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Most companies have a Pride post in June and a vague commitment the rest of the year. The people doing the actual work of inclusion year-round are the ERG leaders, who are usually doing it on top of their day jobs. Luke Austing, who chairs the Pride ERG at Best Buy and works on the Reporting & Insights team for Best Buy Ads, has the lived experience of running that double role for years. His conversation on Reimagining Company Culture is a working leader's guide to inclusive behaviors that hold up when no one is watching.
The argument is sharper than the usual ally talk. Inclusive leadership is not a vibe; it is a set of repeatable behaviors. Most managers can describe the values in the abstract and fail at the daily moments where the values matter. Closing that gap is what the ERG ends up doing for the rest of the company.
Why ERGs Carry a Disproportionate Weight in Workplace Culture
ERGs were originally designed as community spaces. They have evolved into something else entirely: feedback channels, leadership pipelines, recruiting partners, and unofficial culture audit teams. McKinsey research on diversity, equity, and inclusion consistently shows that companies with strong inclusion practices outperform peers on financial and social metrics. ERGs are usually the operating layer that makes those practices real.
The problem is that the work is mostly volunteer. ERG leaders pour hundreds of hours into programming, panels, and 1:1s with teammates who are struggling, on top of their actual jobs. Companies that treat ERGs as a free resource burn out the leaders inside two years.
What Inclusive Leadership Behaviors Look Like Day to Day
Luke's framing is direct. Inclusive leadership is what a manager does in moments where they could just as easily have done nothing. They ask the quiet person in the meeting for their thoughts. They redirect credit to the right person. They name the assumption that just slipped past in a hiring debrief. None of it is hard. All of it requires intention.
The data says it matters. DEI programs that translate into real behaviors drive better engagement and retention than those that live only in policy docs. The behaviors are observable. The values without the behaviors are decoration.
How Do ERGs Actually Influence Inclusive Leadership?
Three ways. They surface what is happening that leadership cannot see. They provide a safer practice ground for managers to ask hard questions before they ask them in front of their teams. And they translate values into specific scripts: "This is what to say if a teammate uses someone's deadname," "This is how to handle a microaggression in a meeting."
What Is the ERG Leader's Role When Something Goes Wrong?
It depends. ERG leaders are not investigators, and confusing them with HR investigators puts them in an impossible position. The good companies make the line clear. ERG leaders provide community support and informal listening. Anonymous reporting channels provide the formal intake. HR case management provides the resolution layer. Each part stays in its lane.
Translating Ally Values Into Daily Behavior
The most useful piece of the ERG leader's job is translation work. Most well-meaning managers genuinely do not know what to do when something happens in front of them. They freeze, then they apologize later in a 1:1. The ERG leader's contribution is to give them a small library of better moves they can use in real time.
Three Behaviors That Travel Across Most Companies
First, name-and-redirect: "Actually, that's a great idea Aisha just raised. Aisha, can you say more?" Second, the public correction of pronouns or names without making a production of it. Third, calling time on the meeting that has gone off the rails into a place that is not okay. None of it is dramatic. All of it is doable.
What Actually Works for ERGs and Inclusive Leadership
Pay ERG Leaders for the Work
Companies that fund ERG leadership stipends or count the work toward formal performance get more sustained programs. Volunteer-only models burn out the people doing the work and produce inconsistent results. The cost of a stipend is far less than the cost of replacing a burned-out senior contributor.
Tie Manager Promotions to Inclusive Behaviors
Calibration sessions are where this gets real. If managers are promoted on output alone, the inclusive behavior gap will not close. If calibration explicitly includes inclusive behavior, the bar moves quickly.
Build a Real Reporting Backstop
ERGs hear about issues that never reach HR. Many of those issues need a formal channel and will not get one through the ERG. A DEI hotline creates a low-friction, anonymized path for reports that the ERG itself cannot or should not handle.
Where Employee Relations Fits
ER's job is to handle the formal cases that arise out of inclusion failures, including workplace bullying and discrimination. The team needs both the structure to investigate carefully and the data to spot patterns across the company. Vera, the AllVoices AI co-pilot, helps small ER teams handle larger caseloads without losing the qualitative depth that good investigations require.
How ER Teams Partner With ERG Leaders
The best partnerships are explicit. Quarterly sync between the ER lead and the ERG chairs. Shared definitions of what gets reported informally and what gets routed to formal intake. Trust built through follow-through, not promises.
Frequently Asked Questions About ERGs and Inclusive Leadership
What is the difference between an ERG and an affinity group?
The terms overlap, but ERGs typically have formal recognition, a budget, and an executive sponsor. Affinity groups can be informal community spaces. Most large companies use "ERG" to mean the formal version.
Should ERG membership be limited to people in the affinity?
Most companies treat membership as open and reserve leadership for people in the affinity. Allies attend programming, ask questions, and contribute. Leadership stays with the community for credibility and authenticity reasons.
How do ERGs avoid becoming free DEI consulting?
Set scope explicitly. Funded scope-of-work documents, leadership stipends, and exec sponsor partnerships keep the work bounded. ERGs that drift into doing the company's DEI strategy for free burn out their leaders.
Can ERGs handle harassment complaints?
No, and they should not be asked to. They can listen and refer. Formal complaints belong with HR and ER, with proper documentation and investigation processes.
How do you measure ERG impact?
Retention of members, leadership pipeline, internal mobility, and qualitative survey data. Tracking event headcounts is a vanity metric.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Luke's framing of inclusive leadership as repeatable behaviors is the right altitude. Most companies have over-rotated on values statements and under-rotated on the daily moves managers make in meetings. ERG leaders have already built the playbook. The HR job is to fund it, distribute it, and back it up with real reporting and resolution capacity.
The companies that get this right tend to share a pattern. They pay their ERG leaders. They include inclusive behavior in calibration. They have a working anonymous channel and an ER team that uses it. None of it is unusual. All of it is unevenly distributed across the market.
EEOC data on workplace sexual harassment shows that roughly 90% of people who experience workplace harassment never file a formal complaint, which means the absence of formal complaints in your inbox is not evidence that nothing is happening. The companies that build inclusive leadership take that gap seriously and design for it. They make it easier to surface what is happening before it grows into a formal case.
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