In this insightful episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, Dr. Adams sits down with Alyssa Dver, Founder and CEO of the ERG Leadership Alliance, to explore how employee resource groups (ERGs) can drive both inclusion and business performance. Alyssa breaks down what ERGs are, why they’re different from social clubs, and how volunteer leaders navigate the paradox of doing “extra” work that still has to align with business goals. She and Dr. Adams discuss the current backlash against DEI, the recent U.S. executive order that both constrains and reinforces the importance of inclusive ERGs, and why organizations that were already committed to DEI are now doubling down on ERGs as engines of belonging, innovation, and retention. Throughout the conversation, they connect ERGs directly to disability inclusion, emphasizing that disability crosses all demographics and that every ERG can and should be disability-ready.
Alyssa also shares her personal journey, from a traditional marketing career to brain-science-based confidence research sparked by her son’s neurological disability, and explains how belonging and psychological safety are literally “hardwired” performance factors in the brain. She and Dr. Adams connect this science to everyday workplace realities: when people feel safe and included, they think more clearly, collaborate better, and are more likely to raise tough issues or innovative ideas. Alyssa describes how the ERG Leadership Alliance supports organizations at every stage, starting, restarting, or optimizing ERGs, through research, training, tooling, and a global network of more than 100 million ERG participants. Dr. Adams closes by urging listeners, especially disability advocates and employers, to leverage ERGs as a powerful, practical mechanism to build truly inclusive workplaces and accelerate disability employment.
TRANSCRIPT:
Podcast Commentator: Welcome to podcasts by Doctor Kirk Adams, where we bring you powerful conversations with leading voices in disability rights, employment and inclusion. Our guests share their expertise, experiences and strategies to inspire action and create a more inclusive world. If you’re passionate about social justice or want to make a difference, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in with your host, Doctor Kirk Adams.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of podcast by Doctor Kirk Adams. I am that Doctor Kirk Adams talking to you from my home office in Seattle, Washington. And I have with me today a remarkable person that I’m getting to know better and better who’s doing great things in the world. Alyssa Dver. She’s founder and CEO of the Leadership Alliance. Alyssa.
Alyssa Dver: Remarkable. That’s one of my favorite words. I would use that to describe you too.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Well, there we go. Well, I I’ll. In full disclosure, Alyssa and I had a conversation about employee resource. Resource groups and the Leadership Alliance several weeks back, and the recording disappeared. So we’re doing it again. But I’m going to call it a blessing in disguise, because so much has happened in the last last six weeks as our our topsy turvy world continues to turn. And so I wanted to touch on a couple of recent insights and get your take on it. Alyssa. Yeah, yeah. Before we do that, just to let people know I am Doctor Kirk Adams. I am the immediate past president and CEO of the American Foundation for the blind. Prior to that, the same roles at the Lighthouse for the blind here in Seattle. I have a consulting practice called Innovative Impact. Focus on fun, innovative, high impact projects that will lead to greater inclusion of people with disabilities. I have a PhD in leadership and change. My doctoral work was an ethnographic study of blind adults employed in large American corporations and ergs. Employee resource groups came up quite often in my ethnographic interviews of blind people working in big companies. And in a in an appendix of my dissertation is called Journeys Through Rough Country, by the way, and you can find it by searching Journeys Through Rough Country by Kirk Adams. And in an appendix, I, I have a fictitious scenario when I’m talking, when I’m talking to parents of a young blind child who are very fearful about their child’s future and very uncertain because like my parents, my my retinas detached when I was five.
