DEI: Gain Perspective from a Disabilities Inclusion Influencer
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Maria Grazia Zedda is an award-winning motivational speaker, a Top 10 Disability Influencer 2022 and 2019 for the Public Sector, and a great interviewee. While she is deaf and has supported disability inclusion for years, she is also the Senior EDI (Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion) Manager at High Speed Two (HS2) Ltd and the author of a novel that was recently released in her native Italian language. Rather than summarizing how much of an impact Zedda has as a fierce leader doing the important work of creating cultures of inclusion for Human Resources and beyond, HR Exchange Network implores readers to pay attention to her story and the message she sends about inclusion and belonging:
HREN: How are you supporting disabled people in your work?
MGZ: For most of my career, I have been involved in disability inclusion. I obviously feel really passionately about it because I'm severely deaf. So, I really feel the pain of encountering barriers in the workplace and society because of lack of planning and lack of accessibility.
I started by working at the BBC Disability Programs unit. That was obviously a seminal career moment for me because I realized, ‘Oh my God, we are not disabled. We are disabled by society.’ I learned everything about the social model, and we were going out there filming all the heroes, all the disabled people who were literally chaining themselves to the gates of the Parliament, chaining themselves to buses protesting against the lack of accessibility in public transport and in society. That was really an incredible experience for me.
I also learned to work with other disabled people. Finally, I was not the only one. So, that was amazing because we were working in a way that allowed us to mutually support each other.
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For example, if there was someone who was having trouble with something like reading because they are visually impaired, I would be able to help them. Sometimes, I would have a telephone call that I couldn’t hear because the phone was not amplified enough, and then they would help me.
It was liberating. We all felt equal, and we could contribute and mutually support one another. Obviously, I grew up in the 70s and 80s when I had to confront this way of looking at disabilities that was very pitiful. My parents were relatively understanding. But, at the same time, they still imposed limitations on me, whether it was because I'm female or whether because I have a disability.
Essentially, what was expected of me was to cook, clean, and shut up, and there was nothing else on the horizon for me. So, I left home slamming the door and this is something that I've had to live with for the rest of my life because I haven't been able to go back there to live since. That’s why the work at the BBC was really important.
HREN: What came after the BBC?
MGZ: When I left home, I was about 20 years old. So, when I left, I never got the opportunity to go to university. I met my husband at the BBC, so I could see that he had a degree. He was quickly rising through the ranks and lack of university education was holding me back. It wasn't just that obviously.
It was the fact that I was a woman, that I had a foreign accent, and people used to call my boss to complain about the fact that I didn't have “BBC voice” answering the phone and so on. There were a number of reasons why I could not progress as fast as he.
Certainly, I was very curious about the society I lived in. So, I decided to enroll in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where I got sociology degree. Then, I ended up helping disabled people find work. I used to run job clubs, I used to do everything to support those with disabilities, so that was my passion.
Then, we were in Philadelphia, I had my baby. We returned to London and as I was looking to return to work after maternity leave, I realized that there was another baby on the way, which was a bit of a surprise. I thought, ‘How am I going to make ends meet? I need to do something. I need to work flexibly because I need to juggle being a mom with working.’ With my husband’s support, I decided to set up a business, a consultancy.
I’m proud that I ran it for 10 years, and it did relatively well. In 2009, I won the UK Ready to Start Disabled Entrepreneur Award. We used to deliver face-to-face and e-learning training about disability inclusion. It was experiential learning and I'm proud of that. E-learning allowed people to make mistakes virtually and better understand disability and diversity and inclusion in a safe way.
It was important to give them training, where you put in front of them scenarios, and they make different choices. Almost like a game so that when you make a ‘bad’ choice, it is safe to explore that and see the consequences of that bad choice. You see what happens as a result of the decision you made and to me that was the strength of the program. I sold the programme to many large organisations and my most visible client was the Houses of Parliament. They still have that program 12 years later!
HREN: Then, what happened?
