From structure to impact: Lessons from Women @ LinkedIn ERG with Cory Welsh

[MUSIC] Welcome back, community builders. I am your host, Anne Maria Dorgo. Today, I am joined by Corey Wells to talk about the power of employee resource groups for women in the workplace. Corey is a senior enablement lead at LinkedIn and the global co-lead of the member engagement pillar for women at LinkedIn. In this episode, you will hear how LinkedIn's longest running ERG is structured, what drives its purpose, and how a volunteer lead initiative can create real impact across a global company. Corey also introduces a powerful idea, the vision to value strategy. It's a simple way to keep a community focus by tying its work back to the company's bigger vision. At LinkedIn, that means empowering and inspiring women to grow their careers while staying authentic. The strategy starts with submission statement and breaks down into three clear pillars, building skills, strengthening the community and amplifying impact. These guide the ERG's work and ensure every effort connects to LinkedIn's mission and values. Enjoy the conversation. [MUSIC] All right, hey, Corey, welcome to mapping ties. Good morning, I think for you. Thank you. At a good start to the day? Yes, it is early here. Very good start. It's Friday. So it's Friday indeed. It's always good energy. I love that. All right, Corey, let's jump right to it. Tell us a bit about you and your role at the moment, and also the community that you are part of leading or co-leading, should I say? Of course. So my name is Corey Walsh, and I live in the states on the West Coast in California. I actually used to live in San Francisco, but I am a transplant to Los Angeles, where I work remotely for LinkedIn, the largest global online platform for professionals to connect and find opportunity. I'm sure many of you know it, but find me on LinkedIn. And my day job is as a senior enablement lead. So what that means is I'm in our go-to-market and sales world, leading training and designing learning experiences, and mostly thinking about how do we enable our sales reps, whether they're brand new or tenured at the organization to be more effective with customers. It's really fun, and it's a little bit of a unconventional L&D job, but it's definitely all about learning and development. And my favorite community that I'm a part of beyond the enablement team is our first ever employee resource group at LinkedIn. It's called Women at LinkedIn. Usually we call ourselves Women at, and it's a really vibrant community made up of anyone at LinkedIn. So it's not only for women, but for male allies and anyone who identifies as non-binary or welcome to really celebrate the journey and career experience of women, both at the company and in the world around us. So yeah, I've been a part of the ERG for many years, but I'm recently in a new role for the first time ever co-leading one of our pillars, and it's really fun to be on the global committee after so many years of enjoying their programming and admiring it from afar. From sponge to carving the path, leading the path, beautiful. So the longest standing ERG in the company, I assume that it's quite well established, probably also like a global presence around the world because LinkedIn is a global company. So, does it mean about how the ERG is structured? What does the structure look like? Great question. So it's funny that you say that because yes, all of our ERGs of which we have 10 at LinkedIn are really well organized and supported by the HR team, but they're also always iterating and changing like how we're structured and how we decide to divide up our volunteers based on priorities. So I'll tell you the current state, which is we have a global leadership team that is spearheaded by two global co-leads. And what I love is those women are in different regions and very different roles. One of them, she's actually a sales manager by day, and then one of our others is an operations like senior leader in the Asia-Pacific region. So we bring a lot of diversity of like functions and world experiences, and I feel like they always reflect that well on the leadership team. And then underneath those global co-leads, we have two other kinds of leads. We have regional leads. So in North America, we have a woman who works in San Francisco. She is the North America co-lead and she's in a totally different team as well on our customer support side. And then in each region, we have two co-leads who share that work. The other type of lead is a pillar lead or a priority lead you could think of it as. So that's where we come to my role. I am our co-lead of membership and engagement, which means it's a global initiative that I oversee, and I work with those regional leaders to deploy initiatives or like new programs and make sure that those regional teams feel like they have what they need from like a centralized global hub, if you will. That's very interesting. I think I'm very familiar with the way of structuring per region for a global company. I think it's very common to have the different co-leads in the different region. Also due to time zones and the activities that are being faster based on the cultural nuances. I think it's the first time that I hear the pillar lead and it's really practical that you're in that role now because you mentioned the membership and engagement pillar. Are there any other pillars? And if so, what are those pillars? Yes. So I should have been more clear there several. And what I love about the pillars is that they're not standard token like initiatives every year. They're actually based on our top three priorities that we've decided we need to focus on based on the needs of employees and what's going on in the world. So I'll share with you the four pillars. The first one, which is the most consistent, is the foundations pillar. So if you think about foundations of an ERG, that includes a few other committees like the Treasurer and the Chief of Staff who organizes the whole ERG. And the third is our Data and Insights Committee, which is actually a new element that we didn't always have in the 10 or 