Dr. Kirk Adams: They had never met a blind person before. They didn’t have any experience in that area. And most parents of blind kids don’t. And so I, I focus on employment. So I this fictitious scenario is talking about employment and the things they would need to do in order to prepare their child to be successful in the world of employment and be independent and to be able to thrive in the way that that they want wanted to thrive. And we talked about developmental stages and having kids. Do the blind kids do the same stuff other kids do? You know, for four year olds playing on the playground and playing in the sandbox, and the blind kid should be in there, you know, fighting over the toys with the sighted kids and, you know, the 12, 12, 13 year old kids going to meet their friends you know, at the mall or wherever. The kid needs to have the orientation, mobility, skills and the confidence to be able to go and independently join them. And you know, we talked about early work experience, and then we talked about the expanded core curriculum, which is the great news that blind kids get to hear in school, which says you have to learn all the things the sighted kid learn, sighted kids learn.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And these nine other things like orientation, mobility skills and use of assistive technology and self-advocacy skills and you know, work, workplace and career awareness and development. And then we talked about the workplace, and I talked about you know, some of the things to look for when you’re when your child is going to be looking for work. Is disability inclusion formally stated at a leadership level by, by the company? Do they have a centralized accommodations process and budget? And do they do they have a employee resource group focused on disability inclusion? And that is one of the signs of a potentially good workplace for a person with a disability is to have that erg. So ergs. Ergs have been present in my mind as an important piece of the employment picture. And as most of you listening probably are aware, only 35% of us with significant disabilities are in the workforce. We’re in a much narrower band of occupations. We tend to stick closer to the bottom of the org chart. A majority of us work for non-profits or government where awesome places to work, salaries and incomes are limited there. And so when I encountered Alyssa and had an opportunity to to talk about ERGs in a larger context and to talk about how intersectional intersectionality plays a part, that disability knows no demographic boundaries and covers all demographic characteristics.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And how can we make all employee resource groups inclusive of people with disabilities? Just really started to unpeel an onion here. And then in the last last week there was a study that came out about Gen Z people in the workforce and the very dim view they have of their future in the workplace. Compared to past generations, as far as their what their opportunities are going to look like. And then disability in came out with a study just this week that showed that using data drawn from LinkedIn that in order to advance in careers, people with disabilities need to change employers more often than people without disabilities in order to have upward mobility. So all kinds of factors and dynamics and I’ll just say the the full frontal assault on diversity, equity, equity and inclusion. And I know when we spoke last, Alyssa, you said that in response to that, there seems to be more interest than ever and more engagement and more momentum and traction around ergs than ever before. So with, with with that blast of words from me, I’d like to just turn it over to you, Alyssa, to, to ask if you could tell us a little bit about your journey and how you became defined found the ERG leadership Alliance. And what you’re doing, what you’re seeing. Any reflections on on any of those things I’ve said and anything else you want to share?
Alyssa Dver: Oh, wow. Well, thank you for that. Well, let’s first ERG for anyone who’s listening that doesn’t know what an ERG is. Employee resource group is what it represents, and there’s at least 40 or 50 names. I’ve lost track that they go by that are not erg. It could be ERG nrg erg. We’ve seen associate resource group and inclusion resource group and you name it business resource group of course is very popular. But there’s also employee networks, which is very popular in the UK as the moniker. So, you know, they are groups, associations as we say traditionally set up like any kind of an association where you have volunteer leaders. The difference between what these are is that they are within a bigger entity. And the entity could be a for profit, non-profit, academic government entity. They do get funding from that entity, some funding. They are governed. In other words, they have rules and directions and plans and things that they live by and operate by. And then they’re also accountable to the entity in terms of, well, I gave you X number of dollars, what did I get in return? And that’s the difference between an ERG or any kind of employee group versus a club. There’s another type of group called affinity group that sometimes can be either a club or an erg. It’s very confusing. And sometimes companies have a little bit of each, but an ERG by definition as an association comes with some interesting characteristics. I mentioned that the volunteer, the leaders are volunteers, so they have a job in that entity. Maybe they’re an accountant or a marketer or you know, a know, delivery person, whatever it might be.
