When Disclosure Costs You the Interview: Seattle's Disability:IN Chapter Takes on the Question I Lived

Event Details at a Glance

What: The Courage to Be Human at Work: Vulnerability, Access, and Connection
When: Wednesday, September 30, 2026, 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Pacific
Where: Online, on Microsoft Teams
Cost: Free. Anyone can view and join.
Presenter: Linea Johnson, Founder and CEO of The Thrive Shift
Host: Disability:IN Washington
Register: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/b7846c1c-f48b-4bcf-8183-8358bbcc1db7@29bd5e53-6370-4fae-99be-f7620c97cbe2

In 1983, I Learned Exactly What Disclosure Costs

I graduated from Whitman College in 1983 with a degree in economics, a full academic scholarship behind me, and what I thought was a perfectly reasonable plan. I would send out a cover letter and a resume, the way everyone did, and the work would follow.

The cover letters worked. The phone interviews worked beautifully. Then I would arrive in person, with a long white cane in my hand and a slate and stylus in my bag, and I would feel the room change. The person across the desk had never worked alongside a blind colleague, and simply could not picture how I would do the job.

So I tried the other approach. I began disclosing my blindness in the cover letter, right at the top, so that nobody would have to be surprised by it.

The phone interviews stopped.

That is the whole of it. Two options, both of them bad, and no third one on offer. Disclose, and never get into the room. Say nothing, and lose the room the moment you walk into it. I was twenty-two years old and I genuinely believed the problem was me.

It was not me. It was a set of rooms that had never been designed with me in them. It took me a doctorate and an ethnographic study of eleven blind professionals to be able to say that sentence with evidence behind it, but I knew it long before I could prove it.

The Question Nobody Should Have to Answer

On Wednesday, September 30, Disability:IN Washington is hosting a free 90 minute webinar built on exactly that problem. It is called The Courage to Be Human at Work: Vulnerability, Access, and Connection, and the question at its center is one I recognize on sight:

“How do we create workplaces where people don’t have to choose between protecting themselves and belonging?”

We are all told to bring our whole selves to work. The session asks the harder follow up question, the one that actually matters to the person being advised: what does that instruction mean when being fully seen carries real risk, and when the support you need is not reliably available, understood, or safe to ask for?

What I appreciate most about how this session is framed is where it puts the burden. It does not treat vulnerability as a skill employees need to get better at. It looks instead at how workplace culture, power, accessibility and trust shape whether a person can be open at all. That is the right end of the problem to pick up.

What the Session Covers

Six threads run through the 90 minutes. Courage and vulnerability at work, and what it means to show up authentically while still holding healthy boundaries and protecting your own privacy. Masking and disclosure, including why people mask, what disclosure can open up, and the real risks that come with being open about a disability or a mental health condition. Accessibility and accommodations, and how organizations can move past treating an accommodation as an individual exception and toward workplaces simply designed for access and flexibility in the first place.

Then the practical half. Skills for employees and for managers, because this is never a one sided conversation: individuals learn to communicate what they need and advocate for themselves, and managers learn to respond to vulnerability, build trust, and create conditions where people actually have meaningful choices. Artificial intelligence and assistive technology, and how emerging tools can expand accessibility, autonomy and participation while complementing human connection rather than replacing it. And finally the human side of work, and why relationships, trust and empathy remain essential no matter how much the technology changes around us.

The last stretch is a live question and answer session, open to everyone on the call. In my experience that is where the useful part of any session like this actually happens.

Who Is Leading It

The session is led by Linea Johnson, Founder and CEO of The Thrive Shift, a consulting firm that helps organizations design more ethical, human centered workplaces and technologies by genuinely partnering with people who have lived experience. She works at the intersection of workplace mental health, disability, organizational change and responsible innovation, and she has spent more than fifteen years alongside employers, nonprofits and health organizations on workplace wellbeing and lived experience leadership.

She has advised and collaborated with One Mind, Panasonic North America and the ADA National Network, delivered the opening keynote at the National Alliance on Mental Illness national convention, and serves on One Mind’s Lived Experience Advisory Council. Her work reaches beyond the workplace too, through the World Health Organization, the award winning documentary Hidden Pictures, and her co-authored memoir Perfect Chaos, published by St. Martin’s Press and featured by NPR, Forbes and USA Today. She holds a master’s degree in healthcare leadership from Brown University and a change management certificate from Cornell.

One detail I noticed with real pleasure: Linea has served on the Washington State Governor’s Committee on Disability Issues and Employment. So have I. This state has a habit of producing people who keep turning up for this work, and that is not an accident.

Why This Particular Chapter Matters to Me

I have a long history with this organization, and it started in Seattle.

When I joined The Lighthouse for the Blind, Inc. as development director in 2000, our esteemed DeafBlind program was being led by Marthalee Galeota. She went on to build a career in accessibility and disability leadership at Starbucks, where she has led the company’s disability initiatives and its interpreter services, and where she is also a nationally certified American Sign Language interpreter with specialist skills in Braille and tactile interpreting.

