The Canberra Business Podcast
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The Canberra Business Podcast
Building Australia's First Disability Leadership Network
What happens when we stop seeing disability and leadership as contradictory terms? Christina Ryan, founder of the Disability Leadership Institute and ACT nominee for Australian of the Year, is transforming how we understand professional achievement and organisational excellence.
During our candid conversation, Christina shares the profound moment that sparked her mission: realising that disabled people weren't being believed simply because they were disabled. This revelation led her to create Australia's first organisation focused exclusively on disability leadership – addressing a critical gap that had been overlooked worldwide. What began as a modest enterprise has blossomed into the country's largest professional network for disabled leaders.
For entrepreneurs, Christina offers refreshingly practical advice from her journey building a successful social enterprise with minimal resources. Listen in!
This episode is supported by CareSuper.
Hello and welcome to the Canberra Business Podcast. I'm Greg Harford, your host from the Canberra Business Chamber, and today I'm joined by Christina Ryan, who founded the Disability Leadership Institute in 2016 and was an ACT nominee this year for Australian of the Year. Christina, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thanks, greg, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Now you founded the Disability Leadership Institute what nine years ago now? To address issues around professional development services for people with disabilities and your role there. Your goal is to kind of foster leadership and career development. So tell us a little bit about your journey and what led you to become such a prominent advocate for disability leadership.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm not an advocate anymore. I used to be an advocate. I've given it away. I've given it away. Now I'm a leadership coach, but I was an advocate. I've spent most of my life making change, doing things to make the world a more equal place, and I was running a disability advocacy organisation. And they're the organisations they're all very small, about 70 of them across the country that support disabled people to be heard, get alongside them, people who live in some of those segregated environments like group houses and sheltered workshops, and so we're running a team of advocates and we were just seeing the same thing over and over again every day. Every day and I don't know if your listeners would recall, but there were two separate Four Corners episodes talking about appalling violence and abuse that was happening in group houses that people were living in and institutional environments, and they're the places that we were working in. It's pretty tough stuff. It's really hard, not very glamorous at all. It's actually the hidden world that people prefer not to think about in disability.
Speaker 2:We were campaigning for the Royal Commission during this period. We knew something like that needed to happen and those Four Corners episodes were saying the same thing over and over again and telling us what we were seeing every day and they were just saying it over and over again, and it was particularly particularly the second episode. There was a moment where the reporter who'd put the episode together talked about how she didn't initially believe the advocates who told her these stories. They were mainly people working in New South Wales and Victoria, not the ACT, but it was all the same stories and she didn't really believe it. She thought that the advocates were being dramatic and making the stories sound a bit more ghastly than they really were, until she went in and she realised that there was no need for that, that these stories were true, that this was actually how people were living. It was really tough stuff and it is hard, it's very tough stuff and you're pretty much the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.
Speaker 2:That's the story of a lot of community organisations in Canberra and we were sitting there at the team meeting the day after the second one of these episodes and my team were distressed by it. Of course it was what we were seeing every day. Most of my team were distressed by it. Of course it was what we were seeing every day. Most of my team were disabled people, which is very unusual for disability advocacy organisations. Most of them are run by families, carers, people around disabled people. Very few are run by disabled people and one of my team just threw a head back and said why don't they believe us? We keep telling them this is happening and I had one of those moments of clarity you have in your life where I realised that the reason they don't believe us is because we're disabled people. And it was what the reporter was saying. Everybody thinks we're making a big thing of it, that we're dramatising it, that we're talking it up.
Speaker 2:And it is shocking stuff, but it also is how we marginalise people in our community. It's not just disabled people, but people generally. We can actually, it's easier for people to look away or to think oh, that's only one case, it's not a systemic issue, and it was that moment where I realised that they don't listen to us. We're disabled people. That's actually about where's the power, where is the space that we are in the rooms of people who make decisions, who allocate the budgets, who decide what will get the media, the political, the general public coverage of anything? And it wasn't us, and so the answer is actually equality. Now, duh, duh. I mean that's a big picture change. You know, I'm not frightened of something big. I've been doing that for a while, so no pressure there then, and I realised at that point that what we really needed was disabled people in leadership, in positions of power and decision-making in the rooms where things are decided, where it matters, and we're not there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this was the catalyst to form the Disability Leadership Institute.
