In this Expert Interview, AdvancingWellness CEO Mari Ryan is joined by author and speaker Brian Wagner.
Mari Ryan: Welcome to the Workplace Wellbeing Essentials Series. I’m Mari Ryan. I’m the CEO and founder of Advancing Wellness. It is my pleasure to welcome you today to this expert interview where we explore topics that impact employee wellbeing. My guest today is Brian Wagner.
Brian is the founder and CEO of A Radical Vision. His mission is to help people embrace their own personal blindness to achieve a greater vision for their lives. The process takes people from a point of blindness into sight and toward a greater vision.
Brian was born and raised in northwest Ohio as the son of a tomato farmer, and the youngest of ten – yes, that was ten – kids. In 1977 at the age of ten, he was diagnosed with hydrocephalus, a brain malformation. Over the course of the next 33 years, he experienced several instances of medical issues resulting from this diagnosis. On March 4, 2011, he woke up on the couch and wasn’t able to see. For the next six months, Brian was blind. Only brain surgery and multiple eye surgeries have allowed a portion of his vision to return.
Since then, Brian has become an author of the semi-biographical book, Sometimes It Does Take a Brain Surgeon. He uses his experience to help his audience to improve their lives by teaching them how to see what they are missing as a result of their own blindness.
Brian, welcome. I’m so excited to have you here today.
Brian Wagner: Thank you for having me.
Mari Ryan: I’m looking forward to this discussion today because there are many topics that have really been at the forefront of what’s been going on in 2020, and I am not just talking about the pandemic. Obviously, that’s a key one, but I am talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s been such an important workplace topic for decades, and yet this year it has come into sharp focus as a result of so much of the racial unrest and tensions.
Many times the inclusion aspect of diversity, equity, and inclusion sometimes gets overlooked, in my opinion. When we think about creating inclusive workplaces, we often hear this from the race and gender perspectives. Today we are going to explore inclusion from a different perspective. That’s from the perspective of individuals with diverse and different abilities. In my experience inclusion is about acknowledging and respecting differences. We are all different, we all have different strengths and abilities. Yet, for individuals with what we often call “disabilities,” or prefer to refer to “different abilities,” it may be difficult to acknowledge or feel comfortable talking about those differences.
Brian, I’m curious from your perspective and from your life experience of what you’ve been going through, especially with the work that you do, how do we talk about diverse and different abilities in the workplace?
Brian Wagner: For me, it has to do with not so much with making a different section or specialty or making something different for the audience you are talking to. For example, if you are talking to people with visual disabilities like I have, it’s not so much doing something that is totally different for them, but maybe offering them additional braille, or whatever would help them to be able to follow along. It is not to make it a totally different program. The more you can make it mainstream and make them feel a part of the mainstream, the better off you are going to be.
Mari Ryan: Certainly there are legal requirements for employers to make accommodations for employees in the workplace, but when I am thinking about this from the perspective of do we acknowledge. When you are going into work settings with clients or colleagues, to what extent do we openly talk about and address what might be the elephant in the room? How do we make people still feel comfortable and yet acknowledge that we have differences and we are open and accepting of individuals with those differences?
Brian Wagner: Personally, I think you should leave it up to the person with the disability to say. For me, I am very open with my disability, I make fun of it to some extent, I call myself “Brian-with-one-eye.” I have fun with it. From my perspective it’s much different and may be different from other people’s perspective. You have to make that person feel comfortable being there in the room with you, but at the same time you need to do everything you can to make it accessible to them. So yes, following the rules that are in the laws that are already written is one thing, but not to single them out and not to make them feel singled out is important as well.
Mari Ryan: Absolutely, yes. A big part of one of the models that we use in wellbeing has two dimensions to it. The model itself has six dimensions to it, but two of those dimensions are community and connection. What we want to be doing when creating a culture in the workplace and one that is inclusive is helping people to create these connections and feeling that sense of belonging in the workplace. We want everyone to feel … After all, that is what inclusion is all about is making people feel like they belong.
Brian Wagner: That is very true. Very accurate and very important.
Mari Ryan: Absolutely. I’m curious, when we think about the impact to organizations and teams of recognizing and leveraging the diverse abilities of individuals, what might those impacts be to an organization and to a team?