12 years I've been a part of the ERG. Then the second pillar is expand. So we literally call them the expand skills pillar. And that's because as an ERG, even though we're long established, there's always more we can be doing. So it's expanding the skills of like our employees, expanding the awareness of our ERG. And under those expand topics, I would say we have speaker series, mentorship, networking. So if you think about like the sub themes of an initiative or a pillar, we have people volunteers designated to each topic so that they can focus. And then the second pillar, or I think I'm on the third pillar now, is grow community. So if we're focused on expanding and expanding our skills, we're also focused on growing our community always. And underneath grow community are things like recruitment or allyship and getting, you know, actively involved allies from different communities involved in our ERG too. So the membership and engagement pillar actually falls under grow community. I was about to ask. Which is where I love to thoughts where I love to, you know, ideate and get involved because communities, one of my number one like personal values, but it's also I think one of the most fundamental to our LinkedIn like company vision emission, right? That's why we exist is to be a community and help people find connections. So not that I'm biased, but that's my favorite pillar. And then the third, which is I think very strategic, our third pillar is amplify pillar. So how do we amplify the work and the voices of those in our ERG and just a women in general across the company? So under amplifier, we have things like creative production, our women at LinkedIn podcast, and we have our women at LinkedIn comms or communications committee who do so many important things like own our global newsletter that we send out each month or twice a quarter. They own other channels as well like our internal chat, which we use Microsoft teams and channels. So those are the three focus areas, expand grow community and amplify and foundations. Yes. Love. Okay. I took notes of all of them for how interesting. So how big is moral as the the let's say the steering team like the read the regional needs the pillar leads the people at the in the leadership? Are we talking 10 people? Are we talking 20? Are we talking 60? Are we talking more? We have we have closer to 50. Wow. Total in this leadership team I just described and that's including Also, not only do we have committees under each pillar, but we also have office leads underneath each of the regional leaders. So because LinkedIn is so big as you all can assume, a region like Amia, we call it like Europe, Middle East, and Africa, they have more than 10 offices and each office has an appointed lead as well to help like run programming and recruit members. All right. Okay, so we've got our own safety people. Tell us more about the volunteers. You mentioned that there are different volunteers and different roles, and I think that fits quite well with the grow community pillar where you mentioned eye-lifeship and recruitment and membership and so on. So what is the main difference between the, let's call it the core team or the steering committee and then the volunteers and what keeps them busy? So first and foremost, I think many of you listening probably know that a lot of ERGs or employee resource groups have always been driven by volunteers, primarily, right? And we also are very fortunate now at LinkedIn to have a few of our key leadership roles in the core team are actually compensated for their role. Nice. Even though it's secondary to their day job, and those roles include like our global co-leads and our regional co-leads. Now, anyone beyond that, I did refer to as a volunteer. So for example, if you sign up to be the co-lead of recruitment or the co-lead of membership and engagement like me, that role's not compensated financially, but we are very highly rewarded with lots of recognition and manager support, et cetera. So I think when I refer to volunteers, there's also two tiers at which you could volunteer. You might be again on the global committee that I just described to everyone. You could be someone who's like spearheading a global initiative. That's actually a two year commitment. So you say that I'd like to be involved for FY25 and FY26 at the time of recording this. Now you also could sign up to be a volunteer at the office level. So I know a woman who's one of my mentees, she's on the New York office committee for Women at LinkedIn. And I think what keeps you busy varies, of course, by like which role you're in, but the primary maybe task is organizing your own pod of collaborators and volunteers and to designing and executing programs for your office and region. So for example, for me a week in the life, I might have a 30 minute meeting with my member and engagement pod. There's three of us and we'll be talking about what kind of initiatives we're doing that month to drive new member joining and engagement. So we'll divide up the tasks that we have on that month. A small example is each month on the last Friday of the month, we host a really kind of special event at LinkedIn across the whole company called INDAY, right? INDAY stands for Investment Day. And as the women at ERG, we host or kind of kick off a conversation starter every INDAY. In our global and internal teams chat per women at. Usually that's just a reflection question to get people to share, get to know each other, reflect on their own journey, and finally like spark conversation and dialogue and ideas. So it depends on the month. Oftentimes the last thing that will keep people busy in this volunteer role is planning for our showcase month, which is in March of every like fiscal year. And that's our showcase month, no surprise because that's the same month as International Women's Day. It's a women's history month in the US and many other countries around the world. And what I love is we are designated one showcase month because the company decided we should give every ERG one month out of the year where they get the spotlight. And all the programming