Speaker 2:Absolutely it was and I spoke. I spent a couple of months. I talked to a number of colleagues, trusted friends in the community and others, and we realised that over about 20 years there had been something like half a dozen pilot projects on disability leadership in Australia nationally. There was nothing else. There was no consistent work being done. There was nowhere that you could go. We've got lots of work being done on women's leadership, which needs to happen. We need to have gender equality in our leadership spaces.
Speaker 2:There's some really good work being done in the First Nations community and there's a particularly good First Nations Leadership Institute, but there was absolutely nothing being done on disabled people having access to leadership development. Community of practice the sort of thing that you and I would look at and think that the company directors do, for example, they're a community of practice. The sort of thing that you and I would look at and think that the company directors do, for example, they're a community of practice. They're a bunch of people who have all got their company directors diploma and they sit on boards and they talk about what it's like to do that and what good practice looks like. Absolutely nothing like that for disabled people in Australia. So Disability Leadership- Institute.
Speaker 1:So so tell us about the institute. What is it that you do, and how big have you grown? And what's the journey been over the last nine years?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well fast, I'd have to say. It was the classic example of right place, right time, one of those blue ocean stories. And so the minute we were, you know, we started. I mean, it was me back in the early days. The minute I got out there and started talking about this and setting it up, people wanted in, people wanted a piece of it. The thing that did surprise me was it wasn't just Australians, it was actually colleagues all over the planet in the disability community. Yes, because there's not much out there generally, and in fact at the time we were the only organisation that was specifically focused on disability leadership on the planet. Now there's two or three others, but it was the one.
Speaker 1:So you were really groundbreaking in terms of what you were doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, hey, disabled people don't do leadership. Greg, we're not supposed to be in those places. So we started off thinking we'd be doing a lot of consulting work and I would have to say I put together an advisory board not all disabled people and we thought that was it. But then you've got to be able to monetise. You've got to actually be able to get out there and earn money at what you're doing. It's not just about feeling good and deciding that something needs to happen If you can't generate income and sustain a business. And the Disability Leadership Institute is a private company, we're not a charity, we're not a community organisation, we are, in fact, a profit-making social enterprise and so we have to generate income.
Speaker 2:And we rapidly realised that making money out of disabled people is a bit fraught, because half of all disabled people don't work. The ones that do are often in part-time and poorly paid jobs, and actually it we were wrong. Within about six months, I had employed somebody actually it was about four months and we had all sorts of people governments around the country, other corporates coming to us and asking us if we could run programs for them, all based on the fact that if you Google disability and leadership. You got us. We were it. I get an enormous amount of spam saying you know, improve your SEO. And of course it's all rubbish. I don't need it because every time you.
Speaker 2:Google, disability and leadership. You get us anyway. So I thought go away, don't need you. So we were really lucky right place, right time and we're still here, right.
Speaker 1:So the vision of kind of doing lots of consultancy work morphed into running programs and training, essentially for corporate we always had an idea that we'd run training and do that.
Speaker 2:But it actually has become our central space is our leadership programs, and we now run those not just ourselves openly, but we also run them in-house.
Speaker 2:So big corporates, universities, get us to come in and do a leadership program for them and that might involve some group sessions and coaching, individual coaching on the side. But the other big thing that we didn't expect, the one that was really out of the blue for us, was the membership space, and I was referring earlier to the Institute of Company Directors and how they work, and I've been around them for 20, 25 years now, as many of us have, and watched how they'd developed and how they'd built and I thought that's not a bad sort of model looking at something a bit like that. And suddenly people were coming out of the woodwork. There are disability leaders. They're all over corporate, corporate government running their own businesses. We have a high level of self-employed entrepreneurs, business people, consultants, and they all wanted something. They needed that sense of not being alone, of having a community of practice, of having a network, and we've actually now turned into the largest professional network of disability leaders in the country, probably in the world but in Australia.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, it's amazing. That's an awesome experience, awesome result. So how big is your team now? You started out just you employed someone four months in. How's it going?
