Employee Resource Group Excellence

5Career Pillar: Turning ERGs into a Talent Engine

The competition had been fierce, and the top five finalists felt honored to be in such an elite group of companies. It was September 2010, and the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (USHCC) had just launched the Latino ERG Corporate Challenge in an effort to identify the best Latino ERG in the country. A stellar group of judges had reviewed dozens of submissions from leading Latino ERGs across the country. The finalists had been invited to the USHCC convention in Dallas to present their case for why they should receive the trophy.

Two hundred Latino ERG representatives witnessed HACEMOS, the Latino employee group from AT&T, take the top prize. The winning quality? AT&T had turned HACEMOS into a talent engine with both current and future organizational leaders actively engaged in running the ERG.

A year later, at the USHCC conference in Miami, there was a new Latino ERG Corporate Challenge winner: General Electric's Hispanic Forum. But the winning quality was the same: GE's Hispanic Forum had been able to attract top corporate executives into the ERG. Both the 2010 and 2011 winners proved that ERG leadership roles can be the key to not only achieving tremendous success for individuals and the ERG itself, but to also sustaining, replicating, and scaling ERG success across the enterprise.

The key message that was sent by GE and AT&T, almost like a shot fired across the bow of other ERGs, was the realization that ERGs need ...