Explore how traditional definitions of leadership reinforce systemic barriers for disabled employees, and why challenging these norms is both a disability justice imperative and a business advantage.
For National Disability Employment Awareness Month, we’re looking at how employers can better recognize talent across their workforce, especially talent that traditional systems often miss.
October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month, a time to recognize the value, skill, and leadership disabled people bring to the workforce. This year’s theme, “Celebrating Value and Talent,” gives employers a useful challenge: don’t just celebrate disabled employees after they succeed. Look at whether your workplace is designed to recognize their talent in the first place.
That includes leadership pathways, stretch assignments, promotions, professional development, mentoring, decision-making, and influence. Belonging is not only about being hired. It is about having real access to opportunity once you are here.
Most workplaces have an unofficial picture of what “high potential” looks like. It often includes people who are highly visible, quick to speak in meetings, comfortable networking, willing to take on extra assignments, and skilled at promoting their accomplishments. Many traditional career-success resources name similar traits, including communication, leadership, networking, and visibility.
Those qualities can matter in some jobs. But many workplaces treat them as proof of leadership potential, even when they are really just unwritten social rules. That is where ableism shows up.
When employers reward the person who speaks first, networks easily, reads the room quickly, or performs confidence in a familiar way, they may be rewarding neurotypical communication norms. That can exclude many neurodivergent employees, not because they cannot do the job, but because they do not perform work in the style the organization has decided to value.
It's also bad business. When organizations overlook people who think differently, they lose problem-solving capacity, institutional knowledge, process improvement, and innovation. They also risk spending time and money managing the wrong problem: treating difference as deficiency instead of asking whether the workplace, manager, or process is getting in the way of performance.
This is especially harmful when “executive presence” or “executive material” is judged through personality, polish, charisma, or comfort with informal workplace politics. Those standards often have little to do with whether someone can think strategically, solve problems, manage complexity, build trust, or deliver strong work.
For example:
Too often, those differences are treated as performance problems instead of access issues, management issues, or culture issues.
A 2024 survey cited by the Group for Autism, Insurance, Investment and Neurodiversity found that neurodivergent employees were more likely than neurotypical employees to be placed on a performance improvement plan or face disciplinary action. The same source found that 20% of neurodivergent respondents had never received a promotion, compared with 0% of neurotypical peers in that survey.
That is not just an inclusion concern. It is a talent-management failure.
Companies cannot afford to misread talent. Hiring, training, performance management, turnover, and stalled productivity all cost money. So does promoting the wrong people because they look the part, while overlooking employees who are already improving systems, reducing errors, strengthening customer insight, or solving problems others miss.
Research from Accenture, Disability, and the American Association of People with Disabilities found that companies leading in disability inclusion outperformed peers financially, including higher revenue, net income, and economic profit. Their 2023 update found that disability inclusion leaders earned 1.6 times more revenue, 2.6 times more net income, and 2 times more economic profit than other companies in the study.
In other words, recognizing disabled talent is not charity. It's sound business strategy.
If workplaces are serious about recognizing talent, they need to define what they are actually looking for.
Leadership potential should be based on job-relevant competencies such as judgment, strategic thinking, follow-through, problem-solving, trust-building, clear communication, process improvement, measurable results, and decisions that support the mission. The Center for Creative Leadership identifies core leadership skills such as self-awareness, communication, influence, and learning agility.
Once expectations are clear, managers can look for evidence across the workforce. Sometimes leadership looks like speaking confidently in a room. Sometimes it looks like writing the proposal that gets the team unstuck. Sometimes it looks like documenting a process so the next person does not have to struggle. Sometimes it looks like asking the uncomfortable question that prevents harm later.
A better talent system starts with better questions:
Belonging is the goal. That's why we created the Recognition Gap Audit & Toolkit. It gives employers a practical way to examine where their talent-development practices may be overlooking disabled employees through a self-rating scale and best practices.
When employers move beyond outdated ideas about what talent looks like, they often find employees who have been contributing in important ways all along. The work is to build systems that can see that talent, support it, and create real pathways for it to grow. That is how we move closer to the world Relay is working toward: one where All Disabled People Belong. Everywhere.