Speaker 2:It depends on where the flow of things is, but I've just this week, literally this week employed two deputy CEOs, so I've had to split myself into three.
Speaker 1:Fantastic Always hard to be three people, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, it's sort of. You know, we're a bit of a collective executive team, which I'm a bit excited by, but we've got people all over the country. Everyone works remotely, Even our Canberra folk. You know we get together for breakfast occasionally, the Canberra-based people, but we've got about I think, eight of us at the moment working on different things, including, you know, a research project that we're doing with Sydney Uni. We're looking at what good employment data looks like for disability, so we're really excited by where that might take us.
Speaker 2:We've got people on our coaching panel. We now have a panel of coaches, so it's not just me anymore and we have enough coaching business to farm that out to several people. And all of these are disabled people. We only employ disabled people highly experienced. We've got several ex-government HR professionals who help us out with things like our membership space and our general operations and keeping our systems and processes going. And, of course, because we're a social enterprise, we're currently in the space of setting up our social impact framework, Because if you haven't got social impact reporting, you may as well go home and sit under a rock.
Speaker 1:That's right. So where's your focus in your social impact reporting?
Speaker 2:It's interesting because we have disparate sort of client groups. So we've got our members, obviously, and our members come. They want a good membership experience, so we need to know that that's working. That's important. We need to know that people feel that they are no longer alone and that they are actually developing as leaders. But we also have all the people who employ come to us as client organisations who want to know that the work that we do is actually producing good leadership outcomes.
Speaker 2:You know, if you sign someone up for a leadership program that costs a fair bit of money because they always do then you need to know that that person's going to go back to your organisation and it was worth the expense or the investment one should say and so we need to be able to report on those things, and what we're finding is that the challenge of that is actually being able to structure a reporting framework across all of those things so that we're not doing so much data collection and reporting that it involves an entire first full-time person to us, because they know that the people who are members of the institute are part of that network, of that professional network, and that that means that there's a certain amount of cachet that goes with that, and so people are understood to be of a certain level, a certain competence if they're members of the Disability Leadership Institute.
Speaker 1:It's like a badge of honour really Well, it is Sort of a qualification. You can get a lapel pinch, is there? Very nice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1:So, in your experience, what are the biggest barriers preventing disabled people from stepping into leadership roles?
Speaker 2:I'll be brutally frank, greg, because I'm a bit blunt. I do the blunt Prejudice. It's as simple as that. There's still you know it's the classic unconscious bias thing. People still don't see that putting those two words in the same sentence is actually something that happens naturally. And you know I first did that back in 2016.
Speaker 2:I put disability and leadership in the same sentence and it's actually changed the national conversation. Governments now use that term. It didn't exist before. Nobody even thought of it as a thing. All of the government policy and programs are focused on entry-level employment. They don't actually have any leadership stuff at government level that they're focused on. It doesn't exist.
Speaker 2:And so there's this real assumption that disabled people aren't in positions of leadership because they're not actually in the workforce at all and that we all just need to get a job and one day we'll get there, hot tip. 30 years ago they were saying the same thing. So that's not the answer. What we know in diversity circles is that to change the look of a workforce, to change how it operates and to change the culture, you actually need to be looking at the leadership. We've learned that from gender equality. We've certainly learned it from culturally diverse communities that if you want to actually get a diverse workforce that's sustainable, you need to be looking at leadership, and we're not there, and it's mainly because people look at somebody like me. I come with this large piece of hardware that's underneath me.
Speaker 1:It's a wheelchair that's underneath me.