Alyssa Dver: And then they also have this role as a group leader or on the leadership team. And that leadership team role is, by and large, voluntary. They don’t usually get paid very unusually get paid, in fact in paid could be a spot bonus or a gift card. So just, you know, having a volunteer set of leaders, if you’ve ever run a nonprofit, you know, it’s a different beast, right? You have to motivate people that you don’t really have any authority over, per se. But it’s a very different set of leadership skills. It also is a little tricky to navigate. Even your boss, if you’re, you know, a group leader, you report to somebody who has PNL in some way, you know, profit and loss responsibility. So you have to kind of negotiate with them. This is the amount of time that I’m going to be doing this ERG work. And this is why it’s important to me as an individual and professional development, and this is how it’s going to contribute to my regular job. So there’s a lot of nuances in paradoxes in this space. And again, we’re not going to go into all of them today. But ERG has been around since the 1960s. And for the large part of their history, people kind of just assumed they were social clubs, that they were there to support people who needed support. Typically people would say they’re for underrepresented groups. Underrepresented could be, of course, disability individuals. It could be people who are black people or Hispanic women. But I always said that it may have started for those reasons, but even long back, some of the original groups had nothing to do with underserved populations.
Alyssa Dver: You see a lot of young professionals, groups, Gen X, for example, you see, and Gen Z for that matter. You see you know, religious groups, Bible study groups, Jewish groups, Muslim groups you see groups for hobbies, groups for and I say religious but interfaith. And, you know, I have a hard time saying that a young professionals, interfaith, even caregivers groups, those are not underrepresented by definition. They never have been. So the commonality is that there’s an affinity. There’s something that they all share, that they feel that they want to get liked minded people to discuss share their experiences, share their frustration, share their victories, even with and then advocate for the things that they need in the workplace. And of course, disabilities. Groups tend to advocate for tools and, and functionality in their business, you know, day to day business, whether it’s furniture and ramps or translators captions, things like that. But it goes well beyond that. It goes into what do you need for benefits? You know, how can I better participate in meetings? Where you know, other individuals aren’t making those kind of accommodations for me. You know, I need to have somebody basically make sure that those are in place. So advocacy. Big deal. As well as as supporting the business. You know, maybe the business does have a need to develop new products, whether they’re accessibility products or not. You know, every single group, particularly the disabilities group, should have some way to say, hey, well, if it did this, I could use it better, right? So all many, many ways. And again I’m skimming the surface here. So the thing that attracted me.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So question. So you said early, early on that these are not a club, these groups, you’re going to use ERG as the umbrella term to cover the 200 different terms. They’re they exist to meet strategic business objectives, to help the business operate more effectively. Be be a better, stronger organization. So does that have to do with allowing people to bring their best selves to work? Is it around belonging? Is it around psychological safety? I imagine if you wanted to do metrics, you might think about turnover or absenteeism or innovation. So I’m just curious. I’m just curious about what what are some of the kind of proven I guess our ROI type outcomes that result from good, effective ERGs being in place?
Alyssa Dver: Well, you know, you started kind of the conversation by saying there’s been a lot of change this year. And no kidding, right? And one of the things that, you know, with the directive in the US, the executive director on Dei. Everyone kind of panicked and said, well, you know, what do we what’s going to happen to ERGs? Well, it turns out in the directive, it actually encourages people to have ERGs. But it’s very clear about making sure that that ERG is that every year G is inclusive. So inclusivity isn’t just allowing people to participate in programming. You know, I have a session on you know, presentation skills. Everybody should be allowed to come. Sure. But if I’m talking in a women’s group on menopause pre directive, I could say this particular topic is for members only. Right. So I could basically exclude people. You can’t do that anymore. You can’t you can’t have only leaders or even executive sponsors for that matter where you say only people of this type. You know, if I’m the black group, the leaders have to be black. No, you can’t, because what the director basically said is you have to make it so that if this is something that helps people and the company is spending money on it, it has to be available to everybody. And leadership opportunity is considered something positive. So needless to say, the inclusivity of it was really what was called out and continues to be the the thing that we need to make sure all groups are open and available to everyone and everything that they do. With that said, the history of the groups again started with underserved populations, but very quickly became recognized for ways to people to connect and find friends and belong.
