Research and Leadership Briefs

Best practices in the leadership and disability fields are constantly evolving. To understand how leaders stay informed, the brief uses data from the 2025 Annual Survey with responses from 141 alumni of the Leadership Institute. Participants reported feeling more informed about the disability field than the leadership field, with top information sources including trainings, webinars, and conferences. The brief also highlights the value of peer networks, listservs, and communities of practice in supporting continuous learning. Understanding where leaders are getting their information can help organizations, educators, and researchers better connect and support leadership development in the disability field.

This month’s brief explores new findings from the Organizational Priorities and Practices Inventory (OPPI), drawing on input from over 1,100 disability service professionals across the U.S. The focus is on how organizations are supporting people with disabilities to live, work, and belong in their communities. The data reveal strong alignment in values but also highlight persistent gaps between what organizations prioritize and what they put into practice, especially around natural supports and employment. Explore the full brief to see how roles across the field perceive community inclusion, and where improvements are still needed.

Understanding career trajectories and how leadership develops within our field is essential to helping organizations plan for the future, retain talented staff, and build strong, mission-driven teams. Find out about the employment changes of Leadership Institute graduates over the past five years, why they made those changes, and how their professional training contributed to those changes in this research brief!

The April research brief, Exploring the Implementation Gap: Autonomy, Choice, and Control, presents findings from over 1,100 disability services professionals. While organizations strongly prioritize person-centered supports, the data reveal gaps in implementation around control over service plans and budgets. Executives and directors report the largest disconnects between values and practice, highlighting the need for better strategies to ensure real choice and control for people with disabilities.

Participants of the Leadership Institute often experience a shift in mindset about the rights and capabilities of people with disabilities after attending the training. To gauge this shift, we ask participants to rate what they thought before and after the Leadership. Find out how 2024 participants changed their thinking by reading this Research Brief.

Leaders are critical to fostering (or getting in the way of) happiness at work. Happier workplaces are more productive, more engaged, healthier, and have higher tenure rates. The strategies in this Leadership Brief can help you build happiness across your organization.

The February research brief explores the gap between organizational priorities and practices across different employees’ positions. This brief presents the most recent OPPI data collected from 1,171 professionals with different roles and organizations in the disabilities system. About 10% of respondents are Executives, 19% are Directors, 30% are Managers, 35% are Frontline, and 6% are employees in other positions who do not support people with disabilities directly or indirectly. The piece describes consistently high priorities across all roles, with some differences in principles such as Staff Participation, Values, Impact, and Support. Also, there are notable trends across roles and ratings of organizational practices, with Frontline staff consistently rating practices higher than executives and directors. Learn more about how employees at different levels perceive organizational priorities and practices!

How useful are the things learned at the Leadership Institute? Results from the post surveys of 2024 Leadership Institute graduates show that they find the topics of the Leadership Institute to be very useful to their work. Read the research brief to discover which topic area they found most useful!

Research shows that when leaders have strong personal and professional networks, they tend to be more engaged, innovative, and effective. This Leadership Brief highlights four key relationships for leaders to prioritize, especially when their leadership roles feel challenging or lonely.

The November research brief on the Organizational Priorities and Practices Inventory (OPPI) area of Autonomy, Choice, and Control reveals that while organizations prioritize person-centered approaches and autonomous decision-making, there remains a significant gap between these priorities and actual practices—especially in empowering individuals to control their service plans and budgets. Findings from the OPPI show that although organizations rate autonomy as essential, the implementation often falls short, with a 9% difference on average between priorities and practices. Addressing these gaps could enhance service quality, dignity, and independence for people with disabilities.