Speaker 2:That's a wheelchair for those who can't see us Absolutely yeah, with purple trim folks and people assume that I'm actually. For a start, they'll assume I'm living on a pension. There's no recognition. When I go past you in the street, which I might do in the centre of Canberra. Folks, you've probably seen me around no assumption that I might be somebody who's been a CEO for a couple of decades, I suppose, and that I operate at that level, that I've represented my country at the UN, that I regularly go up to Parliament House as a guest speaker and and am doing keynotes all over the country. Nobody actually looks at me and sees that they actually see a disabled person in a wheelchair who's probably needing support. People even occasionally ask me where the person is. Who's looking?
Speaker 1:after me today.
Speaker 2:Really, absolutely. It happens quite a bit. So there's still this interesting community sort of attitude thing that disabled people are not. You know that we still need help and support to do things. Now, sure, I need support, there's stuff I need help with, but that doesn't mean that I'm not actually a competent person who can run an organisation or that I'm not somebody who can get up and deliver a 40-minute keynote. It's quite interesting.
Speaker 1:So how do we systemically start addressing some of those challenges?
Speaker 2:Well, as I was just referring to, it is about who's in your organisation and thinking that constantly getting people in at that entry level, so the most junior employee in your organisation. Sure, we need to be doing that, we need to be giving people jobs, but we actually need to recognise that that's not going to change the culture. It's not going to help make the organisation inclusive it's not a word I use very often, by the way but what you actually need to do that is changing at the top. It's when you shift the culture. I'm going to give you an example of Westpac who.
Speaker 2:I was a Westpac social change fellow, so I was on the inside for a little bit there and they made a decision about five years out from their bicentenary, in 2017, that they would have gender parity in their leadership spaces by the bicentenary of Westpac, one of the oldest companies in Australia, as we know and they did it. They consciously got women into the boardroom so that they could crack the 50%, and they consciously appointed women to their executive leadership team. And we're not talking about you know, it's very fashionable at the moment to think that that's about diversity, highs and it's all tokens, but we're actually talking about really competent people here um.
Speaker 2:You know you're not going to hack it absolutely not going to hack it in one of those positions if you're really um up for the job. And I keep asking myself, how is it that all of those white blokes are actually, um, you know, not diversity hires when everybody else is that can't be the only people who are qualified in this country, but they did it. They actually cracked the 50% and what changed was the entire culture of Westpac, all the way right down. So, going to work at Westpac, how the work culture shifted, things like flexible employment, things like where offices went, things like how people shaped their hours, how remote work looked, all of those things were changed, even down to the times of the board meetings. All of it shifted in the same way that our parliaments have shifted. We've now cracked, um, you know well, over 50 percent in the act legislative assembly for some years now, um, several terms of the assembly, and and it's changed the way the assembly operates, in the hours that it's sitting, what it does, and it's probably working better than it ever did as a result. So it's it's understanding that getting people in at the top. It's when you've got decision makers, you've got people who can influence culture.
Speaker 2:If you've got people who are junior staff, who have less power. They are far less able to raise concerns, but they're also far less likely to be openly disabled in the workplace, because we know that only about half of people are openly disabled in their workplaces and they're far less likely to stick their hand up and say you know, if we shifted this around and did that, that might work better. Or actually, that is an important work entitlement for a lot of people, not just disabled people, but there's a lot of people. We're currently having that work from home discussion as part of the federal election campaign. That's reared its head again. All of these sorts of things start to shift.
Speaker 2:It's not just about the work culture, though. What we also know about having more disabled people in your workplace. Studies have shown, published in Harvard Business for the other fans of Harvard Business Review out there 10% more innovative in the workplace are disabled staff. So if you've got people on your team who actually look at the world differently, operate differently, approach a building differently yes, I had to come in the back door here this morning all of those things you've actually got people who are really good at lateral thinking and problem solving. That's innovation. Canberra's great at innovation, so it's that stuff, yeah.
Speaker 1:So your challenge, I guess, is to your challenge to business, I guess, is to start employing people with disabilities into some of those leadership roles. Are there enough people out there coming through the pipeline of the leadership Disabilities Leadership Institute to fill those roles and to make a difference, or do you need to see more people coming through your institute?