Alyssa Dver: And, you know, my background comes from that brain science circling around confidence. So that was what attracted me to these groups in the first place. I looked at them and I said, wow, this is where people can find a sense of belonging in the workplace. Place. But at the time when I was really kind of pondering this about 2017, 2018, there really wasn’t any organization around them. So different companies had them. They were very random, and the way they were run, the random in the kinds of types that they were the there really wasn’t anyone in the organization that was chartered to kind of keep an eye on them or kind of make them a little bit more consistent across groups. And there wasn’t really an industry. So, you know, I started the ERG Leadership Alliance as a way to try and formalize things, but more importantly, get people talking to start setting up some sense of benchmarks, some sense of governance, and really professionalize it into an industry. And, you know, again, maybe fortunately, in some sad way when we got into Covid, people were remote. They needed that sense of belonging desperately. We had Black Lives matters. It became, okay, how do we make sure people’s voices and their need to express themselves? In safe spaces. We had a series of other unfortunate situations that kind of, again, encouraged people in the workplace to say, we need to have people feeling safe, psychologically safe and belonging. So the ERGs got kind of a lift out of all of that.
Dr. Kirk Adams: All right.
Alyssa Dver: With the executive order, as you kind of said earlier, you know, I did say on our last recording that we got a lift out of it, right.
Alyssa Dver: What what I think is true. And we saw this back also in the same pattern when corporate social responsibility CSR was kind of the rage. Yeah. Is organizations that are committed to it to begin with. Like it’s part of their DNA. The founder says we are going to do you know, this is who we are. You know, it could be, you know, organizations that whether or not their products or their services even aligned, it was just part of their who their identity. Csr and again with Dei. Those are the ones that have said we are doubling down because we know that this is really important to keep our employees motivated and productive. And the ROI numbers speak for themselves. We we know that employees that are more engaged have higher levels of productivity, and we know how much we know how much more profit they contribute. And they and these organizations have stuck by that. Unfortunately, the ones that never were committed got permission to basically let go of the wheel and be like, I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to do Dei at all. And ERGs are part of Dei. So we’re, you know, we’re going to either downsize or we’re going to get rid of them. And that’s a shame because, you know, it’s a shame for those employees. I feel sad for them. I also feel sad for the organization as a whole, because I think when the pendulum swings, which it always does, they’re going to be caught with their pants down, as the saying goes, right? They’re going to be scrambling to fix the situation. And ERGs aren’t there just for the sake of underrepresented groups. As we’ve said over and over again, already there for the sake of having employees know that they matter.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Right?
Dr. Kirk Adams: Right. So you you you said and it’s true, I, I’m aware of your background, brain science and confidence, but the people listening are not. So I would love to take a step back and have you talk about that part of your life a bit.
Alyssa Dver: Well, you know, I, I followed a very standard, I would say standard, typical path in terms of, you know, college education, dabbled in a couple of things, found marketing interesting, went into marketing, became part of many corporate engines. I was the chief marketing officer, ultimately of a couple companies, both public and startups. And, you know, I can’t say it was bad experience. I don’t I, you know, but at the same time, I always knew that it was just a job. Right. And and like, you spend so much time at work and working that I. And I’m like one of these, you know, workaholic types. So I kept saying, there’s got to be more than this. And you get to the top of the ladder and you’re like, wait a minute. The view’s not any better here. In fact, it’s it’s there’s more pressure, right? So without getting into gory details, I kind of always had that itch for something that was more than just a job. And on top of it at a point in my life, my son, who was eight at the time, was diagnosed with a neurological condition. That causes his hand. I say neurological condition. It is a true disability. It’s a physical disability. It’s not always visible because it’s in his arms. And his hands in the sense that you go to shake his hand, you will see tremors.
