What If Non-Disabled Employees Could Never Become Managers? — Rethinking Disability, Leadership, and Inclusion by Reversing the Roles

Rethinking Blind and Visually Impaired Leaders, Disability Employment, and Inclusive Management by Reversing the Roles

This article tells the story of a fictional company in which the usual positions are deliberately reversed. Employees without disabilities can never become managers, while only employees with significant disabilities are allowed to hold positions with real decision-making power. By making the situation intentionally uncomfortable, the story asks a simple question: what happens when we decide a person’s future based on an attribute rather than their ability, experience, and potential?

A brief cultural note for readers outside Japan

Some parts of this story may be easier to understand with a little context about Japanese communication and workplace culture. Japan is not culturally uniform, and no single concept describes every Japanese person or organization. Still, several ideas can help explain why exclusion is sometimes difficult to see.

Honne and tatemae: private thoughts and public positions

The Japanese terms honne and tatemae are often used to describe the difference between what a person privately thinks or feels and the position they present publicly in order to maintain relationships, social expectations, or harmony. Honne is the more private or candid view. Tatemae is the outward position appropriate to the situation.

This should not be interpreted as saying that Japanese people are dishonest. Similar differences between private thoughts and public language exist in many cultures. In Japan, however, indirect expression and sensitivity to context can sometimes be particularly important in professional settings.

That distinction matters in discussions about disability and careers. A company may publicly say, “We evaluate everyone based on ability,” while an employee with a disability repeatedly hears phrases such as, “Perhaps you need a little more experience,” “Management would involve too much travel,” or “We are thinking about what would be best for you.” Nobody explicitly says, “You cannot become a manager because you are blind.” Yet the practical outcome can remain the same.

Reading the room, harmony, and indirect disagreement

Japanese communication is also sometimes associated with kuuki wo yomu, literally “reading the air.” It means understanding unspoken expectations and the mood of a group. Maintaining wa, or social harmony, can also be valued in many workplaces.

These ideas can support cooperation, but they can also make exclusion harder to identify when people hesitate to say directly what they believe. If everyone understands that a blind employee is unlikely to be promoted, but nobody says it aloud, a formal policy against discrimination may not be enough to change the outcome.

Wabi-sabi: a useful contrast, not a theory of disability

Another well-known Japanese concept is wabi-sabi, an aesthetic sensibility that finds value in imperfection, impermanence, simplicity, and forms that do not conform to a polished ideal. Wabi-sabi is primarily an aesthetic and philosophical idea. It is not a framework for disability rights or employment.

Still, it offers an interesting contrast. Japanese culture has long found beauty in things that are irregular, incomplete, or different from an idealized form. This story asks whether workplaces can become equally willing to question the image of an “ideal” leader. Must a leader see in the conventional way, move in the conventional way, communicate in the conventional way, or process information in the conventional way? Or can leadership be redesigned around outcomes, judgment, collaboration, responsibility, and access?

At 9:00 a.m., the notification for an online meeting sounded.

“Good morning. For today’s executive meeting, please share the text version and the Excel files first. If any slides contain only images, add descriptions afterward.”

The speaker was Kuroda, a completely blind executive officer. On the screen were the company president, who used a wheelchair; the CFO, who was deaf; and the executive responsible for human resources, who had a significant upper-limb disability.

This was Reverse Corporation, a fictional IT and lifestyle-services company with 3,000 employees.

The company had an unusual rule. In practice, only employees with significant disabilities could become executives or managers. Employees without disabilities could rise to the highest level of specialist work, no matter how successful they were, but they could not become department heads, executive officers, or directors.

There was, of course, no sentence in the employee handbook saying so. Human Resources simply said, “Promotions are decided through a comprehensive assessment.” But after five years in the company, everyone understood the pattern. A colleague with a disability would become a manager. You would not. Your performance review would be positive. Your salary might increase a little. But you would never be given a seat where important decisions were made.

This is a fictional world created by reversing a pattern that exists in our real world. I intentionally made the setting uncomfortable, because sometimes we notice an injustice only when the positions are reversed.

Chapter 1: “You’re excellent. But you’re not management material.”

