Reflections on My Journey as an ERG Leader

Today is my last day as the Global Co-Lead for Parents at LinkedIn (PAL) - and while I definitely plan to stay involved with this org, I wanted to write down some reflections from the last 2 years of working with this wonderful Employee Resource Group (ERG). 

It all started with attending a few mom's lunches in the San Francisco office (organized by Carisa Dorosh) after I returned from mat leave. It was great to be part of a community that could teach me and could relate to my experience - since I was the first one in my immediate friend group to have a baby. I quickly realized I wanted to help grow this community, so I started to be involved as a San Francisco office lead, then NAMER lead, and ultimately taking on the Global Co-Lead role (thanks for the opportunity Liza Smyth).

During my time, we officially launched our ERG, which brought onboard two amazing executive sponsors (Ryan Roslansky and Heidi Andersen), and we established our presence in all regions (thanks to our wonderful regional leads Anjulika Saini, Miriam Berney, Charlie Fitzgerald, Nacho Franch, Peter Hubert, Sachin Kapoor and Michele Ragon - our comms queen). Now we boast 1,600+ members in most of our global offices. We also started to form great partnerships with our Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging (DIBs) team, our amazing ERG community and HR! We operationalized how we think about events and priorities, and how we align to our DIBs goals and help the larger LinkedIn community. 

The last few months were especially important: we built an online community for people to share, connect and support each other in the time of a global pandemic and got involved in important conversations around racial injustice and the role we can play to build a better future. And this is just the beginning.  

I said I will share some reflections from this past 2 years, so here we go:

• The whole is greater than the sum of its parts - when we all come together and step up, we can create a meaningful and unique workplace that fosters inclusion and belonging. Scaling our efforts is wildly important, working together and leveraging each other makes everything so much more impactful.
• Prioritization is hard! - as an ERG, there are so many things we can take on, but finding the right balance between building the community and progressing the DIBs agenda is very important. In example, while events/speakers/etc. have been a focus for us in building our community and presence, we were working in the background on the "perfect" launch plan for our future online community platform. That work swiftly shifted when the reality of the global pandemic hit us all, and we decided to launch our PAL group - perfect is the enemy of progress!
• ERGs teach you invaluable leadership skills - even if your company doesn't have a formal program for ERG leadership development, the skills you acquire in an ERG leadership position are better than most management schools. You can learn skills such as: mapping out vision into actionable steps and programs, budgeting and fiscal strategy, executive presence, communication, relationship-building and stakeholder management, and give you an opportunity to connect with people in the org you wouldn't have otherwise. (Big thanks to LinkedIn and Rosanna Durruthy, Thomas Sexton, Meredith Morales, Mary Shindler, Devyani Dutt, Jeanine Francis, Sean Cervera, and Andrea Medina for the program they built and the great opportunity we have to learn). 

In closing, I would wholeheartedly encourage everyone to participate in ERG events, be an ally, make your voice heard and if you can, take on an ERG position. HUGE gratitude for my PAL family and for so many wonderful people I got to work with throughout these years! I see you ??