Today Molly shares her recent experience as an internship in a corporate environment as a person who stutters. Molly speaks earnestly about one of the challenges she faced in this environment, what action she took regarding this challenge, as well as the positive results she’s seen from her efforts. We are so grateful for people like Molly who share these lived experiences so we may all learn and grow.
Like many university students, I spent my summer as an intern at a Big Four accounting firm. As my stutter isn’t that noticeable, I had never felt the need to declare it to an employer during the recruitment process. I did make the point, however, to bring it up to my manager when I first started as I would be attending speech therapy during the internship. About seven weeks in to my nine week internship, I was asked to summarise and present recent changes to tax law at the our team morning meeting. We had a checklist of tasks we could do during the internship so we could experience every aspect of the role and one of these tasks was to present at a team meeting. My manager brought it up in one of our one-on-one weekly meetings. I told him that I didn’t feel comfortable presenting as it was material that I didn’t understand and I need time to practice reading something of this difficulty. His response was “no one knows that you have stutter”. I tried to reinforce the nature of the issue by saying that I attend speech therapy which got me the response “it’s good character building”. He then laughed and moved on to the rest of meeting. I was so shocked and upset that I just agreed to everything else in the meeting so that I could leave. It wasn’t until he sent me the material that I was to summarise and I responded that I was still uncomfortable doing this, that he let it go. The impact that this had on me was quite severe. I didn’t sleep during the nights following the meeting because I was so stressed and anxious over having to speak at the team meeting. I am still experiencing the effects months on as this was my first corporate job and it made me feel like I wasn’t good enough. As a result, and with encouragement from my speech therapist, I ended up going to HR. Going to HR was quite daunting as I was in my first corporate job and I knew that the bigger firms communicated with each other so I felt like I might be damaging my future career before I really even got started. However, as someone whose stutter had always been brushed aside and been told it was something I could get over, it felt really good to finally stand up for myself. Thinking back on the experience, I know that I would have regretted it if I hadn’t have spoken up and used the experience to educate my employer. I hope that I have made it easier for anyone who comes after me who also has a stutter.
I am now in the process of trying to find full time work which comes with job interviews. As someone who wants to enter the legal field, being a compelling and confident speaker is essential to the job. For me personally, nerves factor greatly into whether or not I’m going to stutter, and as someone who wants to sound confident, I try to minimise how much I stutter. However, in being so focused on my speech, I have to compromise by not making eye contact, slow speech and trailing off because I’m so focused on forming the words, that I haven’t prepared what to say next. But if I let myself stutter, then I feel like I instantly get written off by the interviewer. I know that I can be just as confident of a speaker as anyone else even when I do stutter but I don’t want to risk not getting the position because my nerves over the interview process have made me stutter even more. It’s a tricky line for me to walk, especially when my stutter isn’t that obvious when I’m comfortable, so I wouldn’t be stuttering that much at a normal day at work. So now after two interviews, here is what I found out: that I could actually turn my stutter into an answer for that dreaded “what is your greatest strength” question. I think that it makes me unique and is a point of difference between me and other candidates. This interviewer actually said that it showed that I was empathic and understanding of the different ways others chose to do things in the workplace. And after everything I had been through I thought, why shouldn’t I be able to use my stutter to my advantage? For my second interview, I actually declared my stutter in my job application in the disability/impairment disclosure. I didn’t even remember I had done it until I was at the end of the interview and I apologised for all the pauses and they said that they already knew. I think after the experience I had at the accounting firm I thought that all firms wouldn’t want me because of my stutter but this showed me it was just one bad experience, it doesn’t mean that all firms will be like that. And I have to remember, that if a workplace doesn’t want me because of my stutter, they are not someone who I want to work for anyway.
Molly
Interviews are something we commonly discuss with our clients, We know the impact a supportive workplace environment can have for a person who stutters – and everyone, for that matter – which is why we have have created this handout called ‘A word on interviews‘ that you may find helpful. Likewise, a supportive workplace environment can have a huge positive impact for employees who stutter – and everyone for that matter – which is why we’ve put together this short handout called ‘Reasonable accomodations in the workplace‘ which both employers and employees alike may find helpful.
If you are a person who stutters in the workplace or you are an employer with employees who stutter and you have questions please do not hesitate to get in touch.