Saeki was 38 and worked in sales planning. He had no disability. He had successfully led several major projects and was known for mentoring younger colleagues. To almost everyone around him, he looked like the obvious next manager.

Yet during his interview, the head of HR said, “Your performance is highly valued. However, we will not promote you to management this term.” When Saeki asked why, the answer was framed in phrases such as “the ability to imagine the needs of diverse users,” “lived experience relevant to executive judgment,” and “aptitude for inclusive decision-making.”

Saeki asked, “Does that have anything to do with the fact that I don’t have a disability?” After a short pause, the HR director answered, “We are not judging you based on attributes.”

But Saeki knew the numbers. Not one employee without a disability had become a manager in ten years. Around the office, people sometimes joked, “Non-disabled people just don’t have the lived experience, so what can you do?” Nobody said that directly to the employees concerned. Saying it openly would create a problem.

Writing this scene makes me think about disability employment in the real world. An organization may publicly say, “We evaluate people based on ability.” Yet some employees never receive the important assignments, are never developed as management candidates, and are never given the experiences required for promotion. Nobody says the disability is the reason. But if people with the same attribute keep stopping at the same level, we should at least ask why.

Chapter 2: What non-disabled employees had to learn when their boss was completely blind

In Kuroda’s team, meeting materials were not supposed to say only, “Please look at the chart on the right.” This was not about punishment or political correctness. There was a practical reason: if information existed only visually, the manager responsible for the decision could not evaluate it independently.

For a graph, staff might write: “Sales increased from JPY 120 million in April to JPY 180 million in August, with particularly strong growth from July to August.” If a figure was shown in red, the document would also state in text what the red meant. If someone sent a screenshot in chat, they added one sentence explaining what it showed. If someone suddenly began writing on a whiteboard, that person read aloud what they were writing.

At first, some employees without disabilities complained: “Do we really have to go this far?” Six months later, something unexpected happened. Meetings became shorter. Documents became clearer. Tables that did not depend on color alone were also easier to use for people with color-vision differences. Image descriptions helped employees who listened to documents while traveling.

Accessibility is often treated as “additional work for a particular person.” But putting the meaning of information into words can improve communication for the whole organization. Reverse Corporation is fictional. That benefit is not.

Chapter 3: Even a well-intentioned company can create a new distortion

Reverse Corporation originally created its unusual system after a series of failures. Years earlier, every executive had been non-disabled. The company developed an app for visually impaired users and proudly advertised that it supported screen readers. But the purchase button had no accessible label, so completely blind customers could not complete the payment. A store-search service for wheelchair users did not include information about steps at entrances.

The company’s conclusion was: “If people directly affected do not hold decision-making power, accessibility loses priority at the final stage.” In response, the organization moved to an extreme model.

The products improved dramatically. Customers with disabilities supported them. But several years later another problem appeared. Employees without disabilities began to feel that they had been excluded from management before their careers had even begun.

This is one of the points I most wanted to explore. Discrimination does not become acceptable because of who is doing it. A group that has historically experienced exclusion does not automatically create fairness when it gains power. We need systems that accomplish two things at the same time: people with lived experience must be included in real decision-making, and decision-making eligibility must not be fixed by identity alone.

Chapter 4: Not “people who cannot accommodate others,” but people who were never given the opportunity to learn

Saeki later clashed with Kuroda, his completely blind executive. During a product-planning meeting, Saeki proposed releasing the service first for the majority of customers and postponing some accessibility work until the next version. Kuroda immediately rejected the idea.

After the meeting, Saeki expressed his frustration: “Does everything we say end with, ‘You don’t have a disability, so you can’t understand’?”

Kuroda said nothing.

The following week, the two of them joined a user-testing session. People who were completely blind, people with low vision, deaf users, people with mobility disabilities, and people with different cognitive characteristics used the prototype. Saeki saw for the first time that a screen he had considered “accessible” created completely different barriers for different users.

Kuroda also realized something. Saeki had not intentionally dismissed accessibility. He had never learned it. The company’s evaluation and training systems had not given him opportunities to work directly with users or to learn through co-design.

Not knowing something is different from refusing to learn it. When an organization fails to develop its people and instead divides them by identity into “people who understand” and “people who do not understand,” dialogue eventually stops.

