Lots of great ideas come out of ERG meetings. Members learn new skills, hear different perspectives, and build relationships that often continue for years.
But my guess is that some of the most valuable conversations happen right after the meeting ends, when people are waiting for the elevator or walking back to their desks together.
Someone leans over and says softly, "Do you have a minute? Can I ask you something?"
And the question usually isn't about the presentation everyone just heard. It’s more like:
- "My manager told me I need more executive presence. Do you have any idea what that means?"
- "I keep hearing I need more visibility. Visibility doing what?"
- "They told me I'm doing great work, but I wasn't chosen for the project. What do you think happened?"
Those conversations never really lead to a right answer. There usually isn't one. They're about helping someone make sense of abstract instructions, feedback that sounds important but isn't easy to execute on, and terms that sound like something you should already know how to do, but don't. The person asking is trying to figure out what that feedback actually means in their particular situation and what, if anything, they should do differently.
That's one of the most valuable things ERGs provide, and it’s not usually in their mission statement.
We know ERGs are places to build community, develop leaders, and expand professional networks. But they also create one of the few spaces where people can compare experiences openly enough to make better sense of their own.
Organizations have an official language. It's the language of competency models, leadership principles, performance reviews, and career frameworks. Most employees learn that language fairly quickly.
The challenge is that those words don't come with concrete definitions. They're interpreted through the people giving the feedback, the culture of the organization, and the context in which they're being used.
Take visibility. Does it mean speaking up more in meetings? Volunteering for cross-functional projects? Going to more networking events? The answer might be one of those things, several of them, or none of them. It depends on who's giving the advice, what they value, and what they were hoping to see.
The same is true for executive presence. One manager may be talking about confidence. Another may mean clearer communication. Someone else may be thinking about how you handle disagreement, how you respond under pressure, or whether they trust your judgment. And sometimes, whether we like it or not, those interpretations are influenced by past experiences, unconscious bias, or simply what that particular leader associates with leadership.
We often talk about organizations as if they have unwritten rules waiting to be discovered. I don't think that's quite right. That makes it sound as though there's a map somewhere if you can just find it.
There isn't.
What organizations have are people. Managers with different expectations. Leaders with different experiences. Teams with different histories and reputations. Advice that means one thing coming from one person and something entirely different coming from someone else. That's much harder than learning a set of unwritten rules because there isn't a single pattern to decode. There are patterns, but they're shaped by context.
That's why those conversations after an ERG meeting matter. Not because someone else has the answer, but because hearing how similar feedback played out in different situations helps people interpret their own. Someone might say, "When my manager told me to be more visible, she meant presenting our team's work more often." Someone else might say, "For me, it meant building relationships outside my department." Neither interpretation is universally right. But together they remind us that feedback is almost always shaped by context.
That's not gossip. It's not second-guessing managers. And it's not about uncovering hidden rules.
It's about helping people make better sense of the workplace they're trying to navigate.
Those conversations probably won't produce a perfect answer. But they often produce a better question, a different interpretation, or another way of approaching the next conversation with a manager.
Sometimes that's enough.
One of the least visible contributions ERGs make is giving people a place to compare experiences before drawing conclusions. In organizations where so much feedback depends on context, that may be one of the most valuable things they do.
Try This
At your next ERG meeting, reserve fifteen minutes for what you might call a "career translation" conversation.
Invite members to bring a piece of feedback they didn't understand, a workplace interaction they've been replaying in their heads, or a career question they haven't quite been able to answer. The goal isn't to decide what really happened. It's to compare experiences, explore different interpretations, and better understand how similar feedback can mean different things in different contexts.
Granted, this won’t eliminate ambiguity. But it will help people navigate it.