MGZ: The 2008 economic downturn had a ripple effect. The first thing that businesses and the public sector do is cut disability, diversity, and inclusion training. All those budgets evaporated, and I couldn’t really work as much, so I decided to move into equity, diversity, and inclusion as a whole. I got lots of experience from consulting, but I also worked in various places until
I ended up at High Speed Two (HS2), which is basically the biggest infrastructure project in Europe.
Over the next 15 to 20 years, we're building a whole new railway. It's a massive project, and it will better unite the country, which is too London centric right now. Everything happens in London, and so it's important to have an additional railway to help the communication between the various regions and support the economy of other the major cities of the UK.
Also, it's about capacity because London is absolutely bursting at the seams with people. So, we need more transport capacity. It is more about creating capacity to move people up and down the country and really create jobs. At the moment we're employing 29,000 people through the supply chain. It's going to go up to about 34,000 people at the peak of construction.
My role is to basically implement equality, diversity, and inclusion programs and the ‘know how’ in various areas of the business. So, I'm in charge of inclusion for the workforce for our immediate employees, which is about 2,000 people, managing the work of the supply chain. I'm also in charge of providing EDI [Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion] consultancy on how we work with the people and the communities along the route.
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HREN: You wrote a novel, Il Fruscio Degli Eucalipti, in Italian. Tell me about it.
MGZ: When I moved to the United States. I thought that I would be fine, but it was a bit of a culture shock when we moved there. My husband and I also were removed from all the distractions of living in London with our friends, and it was a completely different lifestyle.
I found that I needed to deal with certain things, like the loss of my father, which happened very suddenly. He died of a heart attack during a football (soccer) match for a team that he was coaching. That was really traumatizing because it was so sudden and unexpected, and I never dealt with it because I was distracting myself from the grief.
Now, I was alone for many hours in America. My husband was doing his own thing, and I was having a bit of a crisis to be honest. I couldn't have any mental wellbeing support because there was no medical insurance. I was very lucky because at the time we were living in San Francisco, and I had one chance to talk to a psychologist.
She was definitely trying to reassure me. I remember I was crying my eyes out, and the only thing she could say to me was, 'Do you enjoy writing?' And I said, 'Yes, I do.' She said to put everything on paper.
The little seed of the book was just me trying to deal with the sudden loss of my dad and the fact that when I left home, slamming the door, we kind of had an opportunity to reconcile, but we didn't reconcile properly. We were due to meet again. We were due to talk again properly about what happened. But he died, so I had all these unresolved feelings.
I wrote the book in English and I wrote it within six months. Obviously, it went through a lot of re editing and a lot of work. Essentially, when I started sharing it with publishers, they weren’t interested in so-called women’s stories or they weren’t interested in the story of someone with disabilities because it is considered niche. I got 17 years of NOs.
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The book is inspired by my life. But I've written a novel because I need it for the narrative purpose. I needed to compress and condense some stories and make them accessible within a time frame for the reader. There was no point in having an autobiography. I'm not famous!
I felt that I wanted the heroine in the book to be someone who started from nothing and is riddled with doubt through and through. She's continually doubting herself until eventually she doesn't need to be a hero. She's just really listening to herself, to her intuition. She's listening to people who love her. She's listening to good friends. She's having a reconciliation with her family and all of those, who enable her to flourish and become the woman that she's meant to be. So, I think there's a lot of hope in that message – and a lot of heart.
Often, we disabled people experience this thing called inspiration porn, which is almost like 'you’re disabled, so you're so brave.' And it's like, 'For God's sake, I'm not brave just because I'm living my life.' The type of inspiration that I want to give through my novel is an ordinary inspiration about anyone with a disability, anyone who is somewhat different.
They can look into themselves, tap into their own intuition and their own inner wisdom, and really kind of bring it out and trust themselves to get better, to improve, to do, to follow their dreams. Self-realization is a journey. It's not a destination. You will get somewhere, but you'll always have somewhere else to go further.
You would have thought publishing the book in Italian would be my dream. It is. But now I want to publish in English. When that happens, I will want a movie! (laughs)