Chapter 5: Overlaying real-world data on this fictional world

In Japan, disability employment has expanded significantly. According to the Japanese government’s disability employment statistics cited in the original Japanese version of this article, as of June 2025, 704,610 people with disabilities were employed by private-sector companies, and the actual employment rate had reached 2.41 percent. At the same time, 46.0 percent of companies had met the statutory employment rate of 2.5 percent.

Those numbers tell us something important about access to employment. But the question “How many people were hired?” does not tell us what work they were entrusted with, what development opportunities they received, or how far they could progress.

Research outside Japan has also examined barriers that remain after people with disabilities reach management positions. One study used the idea of “glass partitions” to discuss barriers to further advancement and the organizational roles expected of disabled managers. Research on employees who are blind or have low vision has also emphasized that workplace inclusion depends not only on accommodations, but on social relationships, organizational support, and participation.

In other words, employment cannot end with hiring. People need meaningful work. They need evaluation, development, opportunities to become management candidates, and access to decision-making. Only when those stages connect does employment become a career.

Chapter 6: The revolt of the non-disabled employees

One day, an anonymous post appeared on the company’s internal message board. Its title was: “Please let us participate in management too.”

The writer said they respected the executives with disabilities and supported the company’s philosophy. But they could not accept a system in which no amount of effort would ever make them eligible for management.

Within one night, the post received 800 reactions. Not all were supportive. Some replies said, “You have only experienced a small part of what disabled people have faced for generations.” Others argued that ignoring historical inequality and simply treating everyone identically was not necessarily fair.

Kuroda read the thread and felt a painful familiarity. In a previous company, he had repeatedly been excluded from important projects. He had heard reasonable-sounding explanations: “There is too much travel,” or “Management requires being able to see what is happening around you.” Those experiences were exactly why he felt so strongly about protecting Reverse Corporation.

But now he had to ask himself a difficult question. Had he recreated the same structure that once hurt him, only in the opposite direction?

The executive meeting continued for three days.

Chapter 7: The company did not choose “management by disabled people only”

Reverse Corporation ultimately changed its system. It abolished the informal rule limiting management positions to employees with disabilities. Instead, every management candidate was required to demonstrate practical competence in accessibility and inclusive decision-making.

The requirements included experience in co-development with users directly affected by the product, accessible document creation, arranging reasonable accommodations, crisis planning across different disability needs, and the ability to say, “I don’t know,” ask the people affected, and improve the solution.

The company also required people with disabilities to be included in reviews of major decisions about products, employment, and facilities.

The principle changed from “only disabled people decide” to “disabled people must not be excluded from decisions.”

The following year, Saeki became a manager. He no longer joined meetings merely as Kuroda’s subordinate. He participated as another person responsible for decisions. The two still disagreed frequently. But now they could argue about the substance of a proposal rather than about who was supposedly qualified by identity.

Yosuke’s conclusion: What becomes visible when we reverse the roles

What I want is not a world in which disabled people stand above non-disabled people. I want a world in which a person with a disability is not told from the beginning, “Management is unrealistic for you” or “You cannot do this kind of work.”

If someone told you, “You are non-disabled, so you cannot make executive decisions,” many people would feel that the statement was obviously unreasonable. Then why can “You are completely blind, so management will be difficult” sound so natural? Reversing the positions helps us examine that difference.

It is important for people with disabilities to be present where decisions are made. The World Health Organization also emphasizes the inclusion of persons with disabilities in decisions concerning disability. But lived experience is not a universal qualification. I am completely blind, but that does not mean I automatically understand the experience of a deaf person or a wheelchair user. So I ask. I test. I build together with people.

Instead of “We won’t entrust you with it because you don’t understand,” I want more organizations to say, “Because we don’t understand everything yet, let’s think together.” This is a fictional story, but change can start with something as ordinary as the way tomorrow’s meeting documents are prepared.

1. Do employees with disabilities see a path beyond the job for which they were originally hired?

2. Do management criteria treat accessibility and reasonable accommodation as management capabilities rather than as specialist welfare knowledge?

3. Are employees being removed from promotion consideration because someone assumes, without asking them, that they would not want the role?

