Coaching, Capability, and the Disabled Employee
By Ky Teasdale.
Two people are having the same bad quarter. The work has slipped and a manager has noticed. One is offered coaching and a development conversation. The other is referred to occupational health and booked into capability. They are struggling in the same way at the same job. What changes is the label the organisation reaches for, and the second one is disabled.
In the NHS, disabled staff are 2.04 times more likely to enter formal capability than their non-disabled colleagues (NHS England, 2024). That figure is about how organisations respond to strain, and reading it as a statement about what disabled people can do gets it backwards. The same signal – a dip in performance – is more likely to be put through a remedial process when disability is in the frame.
I was once hired by a disabled woman to coach her, and she was paying for it herself. Her employer had bought the larger monitors and the reserved desk without any argument. Coaching was treated differently. The desk was an adjustment, but "coaching is more of a development thing." So the equipment came out of the disability budget and the development came out of her current account.
Where Coaching Is Already Normal
For one group of employees, this argument is settled. Around one in six UK employers (16%) provide maternity or parental-transition coaching (Bright Horizons, 2025), paid from HR as retention spend and driven by competition for talent (71%) and wellbeing (43%). Everyone treats it as support through a known period of disruption, and nobody asks the returning mother to prove the case or wait on a trial before funding it.
The precedent that sets is the one that matters. An employer funding maternity coaching has accepted, in budget terms, that it owes real support to a capable person going through a hard transition. The same logic runs at the top of the organisation, where a coach is funded to carry a new leader through onboarding. A capable person meets a shape of work that does not fit them yet, and coaching is how the organisation helps close the gap.
Square peg, round role.
The disabled employee is the same case. The label on it is the only thing that changes.
What the Evidence Says
None of this is a leap of faith. Workplace coaching has a modest but consistent positive effect across 17 studies (Jones et al., 2016), and for disabled and neurodivergent staff the review evidence treats it as an effective accommodation (N. E. Doyle & McDowall, 2019). One of the larger UK datasets follows 409 people through an average of 11 hours of coaching and records before-and-after gains in organisation, memory, and stress management (N. Doyle & Bradley, 2023). Maternity coaching, for all its reach, rests more on organisational logic than on controlled trials. Across these cases, coaching turns up wherever an organisation has decided a transition is worth supporting early, whatever the state of the trial evidence.
Routing Is the Problem, Not the Systems
Occupational health, capability, and coaching are all legitimate, and they exist for different purposes:
- Occupational health assesses function and risk.
- Capability manages sustained performance breakdown with some procedural fairness.
- Coaching develops people through structured support.
None of that is in dispute.
The question is which one an organisation reaches for first when a disabled employee starts to struggle, and how early. The same situation becomes a transition if coaching comes first but a failure if capability does. The underlying condition can be identical either way.
Access to Work and the Awareness Gap
There is even a way to fund coaching that never touches the employer's budget. Access to Work pays for job coaching directly to the provider, on the employee's own application, with no employer sign-off in the way. Awareness of it is low, and the design puts the first move with the employee, so the scheme reaches whoever can navigate it rather than whoever needs it. The route a struggling disabled employee is far more likely to be sent down, occupational health, is one that only 22% of them and 25% of their managers say has actually helped (Business Disability Forum, 2023).
The wider picture is the same. 78% of disabled employees have to start the adjustment process themselves, and only 10% find it easy (Business Disability Forum, 2023). 58% say whether they got anything at all came down to how confident they felt asking. A system that runs on the employee's confidence and information rewards the people who already have both.
Reading Has to Change First
None of this needs a new programme. Coaching is already in the adjustment column for the employees we have decided to back. Putting disabled staff in the same column is a small operational change. The hard part is the idea underneath it.
The medical reading holds because it is cheaper and safer for the employer. Occupational health is the established route and capability the established process, and both let an organisation treat a disabled employee as a cost to contain rather than a person to develop.
This is not an argument against either system, only about which one comes first. While the difficulty gets read as a medical fact to be accommodated or a risk to be managed, coaching stays filed under development and out of reach. Read the same person as capable, meeting a role that does not yet fit, and coaching becomes the ordinary adjustment it already is for everyone else. That shift is occupational psychology's to make. No reasonable employer should expect a person to work to the point of sustained pain and exhaustion.
Conclusion
A manager who notices a disabled employee struggling can refer them to occupational health without a second thought. The route is built and the budget is understood.
Coaching should be that easy to reach for, offered as readily as a referral and put on the table first rather than last.
The systems already exist. Making coaching a default adjustment is mostly a matter of deciding that it is one.
For ABP Members:
Not a member? We invite you to join us at The Association for Business Psychology!
About the Author
Ky Teasdale is a Certified Business Psychologist (MSc), executive coach, and coaching supervisor, and serves as Corporate Member Concierge for The Association for Business Psychology. His work sits at the intersection of practice, judgement, and access, shaped by years working with and advising leaders, coaches, and organisations on real career and decision-making challenges. Alongside applied work, Ky completed his MSc examining how skills are interpreted and evaluated in early-career recruitment, with particular attention to how socioeconomic background shapes interpretation within selection decisions.
References
Bright Horizons. (2025). Parental Leave & Family Leave Benchmarks. https://assets.brighthorizons.co.uk/-/media/BH/Solutions/Resources/Research/bright-horizons-parental-leave-and-family-support-uk-benchmark-uk.pdf
Business Disability Forum. (2023). The Great Big Workplace Adjustments Survey 2023. Business Disability Forum. https://businessdisabilityforum.org.uk/key-statistics-and-graphics/
Doyle, N., & Bradley, E. (2023). Disability coaching in a pandemic. Journal of Work-Applied Management, 15(1), 135–147. https://doi.org/10.1108/JWAM-07-2022-0042
Doyle, N. E., & McDowall, A. (2019). Context matters: A review to formulate a conceptual framework for coaching as a disability accommodation. PLOS ONE, 14(8), e0199408. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199408
Jones, R. J., Woods, S. A., & Guillaume, Y. R. F. (2016). The effectiveness of workplace coaching: A meta‐analysis of learning and performance outcomes from coaching. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 89(2), 249–277. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12119
NHS England. (2024). NHS Workforce Disability Equality Standard 2024 data analysis report. NHS England. https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/nhs-workforce-disability-equality-standard-2024/