Structure That Lets ERGs Move Faster
I spent a good portion of my early career resistant to anything that sounded like governance. Bureaucratic, top-down, designed more to manage people than to support them. For someone who came up valuing creativity and momentum, formal structures felt like the thing that slowed good work down or took the fun and passion out of it.
What changed my mind was the long-burn of watching the same problems repeat themselves across ERG after ERG, year after year. It came from solving problems at a global scale: how to create a structure that is strong enough to sustain across business silos and through times of uncertainty, while being flexible enough to have local relevance and agency for employees around the world.
When a new ERG chair steps into the role, they’re motivated and ready to make an impact. And then they frequently spend the first several months (sometimes longer) figuring out things that their predecessor already knew about how decisions get made, what the budget process looks like, and who needs to be in the loop before an initiative moves forward. In a typical two-year term, that’s six months of orientation before leaders get to do the things that excited them to get involved, the real contributions they wanted to make.
That’s an opportunity to rethink and redesign.
What Governance Actually Does
At its most useful, governance is created from experience and institutional memory. It answers the questions that shouldn’t require a senior leader’s knowledge to resolve, and frees up the people in the room to focus on what actually requires their judgment.
When an ERG has clear operating structures, incoming leaders don’t have to rebuild the foundation. They inherit the decision-making pathways that exist. They have documentation to work from, and precedents that are visible. They can move directly into contribution rather than orientation, which is both more energizing for them and more valuable for the members they’re serving. It also saves precious time for your organization while reducing risk.
This matters more than it might seem, because ERG leadership transitions are frequent and often unpredictable. People leave organizations or get promoted into roles that demand more of their time. Life changes. An ERG that depends on any single person’s knowledge to function is perpetually one departure away from starting over, and the volunteer leaders who inherit that situation feel it immediately.
And while sometimes governance can be overblown, when done well, it’s a bit of a relief. I don’t want to have to look at 6 websites and 4 procedures and 3 policies and phone-a-friend to figure out how to submit an expense report for my ERG. That’s a huge drain on time and energy that I should be spending elsewhere. I would much rather know where to find the rules and action steps and just get it done, so that I can focus on making a real impact.
The Autonomy Argument
This highlights what might initially feel counterintuitive: clear governance actually expands what ERG leaders feel empowered to do.
One of the most frequent risks that I managed at Amazon was the management of speakers for ERG events. Each country or region had policies for vetting and approving external speakers, and procedures for the contractual set up and payments. At least once or twice a month, I was pulled into an unexpected call with partners from public relations and internal communications, and often public policy or local HR leaders. Occasionally they surfaced concerns that our team and ERG leaders would never have known about, but they also uncovered countless situations in which a step in the process had been skipped or misunderstood. This was rarely intentional – more often than not, it was a lack of clearly defined and documented governance for how an ERG leader should navigate the scenario.
When leaders know what they’re authorized to do and how to do it, they move. They don’t have to wait for permission on things that don’t require it. They don’t stall on logistics that should be resolved by process. The creative and strategic energy that drew them to ERG leadership in the first place can be used, because the operational groundwork isn’t consuming it.
I’ve seen this shift happen, before and after governance structures were put in place. The changes weren’t painless; it’s almost always challenging to move from little or no structure to something that seems more rigid. But once you’ve shown what people get back – time, energy, clarity – the change management is worth it.
The Bureaucracy Concern Is Real. Don’t Ignore It.
One concern I hear often, especially from leaders who share my original perspectives about structure, is that building governance means building bureaucracy. That it will slow things down, add layers of approval, make the ERG feel more like a committee and less like a community.
That’s a real risk if governance is designed to manage people rather than support them. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and in well-functioning ERG ecosystems, it usually isn’t.
The most effective governance structures I’ve seen are minimal on paper and significant in practice. They might include a decision-making framework, a documented budget process, a succession planning process or even a simple leadership transition protocol that ensures the next person isn’t starting cold. Things that work well are documented in shared templates that reduce the time it takes to launch a new initiative or write a proposal. None of this is heavy, and all of it compounds positively over time.
One particularly useful function of effective governance is to close the gaps between your organizational policies, and the use case of how to apply the rules in an ERG scenario. For instance, if your company’s finance policy allows managers to purchase lunch for their teams once per quarter: can your ERG leaders do this as well? And if so, under what circumstances? And how do they pay for it if they don’t have a company credit card? And what cost center should it be billed under when they submit an expense report?
Finding an answer to this question might take unnecessary time and still be unclear. This is frustrating for the individual, but also think about how this compounds across multiple ERGs and multiple years – many volunteers losing time searching for an answer which could be easily documented and readily available. Consider the risks: if your ERG leader doesn’t feel empowered, they might delay action and miss an opportunity because they’re concerned with making the decision themselves OR the opposite, your ERG leader moves forward anyway in the “ask for forgiveness later” approach. In some instances, this might not be a big deal, but in others this could create a ripple effect much bigger than the scenario – had there only been clarity.
Key considerations should be whether your structure can sustain the ERG’s momentum when the people change, and whether you’ve reduced unnecessary risks for your ERG leaders and organization. If these are true, it’s working well.
What Becomes Possible
A manufacturing organization we worked with had well-intentioned ERGs that were, by their own description, exhausting to lead. Every incoming leadership cohort faced the same learning curve. Every initiative required reinventing processes that previous leaders had already figured out. Their momentum was real, but fragile, because it was dependent on whoever was currently in the role and whether their predecessor had given them any context or content.
When they built out even an initial governance framework with documented processes, a transition playbook, and shared templates for the most common ERG activities — the feedback from leaders shifted almost immediately. They could focus on creating impact through the connections and community, rather than expending repeated effort reconstructing the infrastructure beneath it.
One incoming ERG chair told me that for the first time, she felt like she was adding onto something successful rather than building from scratch.
Reflections
For ERG Leaders
Where are you spending time on logistics and decisions that a clear process would resolve — and what would you do with that time instead?
If you left your role tomorrow, what would the next person need that doesn’t currently exist anywhere in writing?
For Program Managers
What’s the lightest governance structure that would meaningfully reduce the burden on incoming leaders without adding layers that slow things down?
Are the ERGs in your ecosystem rebuilding the same foundations every leadership cycle, and what’s the cost of that in momentum and leader experience?
For HR Leaders and Executives
If your ERGs are underperforming, is the diagnosis a leadership problem — or are leaders being asked to operate without the structural support that other parts of the business take for granted?
What would it mean for your leadership pipeline if ERG roles were known as positions where people could make an impact quickly, rather than spend the first half of their term getting oriented?