Brian Wagner: Right. It’s very important to have a team acknowledge that. For example, the 360 interviews, where you typically have, they come back to you, the manager will come back to you and say, you are really strong in this area and you could use some work in this area, but you are also strong in this area. It’s kind of like this sandwich effect or the sandwich approach to the review, but they will always welcome, or not always, but many times they want you to work on that area where you have the least, or the lowest efficiency.
I would take a different approach on that and I would say, maybe we should focus on what they are good at, make them better at what they are good at, make them more awesome, and then allow them to be able to have that weak spot. Let’s say it’s accounting where they are not as strong. Have other people, other members of the team fill in where they are strong, and maybe they are strong in accounting and they fill that gap. So it’s not so much making them work on things that they are not focused on and they are not strong at, but it is helping them to think about things that they can do better that they are already doing well at.
Mari Ryan: I totally agree. I’m always a believer at the strengths approach rather than focusing on the deficiencies. That’s a great way to think about it. I’m curious, in the work that you are doing when you are helping people embrace their own personal blindness to achieve a greater vision, you are helping individuals to see their own blind spots. I’m curious if a blind spot for many individuals is not seeing others for their uniqueness, their differences, and therefore by doing that creating a less inclusive workplace. Talk a little bit about the work you are doing.
Brian Wagner: In the work that I am doing with clients that I have, we talk a lot about how important it is to be inclusive and to understand the value that individuals are bringing from their perspective. There’s a blind spot when we don’t do that, but also there’s a blind spot that we have where we don’t always recognize the value that someone else is bringing. Sometimes we don’t recognize the value that we are bringing when we have conversations with people and what we do to help them if we are not able to recognize that value.
I use my daughter as an example. She sent me a letter after I had brain surgery in 2011 because I lost my eyesight. She sent me a letter and in the letter she said, other people, dad, are great. I mean the only thing, you, and they are younger than you and they’re more fun, but you have something that they don’t have – bravery. She showed me to stop comparing myself to other people. This is how I look at. She said, stop comparing myself to other people, stop worrying about how other people are handling their lives and worry about the fact that you were my dad and you bring a lot of value as my dad. The bravery that you have shown here is one of those things that has helped her so much throughout her life. It’s a letter that we still talk about 10 years later. That letter really exemplifies what it is that we are trying to do with our coaching clients and all that, is help them understand they need to stop comparing themselves to other people. They need to recognize the value that they bring, and then they just need to know that within them is something that is going to help other people. The further they can understand that and the better they can understand that the better off they are going to be.
Mari Ryan: Thank you so much for sharing that story about your daughter and the letter from your daughter. She certainly is wise beyond her years. It really does, I think, help us understand that we all have blind spots and we all have places where we can perhaps take a different perspective or look at things a little bit differently. We can do that not only about ourselves, but the other people that are working with us in the workplace.
Brian Wagner: Absolutely. That’s greatly important for us all to understand.
Mari Ryan: Absolutely. How can employers nurture a culture of inclusiveness? What specifically should they be doing do you think, Brian?
Brian Wagner: How can corporations nurture a culture of inclusiveness? I think excepting people and not singling people out is the first part of doing that, is not … getting to a point where they have a practice in place to make sure that this group is being cared for and given nurturing. I think it’s more about making sure they are part of the team, that they come along with whatever disabilities they have, to understand that they have value, that they bring value.
It’s much like what I was referring to earlier with the 360 review, where you have a good part, a bad part, and then you have a good part. Well, they have good parts, bad parts, and good parts as well. They are no different than any of us. There are still actually a lot of things that we don’t see. The better you understand your employees, the better off you are going to be. I don’t care if that’s a normally sighted, normally mobile, neuro-typical, any of that, or if it is someone with disabilities. It doesn’t matter. They are all the same to a certain extent.
Mari Ryan: Right. We all have strengths, we all bring value to the organization, we are all unique individuals, and we need to be honoring and respecting that.
Brian Wagner: Absolutely.
Mari Ryan: Brian, if our audience wants to learn more about you and the work that you are doing, where can they find you?
Brian Wagner: They can find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. My handle on all four of them is aradicalvision, and if they want to find me on my website, it is aradicalvision.com.
Mari Ryan: Fabulous, Brian, thanks so much for being here for this conversation today. As always, it is wonderful spending time with you.
Brian Wagner: Absolutely. Thank you for having me on, Mari.
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