is mostly Senator on that employee resource group rather than another. Now all the ERGs are welcome to program at the same time as well, but it's kind of like the month where we get the microphone and the company gets to see more of what we're doing amplified. I love that and I took it out because I'd love us to come back to the showcase month. And here I mean, what that looks like. Sure. But before we go there, I think I'm very curious, Karee, where does this fit strategically the ERGs? Traditionally in different organizations, they're rather linked into the DIY department. So they contribute to DIY or the corporate social responsibility or probably they're kind of linked into the HR people or culture function. How does that look like in LinkedIn? And does it have, was I could dot at the line to a department and thus contributing to specific organizational goals when it comes to that department? Yes, the short answer is definitely yes. Like they are strategically placed in a part of the company that is heavily invested in. I think two things, like one, Dibs is how we refer to it at LinkedIn. So diversity, inclusion, and belonging, which is a huge strategic pillar. It's one of our core values as a company. And then two, it's nested underneath the employee experience arm of our HR team or the people work. So when you think about employee experience holistically, that includes things like our company events and communication channels, our company town halls and programmatic events that happen every single year like our celebrations. And then diversity, inclusion, and belonging newly fits underneath employee experience, which eventually rolls up to our chief people officer. And secondly, we've had some changes. So I know that's the recent, like most recent structure, but what I've loved is we've always had employee resource groups. Again, like since 2011 is my understanding when women at LinkedIn was first founded, but we had different levels of investment from the HR people team, full time employees I invested. But now we have very heavily dedicated support from what we call the Dibs team. So there's a diversity, inclusion, and belonging team. And we have one teammate who his job is to manage all of our employee resource group, professional development, and management. And then those 10 ERGs get a lot of investment in like their leaders. We have an annual ERG leader summit where they bring them together and invest in developing them and strategic planning. And then lastly, we have two executive sponsors for our ERG. And what I love is that every ERG has at least one. That's a senior level executive, the peer hire, who is a basically dedicated advisor to us on how we can be more strategic in our own goals and initiatives. So I feel like it's a really big part of the LinkedIn, like DNA. It's not just a nat on, but it is very much powered by volunteers. And I think that creates a pretty cool synergy. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I think that's the really this week spot in between. And it almost works like a little bit of a spiral. The more volunteers and colleagues that are raising their hand to getting involved into something, the more impact the ERG has, the more visibility it has in the upper leadership level, the higher chances for sponsors to raise their hand. And be like, OK, it's actually really cool. Wanna keep it alive. We wanna give it more spotlight, more resources, et cetera. And on the spiral, the-- it's not just with ERGs in general with internal communities and everything that is voluntarily based within organizations. You really need that sponsorship from higher up. If you lose that, it becomes very hard to continue driving the initiative forward. So the sponsor plays a crucial role for the health and longevity at sustainability of the initiative does driving. More volunteers and kind of the spiral keeps going. So it's really interesting to hear how you've also noticed different peaks and valleys when it comes to that. Because indeed, it does change based on the leadership changes, re-orics, et cetera. And how wonderful to see that it found a nice home inside the DIB team or department. Then you have now someone that is full time invested in the success of the ERGs. That's fantastic. All right, so speaking of experience, if we were to join as members, the women at LinkedIn ERG, what would we see? What would we notice? What would that experience look like? Hmm. So this is something that we're always trying to amplify and improve. Hence why we have an amplify pillar in our team. But I think that what stands out to me is what I heard recently from someone who's newer to the company. So fun fact for those of you connecting with me on LinkedIn right now, my sister worked at LinkedIn too. And she just began in the last few years. So when you become a member of the ERG, the first thing is you're joining our communication channels. Like you're joining through our website, our internal microsite, a distribution list, and you become a part of our team, channel, which is the primary way that we all do internal chat, Microsoft Teams. And you might see anywhere from like weekly posts about events being promoted, challenges or questions that members have for each other, and other various opportunities to get involved or learn. So an example of this very month right now as we record it is September. We're launching one of our leadership development programs that we host twice a year. It was created like and co-authored by women at LinkedIn. We call it steer as T-E-E-R. And the leadership development track just launched its recruitment, you know, messages. So my sister's sought at notification and she applied. I'm looking forward to seeing if she's accepted. And then, you know, the next week you might see the conversation starter that we put on my team into the Teams channel. This month, the theme of in-day or investment day is belonging. And so we're probably going to ask a conversation starter with a prompt that says like, tell us about a moment of belonging that you've experienced in the workplace. As you know, nowadays we're all working in a