Alyssa Dver: You hand them a bottle of water, you’re going to see tremors. But if he’s just standing talking to you or teaching tennis, which he’s learned to do as a tennis pro you aren’t going to necessarily know he has a disability. So it’s an interesting conversation about visible and not visible disabilities. We have a lot. Suffice to say, that triggered me to really dig into brain science because after several years of trying to get more information and answers and understanding from all these neurological experts, I realized that they didn’t have the answers. They thought they had ideas, and they would look at me with confidence and say, do this, do that. And then when I would ask questions, the confidence would peel apart because I couldn’t understand why they were slowing his brain down or shooting Botox, which is actually poison, right? Toxic into toxin into his arms to kill muscles. I was like, I don’t understand, just explain. You know, the naive mom here, like I was a marketer. And mom, what did I know, right? And so it just triggered me to say, I got to figure this stuff out better and learned a lot about brain science at the pinnacle time, where functional MRI were finally now being used in research to explain specifically where and how in the brain things are happening, emotions and motor skills.
Alyssa Dver: And lo and behold, things like confidence and decision making. So it was serendipitous. Again, another one of these situations seems to be our theme for this. It’s like, you know, bad reason, but great. Aside, I don’t even want to call it a silver lining. I think it was just like a whole path that was carved there and followed that to understand how the brain works. And so, you know, belonging and this need to belong, which is dates back to Abraham Maslow in 1940s. Right. That’s when he coined it. In terms of the brain science. And what I learned is everybody needs belonging. Everybody, including the CEO. And so when that is starved, when we don’t have belonging aka psychological safety could be somewhat of a synonym. You know, we act like literally cave people because that’s the part of our brain that gets activated. And so the, you know, the microaggressions, the fear, the all the defensiveness, the quietness, the the things that go into survival mode, that’s not good. That’s not good collaboration, teamwork, happy, authentic employees. And so I knew that. And that’s why when I was presenting to so many of these ERGs, the science of confidence and I started learning about the ERGs, I was like, hey, we can create more belonging at work if we get these groups in better order.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So confidence and belonging interrelate I’m guessing.
Alyssa Dver: Absolutely. Because confidence at the core of confidence. You know, my book, my last book on confidence was confidence is a choice because it is. You make a decision if you’re confident or not about something. And so confident or not that I can be my authentic self, confident or not, that I can say what I want to say in this meeting. I’m not going to get fired or berated, you know, confident enough or not to go and ask for that raise. Right? So if you’re not, if you don’t feel that you belong, if you don’t feel psychologically safe, safe you it’s really that decision is going to be like, I’m not I’m not going to ask. I’m not going to do it right. But if you have all that sense of belonging you actually are starting to operate now in your prefrontal cortex because you feel, you know what, I can do this. And how do I want to do it? What’s the best way to do it? You get all that additional cognitive juice there to really make a better approach. Once you’ve made the decision that you’re going to do it. But if you don’t have that psychological safety, you’re not even going to try.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Right? So you’re not always in fight or flight.
Alyssa Dver: Yeah, right. Well, fight or flight, you know, all that survival mechanism is in your brainstem. It’s. You’re not thinking, you’re reacting. You know, you’re responding to the fear in the way that is going to keep you safest. So when we operate in a place that we don’t have belonging, where we don’t have that sense of safety we’re really not thinking. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I want to have a team of people who aren’t thinking.
Dr. Kirk Adams: No.
Alyssa Dver: I mean, it doesn’t matter what the job is, you know, let her, you know, air traffic control all the way down to, you know, just painting the walls like you want people thinking.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Right.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So I don’t know if this relates. Well, I’m sure sure it does. And I don’t know if you’ve thought thought a lot about it, but I was asked to just yesterday to identify some potential topics for seminars next year for an Organization I’m part of called the Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion, based here in Seattle. And I’m on the board and I talked about how do we operate effectively as organizations in an environment where some of our essential institutions are intentionally creating fear and uncertainty, which which is something that’s happening. And I can imagine a well structured, effective ERG can be a mechanism that can allow a company, a nonprofit to operate. On a, on a more even keel in most turbulent times. Does that is that a fair thing to think about?