Speaker 2:Both, both. There's an awful lot of people out there who are highly qualified, who actually can't get work at all or are working outside their field. It's a little bit like the people who speak English as a second language who have trouble coming into Australia and finding work in their chosen fields. Same sort of gig. So there's both.
Speaker 2:We actually run something called the National Register. Fundamentally it's a jobs board and all sorts of government corporate organisations come to us on a regular basis to list their positions, and sometimes voluntary, sometimes usually paid employment or, in fact, board positions. And we've had organisations say I wasn't really sure I'd be happy if you could just find me one disabled person. And they've come back to us and said now we've, you know, a short list and we don't know what to do. We never actually put a process in place to select anybody. We just wanted a disabled person. It's like no, there are people out there. We've got all sorts of people on the books accountants, lawyers, a lot of academics, specialists. We havewe've got an astronaut. We've got people who are highly, you know, mid to upper level government employees. We've got people who are senior corporate. We've got partners in global corporates, commissioners, ceos. There are people right across the board.
Speaker 1:So lots of talent out there, I guess the challenge is how you match them into the roles.
Speaker 2:We don't do that People advertise their position and people apply for them. The thing I always say to people is have a look at how you're advertising, in the same way that you might be using language in your job ads that isn't gender inclusive. So, you know, I look at that as a woman and think, okay, they're really not looking for me. We kind of got past that a bit now in Australia. We've, you know, thankfully moved down the track a little bit to gender equality, but it's a bit like that. We've, you know, thankfully, moved down the track a little bit to gender equality, but it's a bit like that. People often advertise their positions and they don't realise that they're shaping it and saying you must be able to do this, this, this and that. And, by the way, if you don't have a driver's licence, you can't have this job, when in fact you'll never be driving anywhere. So why do you need that? And the first thing that happens is some disabled person will look at that position and think, oh, that would be the perfect job for me, but I haven't got that driver's licence so I can't do it. So it's often how people shape their ads People self-select out and then they get selected out again at the recruitment process, because recruitment is often not an inclusive process either. We're all, we're all learning in this stuff. I'm still learning as well. We're all learning. Um, none of us know everything. So it is about recognizing that the talent is out there. How are you actually speaking to it?
Speaker 2:And, of course, as you and I both know, greg, people go usually to our own networks. You know, that's how we end up with people who look all the same in our organisations, and that's fundamentally one of the barriers to disability leadership is. You know, we're not in a lot of those networks. You know, very few of us are actually members of the company directors. Very few of us are actually members of of the business networks more broadly. And when I go to Telstra, business awards, networks events and things, because I'm a previous finalist in the awards, I might be the only disabled person in the room and and so we're not in the networks. And so actually contacting people, you know saying, oh, do you know someone who's good at this? Or I'm looking for a bookkeeper, or I've been trying to find someone who can help out with that. Um, you know, we go to our mates. That's what we do in business. It makes it easier. Um, we haven't got the resources, so it is about networks. You know what do your networks look like?
Speaker 1:how do they stretch absolutely? Um, you're certainly welcome to come along to some of our networking events to try and build your network through the Chamber, Absolutely, absolutely Looking forward to it.
Speaker 2:It's all about time and things like that. Yeah, no appreciate that.
Speaker 1:So, look, you're doing lots of great work. Disability Leadership Institute's been going for nine years, coming on 10. What's next for you and for the Institute?
Speaker 2:Oh, more, more, more, apparently. Um, well, this current recruitment round, we're we're in that incredible growth phase, um, you know. So we've done our startup phase, um, we've done our sustain phase. You know, actually bed, bed ourselves down as an organization. We've got the reputation, we've got the profile and what we are now doing is looking to the next 10, 20, 50 years and thinking what's that look like? How does that work, how does that come together? It's, it's going to be big.