more like hybrid and disparate world than ever. What's something that a teammate or the company did to help you feel like you belong? Those are my favorite days of the month where people start chatting in and I just hear back from women. I've never worked with, never met, but we're all kind of connected in this common place. So the second thing that a woman who's a member of women at would see is our global newsletter. That goes out like I mentioned almost monthly, but it's typically more like twice a quarter. And that is where they'll see a lot more specific ways to like get involved, learn about a member, and learn both to expand their skills and maybe, you know, find career opportunities. So in our newsletter, we'll have like a message and an update from the global co-chairs. Sometimes the global newsletter will have like a message from our executive sponsor depending on the time of year. And then we'll have things like a reminder to apply for the steer program or a reminder to check out our new podcast episode. Funny is only about a year ago we launched a new global internal podcast for the first time and it is so fun and just rewarding to listen to like stories of women at the company. And then at the very bottom of the newsletter, we'll see spotlights from regional and office events. So they'll probably promote events that are coming up, volunteer opportunities, and events that just happened in Q1 so far for us. It's Q1 in the financial year, July through September. And I also do love seeing like little spotlights from the offices because I work remotely. Those things really fill my cup as someone who used to be in SF and now misses getting to talk to people in the office all week. I am fascinated by this idea of a learning and connection ecosystem that communities create and it sounds like a women at is building that ecosystem. I absolutely adore that. I hear events happening online happening locally in a different offices. There's a podcast. We've got a newsletter, obviously the channels for AC communications and ponds and just support. We have the showcase monthly march and you've mentioned the steer leadership development. And I think my attention was very peaked by these two main saying so first, the month of March, as you've mentioned, it's kind of you get the mic you get the spotlight. So I would assume that there's a lot happening. Maybe you can paint as a picture of what would a march look like? What would that programming look like? Is it intensity wise? Something that's bigger than the rest of the year? Is it impact why something that you're aiming for more? And then I'd like us to circle back to the leadership development program because that sounds fascinating. So let's start with the month of March for Scurry and then circle back to the leadership program. Okay, that definitely makes sense by the way that that would catch your eye. So I'll share what we've done historically and then knowing that guess what this year March 2026 will be a little bit different, which I'm really looking forward to. So about, probably in the past like five to seven years, we started seeing showcase month where all of the company like I mentioned and the Dibs team would spotlight a different ERG each month of the year. Like I said, that doesn't mean you can't do programming the rest of the year. It doesn't mean we're not active, but it does kind of provide a little more clarity and focus like a flashlight illuminating what we're doing right then. And each year we have a different theme for that month because as you all may know from International Women's Day, there's always an appetite for so many different topics underneath like the umbrella of gender equity and yeah, women in the workplace, for example, so we pick a different theme each year to really like celebrate and rally around. So last year, I'll use the most recent theme. We actually designed our own and didn't like anchor on just what International Women's Day was doing and we called it Power Herring Growth. Now, power was a little bit of a pun. It was power with an H. And that means that we wanted to focus that year's spotlight and like showcase month on developing ourselves and developing our skills in this age of AI. And I would say expanding our skills around like data and insights that could then inform what programming we did, what opportunities we gave employees. So during Power Herring Growth Month, we had a series of both events, but also initiatives because we don't want the only way for people to benefit from the ERG to be through events. Some people are time constrained due to their responsibilities both at work and outside at work. Some people are not based in the office like me. So they might have a fatigue around virtual events. So the first thing that we do do is around weekly events. There's usually a minimum of like four events in showcase month that are open to the global population. Now on top of that, the regions are also hosting events like in their local time zone. This past year, we started off with a global kickoff, but it was hosted in A-PAC and two of our most senior sales VPs basically did like a fireside chat. That was then shared with the rest of the ERG through our channels and teams and people could watch the recording. And it was so motivational. Then after events kind of kick off in the local regions, we also will typically have like two to three different types of development events. So when you think about that, I'm like, all the events had like different themes or different topics. One of the events I remember attending in March 2025 was around basically growing your financial prowess or your financial acumen. And it was really helpful. It was with a financial advisor who's certified in the US. So for me, like that was super timely, very practical. And I love that the company was offering me that, right? Like during work hours. So I attended that virtually. Now I also mentioned there's different initiatives during that month too. So outside of programming and events, we did a pretty fun social media initiative. So what we do is we use in our own platform naturally. We