Case Study

ENABLING ERG SUCCESS

CLIENT PROFILE

An American multi-national aerospace and defense conglomerate with more than 150,000 employees and more than $60B in revenue, this company has undergone tremendous change in the last five years.

CHALLENGE AND ASK

The client was investing in a multi-point initiative to create “one culture” following a merger, which included the consolidation and relaunch of several satellite employee resource groups (ERGs). They understood the importance of sponsorship and development, as well as community building and manager support. Our stakeholder asked for our help to ensure the success of the ERGs and their new leaders, which included division chairs, board members, and sponsors.

APPROACH

We worked together with the client to develop a holistic approach that served each important stakeholder in the success model: the ERG leaders who represented their communities with passion, the executive sponsors who were called upon to use their power to support these communities, and the managers of the ERG leaders whose responses to these investments of time and energy would either enable success or disable it. We wanted to inform, inspire, and equip each group to show up effectively for their unique role in the change.

SOLUTION

We engaged in the ERG relaunch initiative on several interrelated fronts over multiple years that included, but were not limited to the following components:

The administration and reporting of our Waymakers Talent Experience Survey (WTES) to better understand how ERG leaders were experiencing the organization by identity and at several critical intersections (now part of their annual listening strategy)
Skill-building workshops at their first ERG Summit included a session for ERG leaders on mindset and leadership and a workshop with the executive sponsors on how to sponsor effectively (with a high–level read–out of the survey results)
Pre-summit coaching circles for ERG leaders, and post–summit coaching circles with ERG leaders and sponsors to discuss insights and bold actions that might accelerate progress
Inclusive leadership training of the ERG leaders’ managers, whose conscious and active support would be required for success
An innovation workshop at year two of the Summit that brought together ERG leaders and executives to collaborate on next steps

OUTCOMES

The major investment the client made and is still making in their ERG community had a tremendous effect on their belief in the company’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. It cultivated their sense of belonging by giving them an identity, opened doors for opportunity by providing a direct link to power networks, enabled efficiency and best practice implementation by creating forums for sharing ideas and results, and improved accountability for all involved, including the executives.

Through our solutions, all parties:

Learned how to have more open and honest conversations
Know more about what’s happening in their workplace and what they can do to make it better
Have collaborated on a set of choices to improve outcomes for ERGs and the communities they represent
Learned new leadership skills and tools
Built genuine relationships across backgrounds and levels, which has made the way for individual sponsorship

We are repeating the two–year cycle with this client in 2024/2025 and will be administering the WTES survey to 27,000 employees in 2024.