Speaker 2:Um, for me, that means that beautiful moment of thinking how do I get myself out of this? And so you know, I've got an ulterior motive here. I mean, I'll still be around for a while, of course. Um, so, you know, we we are in such demand at the moment for our programs and working in-house with organizations that we're actually working to service that. Hence the the sudden growth that we're doing. So we're in that phase of trying to make sure that we grow sustainably, um that we don't bite off more than we can chew and do the whole implode, um thing that is such a danger to a small organization. Um, yeah, our onward and upward, basically now.
Speaker 1:Your experience obviously is really interesting, and there'll be people listening to this who are in the early stages of starting their own businesses. What's been your biggest learning as a as a startup?
Speaker 2:um, something that I encountered a number of times when I was first getting going was uh, actually it was all blokes. Um, it really was a gendered thing, but people coming to me and saying where are you going for investors, where are you getting a grant from, how are you approaching funders? And I said I'm not, and they were really shocked. It's like you don't have to look like a big flash business right at the outset, and I actually think this is the way a lot of female founders work, given that we get less than four percent of investment, as we know. That's another issue. But it was all done on the smell of an oily rag, that that rapid startup thing. So all I had cost me about two, two grand get a domain name, get the bells and whistles that go with it, um, register the name and get going and run on the money that you make.
Speaker 2:Now I was doing that as a side hustle for a very short period of time and, as I said, within four to six months I had to start employing other people. So you know I had to jump off and just jump off the cliff and do it, which I was very lucky it happened. Now it doesn't work like that for everybody. For some people it can be a longer grind, but what I've observed through some of our members at the Disability Leadership Institute who are entrepreneurs who are running their own businesses, is the expectation that you'll be successful in three or six months is actually really dangerous because it doesn't actually happen. It takes about three years, you know. And if you're not giving yourself, say, three years to get where you're going, three years of profile building, of coming up with your products, of organising your systems and processes, of getting out there and getting your brand out into the community in whatever your community is, then you're not going to make it.
Speaker 2:And we did that. We did the hard yards, the whole thing about talking disability leadership, content, content, content, networks, networks, networks and profile building. And I noticed it happened at about the two and a half three year mark. We were starting to have people come to us. We didn't have to go looking for people, for clients in the same. We're now in that position where members come to us. We don't really get out there and, you know, look for them. Our members are actually our best ambassadors. They sell us for us. We don't have to do it and in fact now we're in a position where our corporate clients are clearly talking to each other amongst various networks, like the disability networks inside some of the big organisations, and so they all are coming to us based on word of mouth, but that takes time. That doesn't happen in inside your first year yeah, and?
Speaker 1:and what's the secret to that? Just getting on with the job, doing the hard yards?
Speaker 2:hard yards. Consistency um, if you change what you're doing every five minutes, or if you change your image or if you change your name I've seen people try and do that you've got to start all over again. So it's actually consistency Get your brand in place and do it. Entity structure. We started out as a sole trader because I thought, oh yeah, I'll do that and then I'll worry about GST. I did GST registration first up because I thought that helps to look professional, but then inside two years we had to become a registered company because otherwise the tax was going to become a bit awkward. So I was very lucky to have a very good accountant right from the outset. Get good people around you, get an advisory board. Don't go it alone. You might be working on your own in your business, but have good people around you. Have that advisory board of of trusted people that you can go to and get horrible truths from people that ask you questions you'd rather not answer and use it. Listen to them.
Speaker 1:Excellent, some great advice there. Christina Ryan, thank you so much for joining us here on the Canberra Business Podcast. It's been a pleasure having you on and really great to hear a little bit more about the Disability Leadership Institute and indeed, your learnings and experiences over time.
Speaker 2:Art of pleasure to be here, greg, and you can find us at disabilityleaderscomau.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Thank you very much, christina, and just a reminder that this episode of the Canberra Business Podcast has been brought to you by the Business Chamber with the support of Care Super, an industry super fund with competitive fees and returns, exceptional service and a focus on real care. You can learn more at caresupercomau and don't forget to follow us on your favourite podcast platform for future episodes of the Canberra Business Podcast. Christina Ryan, thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 2:Thanks.
Speaker 1:Greg.