Alyssa Dver: Absolutely. I mean, this is not a political statement, but think about it. If you’re deliberately putting people in a state of fear, it’s because you don’t want them to think. You want them to react, you want them to behave or follow whatever you’re telling them to do because they’re scared, right? And there’s a bazillion different examples of doing that, not just the edicts of the government or or CEOs. Right. But cultures that are built like that. I said, you know, there’s kind of like this organic culture that would say, look, we want you to come your full, authentic self to work. We want to support you. There are cultures out there that are like that, maybe not as many as you and I would like, but there are out there. There’s many that are just the opposite, right? You have to do this. You have to dress this way. You have to say this. And we’re not going to reward people who do that. Like. And that’s part of their culture. Part of their culture may be, you know, when somebody senior walks in the room, you don’t say anything, you know, and I think, you know, my comment before about paying my corporate dues, you know, I didn’t have I wasn’t aware maybe it’s because I was a lot younger then of organizations that I was part of that did that. But needless to say, I always felt as a young woman I had to be careful, right? And I think that just, you know, if being careful takes 20% of my cognitive cycles, that’s a waste.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So let’s talk about the ERG Leadership Alliance a bit. And what what what is it if people are part of the alliance? What what does that mean to them? Either individuals or organizations. Anything you want to share about the alliance itself?
Alyssa Dver: Grateful. Thank you for asking. So 2019, as I mentioned, we started with kind of an invitation for people to come talk about ERGs. And here we are. Through all the chaos of the last several years we have over 25,000 organizations that participate. Anticipate. They are every kind of size and shape. And we’re very global. We have members all over the world as well as our team now is all over the world. So it’s very exciting and complicated at the same time.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So are the members, the ERGs themselves, the parent organization, both individuals who are involved in ERGs, who are the members?
Alyssa Dver: Yeah, a little bit of all the above, but we tend.
Alyssa Dver: To have three different types. They’re all employees of whatever organization, but they might be group leaders. They might be the oversight managers. These are the people who get paid to actually oversee and manage the groups as a whole. And executive sponsors and executive sponsors tend to be director or higher up into the C-suite. Both they and the group leaders are typically on some kind of a term limit. That is, you know, maybe two years, which is what the average is. So you have a constant change of those kinds of leadership. Both those kinds of leadership roles. So those are those those are kind of the key people, allies, of course, anybody who just wants to be supportive of these types of people and groups we do, of course, have plenty of allies involved as well.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Wonderful.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And what is the experience of these members? What what what are they what is their engagement in interaction with the leadership alliance like?
Alyssa Dver: Well, it can really vary, right? So sometimes it just might be. They’ve come to one of our training sessions in ERG University, which is our public training offering, or they’ve hired us to come in and support one of their internal summits or an event, or it could be a lot of different ways in that we have also online resources and things like that. So sometimes people just, you know, self serve. But I would say the reason why people like being part of the alliance is twofold. One, we do a lot of Research and we give a lot of data and information for free. So just being on our mailing list, they get a lot of value in that because they get all those events and resources to them which can really help them with asking for budget and crafting the right kinds of programming and just doing their jobs as ERG leaders and managers and sponsors better. The other reason they do it, and I think we’ll all kind of giggle a little bit, but it makes so much sense, is to commiserate, right? Because the work of any kind of you pick their favorite letter, the D, the E or the I, right? It’s hard work. You’re dealing with people and their biases. You’re dealing with people and their fears in in all different ways. And it can be exhausting, frustrating. It certainly didn’t get easier this year. And so the ability to know that you have other people dealing with that, you know, I say to people almost every time, like, guess how many people are in ERGs today around the world. Right. I do is like, just kind of an opener, an icebreaker. And, you know, we get answers. A million, 10,000. And I say, you know, there’s over 100 million people in ergs today.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Wow.
