If you’re looking for a way to leverage your role as a resource group leader into career opportunities for yourself, you’ve landed in the right place. Have you ever wondered why some people who are not doing half of what you do seem to be pulling ahead of you in their career? Many years ago, as a diversity officer, I used to rack my brains trying to break that puzzle. I knew ERG leaders that I thought were rock stars, but the company’s other leaders just did not see them that way. Being in my role, I would see these budding leaders up close and think, “my God, this person is more talented than some of the VPs around here.” And yet, when I brought them up as a potential future leader, the majority of the other executives would say things like, “yeah, I think they are hard-working and passionate, but they simply don’t have that leadership quality we look for here.” Other times, it was more of a “let’s see what else they accomplish, and we can reconsider them later.” Meanwhile, these other executives brought up someone else who did not have half the ERG leaders’ accomplishments and several of them would line up behind this person and say, “I think she or he is a high potential. Let’s give them a stretch assignment.” It left me speechless.
Like for example Julie a co-chair of a women’s network. Julie was a master at staging huge events with hundreds of members and guests. She managed the food, the agenda, booking speakers, etc. She literally ran these major group events like a well-oiled machine. When an opportunity came up for an events manager in the company, I put Julie up as a candidate. She was beaten by someone who had never put together anything bigger than a ten-person meeting. I had it.
That’s when I began to study in earnest what secret ingredient was missing in people like Julie. The stunning thing I discovered was that it was a set of skills, states of being, and strategies that I had personally acquired over the years without thinking about them. They were the things that were responsible for my own success as a front-line executive leading a 300-employee outsourcing team that generated between 50 to 75 million US dollars a year, and ultimately to the role of diversity officer over Siemens 65,000 employee US operations. It was like water to a fish for me. It was there, but I couldn’t see it.
Years later when I started my business, I launched the ERG PowerTalk podcast to teach ERG leaders those powerful secrets that make the difference between working hard behind the scenes with little recognition and being embraced as a high potential leader and asset to the company by senior management. Each episode has a special guest and is designed to inspire and teach those success secrets that you don’t learn in college or corporate management training offerings.
Want to learn more? Then just click here to access and download this season’s catalog of episodes free of charge and check out all the wonderful new ideas and techniques that I guarantee will skyrocket your career. Join the hundreds of thousands of listeners who’ve already benefited from the power-pumping ideas and inspiration delivered by ERG PowerTalk.
All you have to lose is your invisibility!