4. Are meetings, documents, and performance reviews accessible with screen readers and other assistive technologies?

5. Are people with lived experience merely consulted, or do they also hold roles with decision-making authority?

These questions are not about giving disabled employees special advantages. They are also questions about transparency, management quality, and whether an organization can clearly explain what leadership competence actually means.

Going deeper

1. Do not “help” a blind manager every time. Redesign the work.

When people hear that they will work with a completely blind manager, they may imagine that subordinates will need to read documents aloud or guide the manager from place to place. From my own experience as a blind employee, a system that depends on another person’s constant help is difficult to sustain. It prevents the manager from accessing information independently, at the time they need it.

If email, Word, Excel, chat, and internal systems work with screen readers, the manager can read the information independently. If information is locked inside image-only PDFs, mouse-only systems, or color-coded tables, access depends on somebody else’s goodwill.

At Reverse Corporation, managers with disabilities participate in usability testing before new internal systems are introduced. That is not a “special service for the boss.” Independent access to information by decision-makers is a governance issue. If a CEO could never read a board document without asking a secretary to read it aloud, many companies would identify that as an information-management risk. The same principle applies to a completely blind executive.

Meeting behavior changes too. If someone says “this,” “here,” or “the red one from earlier,” another person may clarify, “You mean the July section of the sales-trend graph.” At first, that can feel cumbersome. But it turns vague visual references into explicit information, which also helps remote participants, people who are not looking at the screen, and people reading the minutes later.

2. Promotion barriers are rarely written in job advertisements

Discrimination at the point of hiring can sometimes be easier to identify. Career barriers are often more subtle. “Get a little more experience first.” “Managers have to travel a lot.” “You need to be able to oversee the whole team.” “The burden might be too much for you.”

Each explanation can sound reasonable. The problem begins when those explanations are repeatedly applied to employees with disabilities while the opportunities needed to gain the missing experience are never provided.

If business travel is considered difficult, break the problem into parts. Is the issue transportation? Local assistance, mobility support, remote participation, or taxis may be options. Is document review the problem? Use an accessible format. Is an unfamiliar venue difficult? Share the route and layout in advance.

If the organization simply says, “Travel is required, so you cannot do the role,” the employee never gains travel experience. The following year, the same organization may then say, “You lack the experience required for management.” A barrier to opportunity has been transformed into what looks like a difference in ability.

Reverse Corporation applies this cycle to its non-disabled employees. They lack co-development experience with users with disabilities, but they are never selected for projects in which they could gain that experience. Years later they are denied promotion because they “lack lived-experience-oriented development experience.” If that feels unfair in the fictional world, we should ask whether similar cycles exist in real workplaces.

3. People with lived experience still need to be in management

Everything above warns against restricting leadership according to identity. That does not mean identity and lived experience are irrelevant.

When nobody with a disability is present where decisions are made, accessibility can become something an organization does “if there is enough time.” When budgets tighten or deadlines approach, it can be deprioritized. There is real value in having people with direct experience of exclusion holding decision-making power.

But inviting one disabled person to a meeting, asking for an opinion, and then excluding that person from the final budget or launch decision is not enough. People directly affected need to be present where decisions are actually made: planning, budgeting, hiring, evaluation, procurement, product approval, and governance.

At the same time, one completely blind person does not represent every visually impaired person. Experiences differ among people who were born blind, people who lost sight later in life, people with low vision, people with restricted visual fields, guide-dog users, and white-cane users. A strong organization builds sustained relationships with multiple users rather than assuming that one representative can speak for everyone.

4. Make accessibility competence part of management assessment

If I were designing a management assessment for a future company, I might include cases like these: introduce a new time-management system to a team that includes screen-reader users; respond to an employee with low vision who raises concerns about meeting-room lighting; organize training in which a deaf employee and a completely blind employee participate together.

The test would not ask candidates to memorize a single correct answer. It would evaluate how they think: Do they ask the person affected? Do they clarify the purpose of the work? Do they generate multiple options? Do they consider safety and information security? Do they recognize when they need expertise?

No manager can know everything about every disability. What matters is the ability not to make unilateral assumptions when you do not know.

That standard can apply equally to disabled and non-disabled candidates. Having a disability does not automatically make someone qualified, and not having a disability does not automatically disqualify them. The criterion becomes the ability to operate an inclusive organization.

