, de-toxifying organizational environments, and providing accommodations are all elements of unlocking human potential.

When barriers to performance are broken, human brilliance blooms.

Newsletter items:

?? Check out my podcast episode, Workplace Design for Neuroinclusion, for the Association for the Association for Talent Development (ATD) with the wonderful Ann Parker .

?? Have you seen my Psychology Today article on a hot topic - framing autism as a superpower or disability? Check it out: Healing the Invalidation: The Complex Truth of Autism.

?? Fresh off the press! HR Brew just published an interview with me - A better workplace for neurodivergent employees is a better workplace for all. Thank you, Mikaela Cohen!

?????? And, of course, check out The Canary Code: A Guide to Neurodiversity, Dignity, and Intersectional Belonging at Work, which has been listed among the 2024 Top 10 Best New Management Books by Thinkers50, the global authority on management.

Be well! Be safe!