What Happens When ERG Leaders Have One Consistent Place to Connect
Most organizations with multiple ERGs or Councils have experienced some type of collaboration: two groups co-host an event, share a flyer, split the catering budget. It’s friendly and efficient, but the impact mostly stays at the surface. The groups operate separately but happen to intersect once in a while — and the real opportunities, the ones that would actually change who the groups are reaching and what they can do, stay untouched.
I know what it looks like when it goes further than that. I’ve built it.
The Rhythm That Changed Everything
When I came in as program manager at Amazon in 2019, there was a loose virtual monthly routine that pulled a handful of ERG leaders together. It wasn’t much — no consistent agenda, nothing designed to build real relationships between leaders or produce the kind of impact a truly connected cohort of groups can generate.
We started with two simple things: a shared list and chat room so leaders could reach each other directly, and a monthly routine focused on staying aligned on priorities — not reporting out on separate calendars. That was the first stepping stone. It became the foundation for what came next: knowledge sharing between local chapters, a repeatable process for launching new ones, and advantages that only showed up once leaders were working together instead of in parallel. This enabled the global growth we’ll talk more about in the upcoming Spark Series episode.
The number still catches people off guard when I say it out loud: the organization grew from 100 chapters in 2020 to more than 2,000 just five years later. That growth didn’t come from a bigger budget or a mandate from the top. It came from leaders who had a reliable place and time to learn from each other, and a cadence that was sustainable.
Why This Doesn’t Happen on Its Own
ERG leaders are, in my experience, genuinely willing and often eager to collaborate. The challenge isn’t motivation — it’s that collaboration needs a consistent place to happen.
Without an established rhythm, the conversations amongst groups are still event-driven and reactive. Leaders will connect when there’s a reason — a shared initiative, a scheduling conflict to sort out, a request from Talent Acquisition to help with a hiring fair — and then go back to operating independently. The relationships don’t deepen, the strategic conversations don’t happen, and the compounding value of a truly connected group stays theoretical.
Sometimes an ERG leader takes the initiative themselves, pulling peers together because they see the value before anyone asks them to. Sometimes it’s coordinated by a program manager or HR partner who builds the routine on leaders’ behalf. Both paths work.
What makes the difference is treating collaboration as something you design for, and with a connection consistent enough to become a sustainable rhythm.
What the Strongest Programs Have in Common
We see this pattern consistently in our work with GEN. Among the GEN IMPACT Award recipients, particularly those organizations with Top 10 Enterprise-wide ERG and Councils, one thing shows up every time: strong, deliberate connection between groups.
Two examples come up constantly when we talk with leaders who’ve built this well.
A shared newsletter across ERGs is one of the simplest, and most underused. When groups combine efforts to promote every event and program in one place, each group’s message reaches people who never would have found it on their own — the same logic behind meeting members where they’re actually paying attention rather than defaulting to whatever channel is easiest. A newsletter built by one group and read by five reaches further than five newsletters, each read by one.
The second is longer-term and less transactional. A Veterans network and a Mental Health & Wellness group build an ongoing partnership around service-member transition and isolation. A Families ERG partners with an LGBTQIA+ group on parenting benefits and legal protections. A Hispanic/Latino ERG works with a women’s Council to explore career paths across generations. The conversations amongst the people leading these efforts create invaluable understanding and knowledge, and these relationships often have impact far beyond day-to-day interactions.
They’re also the same kind of cross-group relationships we’ve pointed to as one of the most underrated ways ERG leaders grow — the connections you make through an ERG that you wouldn’t have made otherwise. These collaborations aren’t single moment-in-time events — they work because they’re built to last.
What It Produces for Members
One dimension of cross-group partnership that often gets underdeveloped is what it produces for members specifically. When leaders know each other, understand each other’s communities, and design with each other’s members in mind, the programming that results tends to reflect how employees actually experience their lives at work.
Employees don’t compartmentalize their identities. A Latino woman who is also a working parent and early in her career isn’t looking for separate programming from three different groups — she’s looking for spaces that see her whole. Programs built to collaborate produce more of that, because the leaders building the work have a broader view of who they’re building it for. And as a member, this means that I’m more likely to find events and activities that feel truly meaningful and applicable to me.
This is more efficient for leaders, too. Intersectional programming done well means more impact from the same investment of time — which matters considerably when the people building it are volunteers. It also increases the likelihood of sharing strong practices across ERGs.
What Becomes Possible
When ERG leaders operate as a connected group rather than parallel programs, their influence grows in ways no single group can produce alone. Shared priorities become visible. Patterns that cut across communities — retention friction, manager gaps, employee experience breakdowns — surface faster and more clearly. And the collective credibility of a unified volunteer leadership group is, frankly, harder for an organization to overlook than any single group making the same case on its own.
The organizations that do this well didn’t get there by telling leaders to collaborate more. They built the conditions that made collaboration the natural, valuable thing to do.
Reflections
For ERG Leaders
- When you’re with other ERG leaders, are you thinking together about shared organizational goals, or mostly updating each other on separate activities?
- Which communities adjacent to yours are navigating challenges your group is also facing, and what might you build together that neither of you could build as well alone?
For Program Managers
- Does your program have a consistent, structured space for cross-group strategic conversation, and is the agenda designed to generate collaboration, or just coordination?
- Where are groups in your organization duplicating effort that a shared approach would resolve?
For HR Leaders and Executives
- Are you seeing your ERG leaders as a collective leadership cohort, and are you using that cohort’s insight to inform people strategy?
- What would it signal to your program if cross-group collaboration were treated as a strategic priority rather than a nice-to-have?