Marthalee is the reason I know this organization at all. While I was serving as the Lighthouse’s general manager of administration, she urged me to go to a national meeting of the U.S. Business Leadership Network in the Washington, D.C. area. It was held at the labyrinthine Gaylord at National Harbor in Maryland, which was a considerable orientation and mobility challenge all by itself. My recollection is roughly 300 people in the room, most of them human resources specialists trying to work out how to hire a few people with disabilities.

Shortly after that trip, the Lighthouse got involved with WSBLN, the Washington Business Leadership Network. We hosted chapter meetings in our own building. That chapter is the direct ancestor of the one hosting this webinar, and the chapter says so itself: its site today reads “Disability:IN Washington, formerly WSBLN.”

So when an invitation from Disability:IN Washington landed in my inbox this month, it did not read to me like a newsletter. It read like a room I used to sit in, still going.

Where the Business Leadership Network Actually Came From

The history here is worth getting right, because it is better than most people assume.

The Business Leadership Network model was created in 1994 out of the President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities, the federal body that later became the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy. It was built as an employer led coalition, and the national network was co-sponsored by a partnership between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Department of Labor. This was never a charity initiative bolted onto business. It was business, with the federal government holding the door.

The national organization that supported those local chapters, the U.S. Business Leadership Network, was incorporated in 2003. By the time I was attending, John Kemp was its executive director and general counsel, a role the Department of Labor recorded by name when it signed a formal alliance with the USBLN to promote the employment of people with disabilities. Kemp went on to lead The Viscardi Center, which is a pleasing coincidence for me personally, because in 2024 I was honored with the Henry Viscardi Achievement Award.

In 2018 the USBLN became Disability:IN. Same lineage, much larger ambition.

What Disability:IN Looks Like Today

If you have not run across the organization before, here is the short orientation. Disability:IN describes itself simply: it partners with business to globally advance disability inclusion. Go to its site and open the corporate partners page, and you will find a long list of major companies that have committed to disability inclusion in their hiring, in how they create and market products and services, and in whether disability owned business enterprises appear in their supply chains.

It runs an annual benchmark that lets companies measure their own disability inclusion practices against their peers, and it certifies Disability Owned Business Enterprises so that corporate buyers can find them. Over nearly thirty years it has grown from a handful of local employer coalitions into a genuine force. It also still runs on state chapters, which is the part that matters this month.

I Have Registered, and I Hope You Will Too

I have signed up for this one. It is free, it is online, and anyone can view and join, so there is nothing standing between you and the room.

If you care about disability employment, come. And then please forward the invitation to the other disability employment champions inside your own company and your own network, because the people who most need to hear a session on disclosure are very often the managers who have never once had to think about it.

Register here: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/b7846c1c-f48b-4bcf-8183-8358bbcc1db7@29bd5e53-6370-4fae-99be-f7620c97cbe2

I could not choose, in 1983, between protecting myself and belonging. Nobody handed me a third option, so I spent a decade selling municipal bonds over the telephone instead, where my blindness was nobody’s business because nobody could see me. It worked out. It should not have had to.

Building the third option is what this work is for. And it remains what I have said for most of my career: inclusion is not just the right thing to do, it is a strategic advantage.

Dr. Kirk Adams, Ph.D.
Advocate, Leader and Keynote Speaker on Disability Inclusion & Leadership
Leading the Way to Accessible Innovation

” Inclusion isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s a strategic advantage. “

Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion (ISDI)
Executive Director
Strengthening individual and organizational capability for creating diverse, inclusive and equitable workplaces.

Innovative Impact, LLC Consulting
Managing Director
Impactful Workforce Inclusion Starts Here

American Foundation for the Blind
Immediate Past President & CEO
To create a world of no limits for people who are blind or visually impaired.

Connect With Me:

When Disclosure Costs You the Interview: Seattle’s Disability:IN Chapter Takes on the Question I Lived

Event Details at a Glance

In 1983, I Learned Exactly What Disclosure Costs

The Question Nobody Should Have to Answer

What the Session Covers

Who Is Leading It

Why This Particular Chapter Matters to Me

Where the Business Leadership Network Actually Came From

What Disability:IN Looks Like Today

I Have Registered, and I Hope You Will Too

Like this:

Related

When Disclosure Costs You the Interview: Seattle’s Disability:IN Chapter Takes on the Question I Lived

Event Details at a Glance

In 1983, I Learned Exactly What Disclosure Costs

The Question Nobody Should Have to Answer

What the Session Covers

Who Is Leading It

Why This Particular Chapter Matters to Me

Where the Business Leadership Network Actually Came From

What Disability:IN Looks Like Today

I Have Registered, and I Hope You Will Too

Share this:

Like this:

Related