invite employees to participate in the month by sharing. So for example, on our internal microsite, like we promoted that we want to see people celebrating power her in growth. So here are like three to four prompts that you could consider responding to and share on LinkedIn post a video use the hashtag. So we asked people to share like bold steps and opportunities that they've grasped or had a moment of confidence. So we called that one the confidence to grow. And then there was also an acknowledgement or like recognition prompt that said, like, who is someone who has opened a door for you and encourage you to grow? Those are my favorite types of posts, like celebrating someone else easiest way to get traction on your LinkedIn or social media. And that was really inspiring to see not only how many employees like show up and participate. And then you get this like asynchronous gauge of how people are feeling without having to attend an event. But we also see our members on LinkedIn.com. Outside of the company, engaging with the content. So in the last several years, probably in the last five years, our content and editorial team who run like the content that you see on LinkedIn, they said, we want to amplify this to the whole world and the whole platform, not just employees. Because it's International Women's Day. So it's definitely timely, right? In the month of March and in the US in particular. So we started seeing content campaigns and influencers or top voices on LinkedIn posting articles or being featured in videos. And then we'd invite members, hey, Annamariea, write a post about how you found the confidence to grow this year. And those are actually embedded in the products and platform right on the homepage when you go to post. So that's like a very tactical way that Women at LinkedIn has built initiatives internally that then catch fire and gain interest that inform things like our product roadmap or our monthly member initiatives on LinkedIn.com. And one of the reasons why I am a big fan of the power of like employee resource groups to drive change. Well, talk about insights and impact and so on. We're going to come back to that because that's always a pain point when it comes to internal communities and how do we prove our worth and how do we prove that we're creating and enabling matters. I think it's a beautiful testament when other departments are coming your way and asking you to do more of what you're doing or they're seeing possibilities to take that the work that you're doing the stories that you're actually creating, the impact you're having and bring it somewhere outside, where that's for employer branding or for marketing, et cetera. I think that's always very interesting because it showcases that it's being seen and it matters. And it's worth the time and the effort that we put into these types of initiatives. All right, so that was our showcase month. There's a bit of everything that, again, we've got a little bit of menu online offline, synchronous asynchronous campaigns, prompts, events, et cetera. Tell us about steer. I think it's interesting that you took, you developed a leadership development program inside the ERG. Typically, these programs are sitting with L&D and they are kind of like aimed at the global leadership population. So I'm curious to hear what was the thought behind that? Why have you felt the need to create some saying specifically for women and then what have you created? What does that look like? Ooh, okay, that's a great point that you make there around where these things typically sit. So I'll share with you my kind of limited knowledge. I wasn't a part of the team that actually built the content, but I was very fortunate to be an early participant in the program. So I'll tell you that for sector two. First and foremost, we as a women at community obviously builds so much organic content that comes up from our different respective offices and regions because we are a group of highly ambitious, excited employees. I think those naturally gravitate into the ERGs in the form of volunteers and leaders. And so the cool thing is that steer really came from a few other programs that had been just developed on the front lines. And secondly, was code authored with our LND team, which we call talent development here at LinkedIn. So I have to give credit. Yes, that it was not solely us, but derived from basically a perceived gap in the ability to develop your skills as a junior leader or an individual contributor and actively grow your confidence, leadership purpose, strategic thinking abilities, and the other necessary skills to then obtain a manager and leadership role. So what I loved about the promise of steer is that we wanted to invest in rising leaders or aspiring leaders at any level. And then say, here are some tools to help you grow that toolkit for when you interview to become a manager. And all of that, and Maria was in service of our goal of establishing gender equity across LinkedIn and gender equality in our management and leadership teams. So we saw a gap, we're not at 50/50 male and female leaders. So how do we grow our bench and our pipeline for leadership? Well, we invest in those future potential leaders. So two examples, by the way, of what I think ultimately fed into and led to the creation of steer was one of our regional programs that was designed completely on the ground in Asia Pacific. We called that program at the time and still empower in. And the goal was to bring rising leaders together, put them in front of senior leaders in Asia Pacific and teach them like four or five modules around skills. And by the way, I was really lucky during my time living in Australia, I actually got to participate in that program too. So I saw it firsthand in 2019 when I was, you know, a senior individual contributor, but I knew that I needed to gain more confidence in like certain skill areas. So empowering was so popular and still remains like so engaging and in demand that I understand that we took learnings from that program to build a global curriculum. The second was a really interesting grassroots office initiative, which