5. What you can do in your workplace tomorrow

First, regardless of whether your organization currently employs disabled people, test whether important internal documents can be read and navigated using only a keyboard. Next, examine performance criteria. Are vague phrases such as “the ability to see what is happening around you” or “communication skills” unconsciously tied to a particular physical or sensory way of working?

Third, when someone in a promotion meeting says, “That role would probably be difficult for this person,” ask two questions: “Have we asked the person?” and “Which specific part of the job is difficult?”

Disability-employment discussions can easily end with employment-rate numbers and a question such as “How many people did we hire?” But for an employee, the 20 or 30 years after joining the organization are much longer than the hiring process. Will they be entrusted with meaningful work? Do they have the right to fail and learn? Will they be evaluated fairly? Can they lead a team? Can they attend executive meetings? Those questions are also part of what it means to work.

6. Reasonable accommodation and meaningful responsibility belong together

Reasonable accommodation is sometimes confused with reducing the difficulty or importance of a person’s work. But the purpose is to remove or adjust barriers so that a person can perform their work.

Do not remove a responsibility because the employee cannot read the screen; provide the information in a readable form. Do not exclude the employee from a meeting because travel is difficult; adjust the method of participation. The key is to make sure accommodation does not become a pathway away from responsibility.

Reverse Corporation made the opposite mistake. For a period, it withheld important client projects from non-disabled employees because management believed they lacked sufficient understanding of minorities. The experience gap grew, and the resulting gap later appeared to be a capability gap. Real organizations should be careful not to create the same cycle.

One more question: What does “reasonable accommodation” look like from the non-disabled employee’s side in this story?

Later in the story, Saeki tells Kuroda, “Don’t we need some kind of accommodation too?” Kuroda initially reacts negatively. Saeki belongs to the majority; what kind of disability accommodation could he be asking for?

But Saeki is not asking for disability accommodation. He is asking for transparency.

Why was he not promoted? What did he need to learn or demonstrate to move forward? He wanted the answer expressed in terms of behavior and experience rather than identity. Everyone needs that kind of clarity.

The same problem can occur in disability employment when organizations say, “We already make accommodations, so lower evaluation is unavoidable,” or “We have reduced the person’s workload, so promotion will be difficult.” If the explanation remains vague, the employee has no way to improve or plan a career.

A good evaluation system makes both current strengths and the next required experiences explicit. If a person lacks management experience, perhaps they can lead a five-person project for six months. If they lack customer-negotiation experience, perhaps the organization can arrange the support necessary for them to participate in client meetings. The organization should not close the entrance to the experience and then later criticize the person for not having it.

Using this fictional story in corporate training

One possible training exercise is to divide participants into two groups. One group represents Reverse Corporation’s executives and must argue why management positions should remain limited to employees with disabilities. The other represents non-disabled employees and must explain what is unfair about that rule.

Afterward, participants translate the discussion back into real-world disability employment.

A role-reversal story can create space to share discomfort without beginning by prescribing the “correct” answer. If people are simply told, “You should promote disabled employees,” they may immediately start listing reasons why that would be difficult in their company. But if they first imagine themselves excluded from promotion because of an attribute they cannot change, vague promotion criteria become personal and concrete.

I do not want conversations about disability employment to end with kindness. I want them to become part of organizational and talent strategy: What experiences do we give people? How do we develop future decision-makers? Who has access to the pathway toward leadership? A strong organization is one in which employees with disabilities are naturally included in those questions.

Returning from imagination to reality

The purpose of writing fictional futures is not to wait for technology to solve everything someday. The opposite is true. When we describe an ideal working day in concrete terms, we can identify what is missing now. Is the barrier a policy, a document format, a building, a technology, or an assumption?

Once we break the problem down, we can distinguish between changes that can happen tomorrow and challenges that require research, investment, or long-term collaboration.

At With Blind, one principle we value is not positioning people with disabilities only as the recipients of help or convenience. People directly affected should be able to say: “This is the kind of company I want to work for. This is the kind of store I want to visit. This is the kind of city I want to live in.” They should be able to test ideas together with companies, governments, researchers, and support professionals, participating from the beginning of design rather than simply receiving a finished product.

