I'm Sara and this is my story

The disabled pioneers bringing their superpowers to the City

Written by Oliver Shah, The Sunday Times

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Disability is still the poor relation in the diversity debate, but a few pioneers are bringing the issue to the forefront. 

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Board meetings at BT are not usually dangerous affairs — at least in a physical sense. But the morning after a session last month, Sara Weller, the former Argos managing director who serves as a non-executive, came out of her room at the Clayton hotel opposite the telecoms giant’s City of London HQ, stumbled and broke her shoulder. “I grabbed onto something to stop myself flying and I wrenched my arm out of its socket,” she said.

 

Weller, 60, is unique on the BT board in that she has multiple sclerosis, the chronic condition in which the immune system attacks the brain and the spinal cord. She walks with the help of sticks — short distances only — and sometimes loses her balance. “Nerve impulses normally move at up to 268 miles an hour,” Weller said. “In somebody with MS, they can move as slowly as one mile an hour. So my problem is, my brain wants to lift my foot but the signal doesn’t make it. My body moves — but the message never got to my foot, and then I’m on the floor because my foot is still back there.”

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When she was first diagnosed in 2009, she felt “shock” and “a bit of resentment”. Then, channelling her education as a scientist, she asked herself: “What am I going to do? What’s the solution?”

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Now Weller is convinced that having MS makes her more insightful as a non-executive. As well as her role at BT, she chairs the remuneration committee at her alma mater, New College, Oxford, and sat on the board of Lloyds Bank.

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“All through my early career I thought that success looked like perfection,” she said. “But when you have something like MS, perfection is not an option any more, so I’ve become more creative about finding ways to the solution that aren’t a straight line. I’ve become more understanding of areas of grey, more willing to put the time and energy into finding a workaround to problems, because you do that in your private life all the time: you’re always going, ‘I need to get to that venue but the bus stop is too far away, so how am I going to do that?’”

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Disability has often been the poor relation to gender and ethnicity in the boardroom diversity debate. As recently as a few years ago, “inclusion” rankings produced by well-known consultants failed to mention it. A report last year by media outlet Tortoise and the Valuable 500 corporate disability coalition said that no FTSE 100 executives or senior managers had disclosed a disability, and only five FTSE 100 companies had issued board statements on disability, despite the fact that about a fifth of the population have a physical or mental disability: 14.6 million people in the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics.

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The dearth of senior role models can be a self-perpetuating problem in that it dissuades junior staff from opening up about their conditions. To break the cycle, Valuable 500, whose members include Microsoft and Shell, is launching an initiative at the World Economic Forum in Davos next month to identify and nurture the next generation of disabled talent with board potential. Valuable 500 is chaired by former Unilever boss Paul Polman and run by Caroline Casey, who is blind due to ocular albinism.

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Casey, 50, a former Accenture consultant, said the absence of openly disabled people at the top of big companies “demonstrates ... why disability has been on the sidelines of business for so long”. She suggested that there were bosses in posts who had not yet “come out” as disabled.

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“There’s a lot of senior leaders starting to speak, but what they will say is very similar to when Tim Cook [chief executive of Apple, who is gay] uncovered his sexuality: he said he’d hidden it because he thought he wouldn’t get the same chances.

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“The perception of disability traditionally is ‘less than’. That’s why I tried to hide mine [in her early career at Accenture] ... There are an awful lot of people in the C-suite with serious autoimmune diseases like MS or rheumatoid arthritis, but they’re unwilling to disclose because it would be considered ‘less than’.”

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Steve Ingham, chief executive of FTSE 250 recruiter PageGroup, faced a life-changing crisis after a skiing accident in 2019. The former rugby flanker, who until then had run to work every day, lost the use of both legs and most of the hearing in his left ear. Wheelchair-bound, he chose to stay in the top job at PageGroup and has become a champion for disability in business.

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“There’s this image that all CEOs are 6ft 4in and bulletproof,” he said. “The reality is, we’re not. I believe that showing vulnerability also demonstrates your authenticity. I happened to break my back but I know one guy who, for a number of years at work, hid the fact he had MS. He had to use intermittent catheterisation whenever he went for a pee. He chose to hide it rather than admit that he had MS, because he was concerned about his prospects if he did.”

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Four-fifths of disabled people develop their conditions after the age of 18. This was the case for Weller, who felt the first twinges of MS in 2007, when she was 46.

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She had enjoyed a high-octane executive career. After a degree in chemistry, she started at Mars and rose to European franchise director, at which point she was “travelling with my passport in my handbag”. Struggling to juggle the job and two young children, she moved to Abbey National, then Sainsbury’s, then Argos.

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Three years into her role running the catalogue retailer, she returned from a trip to India with swelling in her ankles that would not go down. For two years, a neurologist told her it was probably nothing. But in 2009, while driving, she lost the clarity of vision in one eye: “It was like looking through a windscreen with dots of rain on one side.” An MRI scan revealed “a nervous system with lots of little white blotches on it”. She decided to retire as an executive in 2011 and build a more flexible non-executive portfolio.

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Weller thinks her condition has given her an unusual perspective on boardroom decisions affecting minorities. She gave the example of BT’s push to migrate all 29 million UK homes from copper landlines to an internet-based system — put on hold last month after a backlash from customers. She and another non-executive spent months challenging BT’s directors over whether they had a “credible argument” for the switch.

“Copper landlines have been there for decades and 80 per cent of the calls on them are scams, but we risk losing the argument because if we fail to treat individual customer concerns with the honesty they deserve,” she said. “We’ve gone for the 98 per cent solution and we’ve forgotten that 2 per cent is still a lot of people, often the most vulnerable.”

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Iain Conn, BT’s senior independent director, said Weller brought a fresh way of “thinking about people, attitudes, organisations, health and safety”, adding: “There are many dimensions where she sees things through a different prism. There’s huge value in having people with disabilities around the boardroom table.”

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MS is relatively well represented in the business community. Weller and Conn are on the board of the Stop MS fundraising campaign; chaired by the insurance tycoon Mark Wood, it has raised £58 million since 2017. On the whole, though, disability remains a fringe issue.

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Last year, America’s Nasdaq stock exchange declined to include disability in new diversity rules for boards. In the UK, ministers have not yet introduced mandatory pay-gap reporting as they have for gender, despite calls from bosses including Ingham. The Tory peer Lord (Kevin) Shinkwin, former chairman of the Disability Commission, said: “There’s a philosophical objection in No 10 Downing Street to, in inverted commas, burdening business. My counter-argument would be that I have a philosophical objection to losing elections — and if we can’t show we are the party of opportunity, we’re going to have a problem.”

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Magic-circle law firms such as Clifford Chance and Freshfields have started voluntarily reporting their disability pay gaps. Members of the Valuable 500 have pledged to do more to hire and include disabled people, and Casey said all boards should try to find directors like Weller. She has no patience for the argument that the pipeline is not there yet.

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“I have listened to that for 22 years,” she said. “We’ve heard that same story around black lives. We’ve heard that story about women. We can continuously say that, but we can also fix this. We’ve got to train the headhunters, first off, but most importantly what you have to do is change the culture of businesses, because it is most likely right now that 15 to 20 per cent of every single employee base has experience of disability.”