Alyssa Dver: Over 100 million. And that’s one of the most conservative numbers. When I break it down for people in my gut, I think it’s probably 3 to 5 times higher than that. Right?
Dr. Kirk Adams: So that’s all I was going to say 25.
Alyssa Dver: So 25 million.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah.
Alyssa Dver: That’s yeah I mean it’s it’s at least 100 million. We know that I can share those numbers. It just, you know, there’s a lot of people doing the work dealing with the same issues we are around the world. And when you talk to, you know, we just did a webinar earlier today, I had, you know, about 300 people there. And you ask them a simple question like, you know, how many of you are I don’t know. We asked like so many today, but like, how many of you feel like your senior leaders don’t get it yet? At, you know, and everyone on there says yes or no or whatever. At least you know that you’re not dealing with the same situation.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Right, right, right.
Alyssa Dver: So that’s the commiseration. I said, you know, we educate for sure, but we also do a lot of commiseration. So.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So in October, I had the privilege to spend the afternoon with a fairly newly formed, disability focused ERG at Russell Investments, which is based here in Seattle. Hats off to Russell Investments for starting the group. Yeah. And so if people are listening to this and they’re with in an organization who think that ERG thing might really be helpful to me and the colleagues in this organization. Do you help people get started?
Alyssa Dver: Yeah. We do. In fact, we have a lot of all kinds of things that we can help you with. But, you know, one of the things that first and foremost is, you know, get on our website, it’s the ERG Leadership alliance. Com. And we give away the book which is the G intelligence book, and it’s a very small book, very quick read, but it’ll tell you like what these groups are and what are the key phrases and stuff. But in the back of it is also a template to kind of start your governance work, because if you don’t have ERGs, you’re in a beautiful spot to really start them right. And it’s actually a lot easier to start them and do them right than try and fix them later.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So it’s easier to put the blueberries in the batter before you bake the muffins, right?
Alyssa Dver: For sure. But you know, that template can really start to you know, give you the questions and information that you need to get started with that. And of course, let us know. And we can provide all kinds of support. Otherwise to get ERGs going, we help a lot of organizations restart their ERGs as well. They have a program and it’s just not working. So they have to restart it. And then there’s also groups that are, you know, been running for a long time, and they’re kind of like, yeah, we’ve been doing a good job, but we want to step it up. What can we do? So, you know, start, restart or optimize. We we have a wonderful staff. Everybody on the team has been an ERG leader or manager. They’re very well trained. We have global people. We have we support multiple languages even. So, you know, whatever. You need just at least let us know. And we probably if we can’t do it, we know somebody who can.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So every interaction I’ve had with Alyssa, her team ERG Leadership Alliance has been top tier. So I unreservedly urge you to reach out, go to the ERG Leadership Alliance website. Get in touch if you think they can be helpful to you in moving your mission forward. And, Alyssa, I just really appreciate you your graciousness and patience and our, our, our our second and successful attempt at recording this podcast. And if anyone wants to get in touch with me, I’m easily found on LinkedIn. Kirk Adams and my website is Doctor Adams. Com. And thank you so much for listening to this awesome episode of podcast by Doctor Kirk Adams, and we will see you next time. And thanks so much, Alyssa.
Alyssa Dver: My pleasure. Thank you.
Podcast Commentator: Thank you for listening to podcasts by Doctor Kirk Adams. We hope you enjoyed today’s conversation. Don’t forget to subscribe, share or leave a review at WW. Academy.com. Together we can amplify these voices and create positive change. Until next time, keep listening, keep learning and keep making an impact.
” Inclusion isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s a strategic advantage. “
Dr. Kirk Adams, Ph.D.
Advocate, Leader and Keynote Speaker on Disability Inclusion & Leadership
Leading the Way to Accessible Innovation
Innovative Impact, LLC Consulting
Managing Director
Impactful Workforce Inclusion Starts Here
American Foundation for the Blind
Immediate Past President & CEO
To create a world of no limits for people who are blind or visually impaired.
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