I also invite readers to start with a question: “If we removed the current constraints, what would we actually want?” We can discuss feasibility afterward. Imagination is not an escape from reality. It can be a tool for questioning assumptions that have become invisible because they are familiar.

About With Blind

With Blind is a Japanese organization working to create a society in which people with visual impairments and people without disabilities can participate together, make choices together, and shape services and communities together.

Our work begins from a simple idea: people with disabilities should not be positioned only as recipients of support. They should also be learners, professionals, creators, instructors, service designers, leaders, and decision-makers.

We connect practical support, education, employment, technology, community activities, and co-creation. Our activities include services related to mobility and daily-life support for people with visual impairments, information and community initiatives, educational programs, employment-related activities, and projects that bring people with and without disabilities into the same design and decision-making process.

Rather than separating “supporting people” from “supported people,” we aim to create relationships in which people learn from one another and build solutions together.

Our philosophy

With Blind wants to move beyond a model in which accessibility is added only after a problem appears. We believe people with disabilities should participate from the earliest stages of planning, design, testing, evaluation, and improvement.

We also believe inclusion should not mean lowering expectations. Accessibility and reasonable accommodation should make it possible for people to take on meaningful responsibilities, develop careers, learn, teach, create, lead, and participate fully in society.

Our initiatives

• Mobility and daily-life support services for people with visual impairments in Japan
• Information and community initiatives that connect visually impaired people, families, supporters, and professionals
• Educational and learning programs centered on practical skills, technology, AI, work, daily life, and accessibility
• Projects that encourage people with disabilities to participate in design, testing, and decision-making rather than only receiving completed services
• Activities related to employment, career development, accessibility, and inclusive organizational design
• Collaboration with companies, public institutions, educators, researchers, support professionals, and communities

With Blind School and international partnerships

With Blind School is our online learning initiative. It creates opportunities for people with visual impairments and others to learn together across themes such as technology, AI, work, accessibility, daily life, communication, and professional development.

Because the program is online, we believe it has the potential to connect learners, educators, disabled people, researchers, companies, and support organizations across national borders.

With Blind would like to develop the School internationally and explore ways to adapt its learning model for different languages, cultures, disability-support systems, and local communities.

We are therefore looking for international partners.

We are interested in connecting with organizations and individuals who share an interest in visual impairment, disability inclusion, accessibility, education, employment, technology, community building, research, or co-creation.

Potential forms of collaboration may include:

• joint online classes and international learning programs;
• exchange programs connecting blind and visually impaired participants in different countries;
• localization and translation of educational content;
• joint research or accessibility projects;
• collaboration with universities, nonprofit organizations, companies, public institutions, and disability organizations;
• guest lectures and instructor exchanges;
• co-development of programs related to AI, digital accessibility, employment, independent living, and leadership;
• international community events and dialogue between people with lived experience;
• pilot projects for bringing With Blind School programs to new countries or regions.

We do not assume that a model created in Japan can simply be exported unchanged. Disability policy, education, culture, accessibility, employment practices, and available services differ widely from one country to another. For that reason, we are especially interested in partnerships based on local knowledge and genuine co-creation.

If your organization is interested in exploring a partnership with With Blind or With Blind School, we would be very happy to begin with a conversation about what each side can learn from the other and what we may be able to build together.

References and real-world sources

The company and characters in this article are fictional, but the issues behind the story are connected to real research, public statistics, accessibility practices, and disability policy. Systems and services may change after publication, so please consult official sources when using this information in practice.

• Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Japan: 2025 disability employment statistics
• Roulstone & Williams, “Being disabled, being a manager”
• Naraine & Lindsay, research on social inclusion of employees who are blind or have low vision
• World Health Organization policy on disability

More from With Blind

• With Blind article on working together with people with visual impairments
• Three months with the next generation of corporate leaders: exploring the ways people with visual impairments want to work
• How learning changed work: nine visually impaired participants explore AI over six months
• With Blind official website

The people, company, cities, and facilities in the fictional story are imaginary. All diagrams and illustrations in this English version are presented in English and were adapted to help explain the content. Please consult the references above for information about real policies, research, and services.