was a workshop designed around a book. So we've all done a book club or been a part of a course club. Many of you listening are L&D professionals, but we have this really powerful book come to our attention. Thanks to someone in L&D actually. And the book is called How Women Rise, the 12 habits that hold us back in our careers. If anyone's never read it, write it down. This is your one and only takeaway from the podcast. It is very powerful. I love it. I didn't know about it, so I am taking notes. OK, and I'm happy to share more info on it. So it's written by Marshall Goldsmith, who's the author of What Got You Hear Won't Get You There. A title many more people know. And he co-wrote that book with a woman named Sally Helgison. I want to make sure I said her name right. So we'll put it in the podcast notes, but Sally and Marshall wrote a book around how the research has changed. And while we used to say like, What Got You Hear Won't Get You There, here's what leaders need, that playbook was written based on the profile of a male leader. And now there are new things that we need to both harness and let go of to be more effective as leaders. So that book changed our lives, blew our minds, and we built a little mini workshop series around the concepts in the book. That workshop was called Rise, and it was so fun. And those workshop elements ended up being piloted in Australia where it started, going to New York, San Francisco, let a workshop, and then it went to Amia. And we ultimately took learnings and topics from that as well to put into the steer program. So now steer program applications are due today, September 12th, and when we're recording this, there are so many paths. I'm just thrilled to like see its expansion. There are three different options for how you can like take the steer program. So if you're a junior individual contributor, like we call it an IC, right? IC level one or two, you can take an on-demand e-learning course anytime. You actually don't have to apply to have access to the steer program. For senior ICs, so IC three or four, you can participate in what's like a cohort model, virtual instructor led training program that is also committed by e-learning. And that's where I participated in the first year it piloted. And then we also have a new cohort based program for managers. So anyone who is like a manager level two and above can participate in a new iteration of steer. And I think my favorite thing about steer that I will reflect from my own personal experience like going through the content, everyone's experience is different, is that you are really prompted not just to learn and take an information, but to reflect on your own personal state of your development and your personal perspective and viewpoint on leadership. So for example, what I mean by that is module one is all about defining your North Star and your leadership compass. Ah, and we had amazing little content modules, via video and then prompts and then worksheets for us to work through what that leadership mentality is. And then they don't just have you reflect on that alone, you're in a cohort model. So you went to a live virtual session with one of our executives, then you went to a small group virtual session where you shared with a partner, your leadership statement and you practiced articulating that. So it was very much hands-on, practice oriented and community based learning, which obviously as we go back to the theme of this whole podcast is my favorite thing. So you meet new people that you wouldn't have met otherwise because it's with women from all over the company. And couldn't recommend it more. So if anyone is in the process of like developing a leadership development program or thinking about it, do not hesitate to reach out to me or Anna-Varia. I don't mind where you are in the world because I think the content is really like transferable and powerful and we could all create something like this using public content, no problem. - Mm. - It's just about building those community learning like mechanisms. - The intention behind it, right? I don't think the content is what is missing. I think the intention behind it is missing. It's the support from a leadership that is missing is the nurturing that someone can give to a program when they take it in their hands and it suddenly becomes a priority. And what a fantastic example curry of experimenting and iterating and building on things as you go and as the community evolved. They absolutely love how you kind of went back and shared what were the two main things that prompted the birth of spear and how fascinating that you took lessons from different mini and not so many programs that were happening around the world and just amplified those and gave them a bigger stage to play on. I love when communities do that because that's like value spotting and value growing in action. You do something small, you don't have to dream as big as to be afraid. Do start small and see where the energy ball is. It's kind of snowballing, right? And then once you find the snowballing energy ball that's where you can go and you know that, okay, there's something there. We can enable it with more resources. We can enable it with more support. Fascinating. So good luck today to everyone that is applying to be part of the world. of the cohorts, fingers crossed, it sounds like a fantastic opportunity. Now, everything is said, Corey sounds wonderful. And again, I'm coming back to this idea of a ecosystem. There's so much richness there. And obviously, there's also a massive group of volunteers at the steering wheel around 50 people. And it's not a new ERG, right? So I'm sure that it's been, it had its growing pains and it's now reaching a level of maturity. I'm curious from where you're standing and what you've seen both as a member, but also now as someone that is co-leading the ERG. What are a few, let's say, one, two, three non-negotiable for an ERG's success within an organization if you were to single out some ingredients? Wow. So this is just from my personal experience. And knowing that I've only been on the global leadership team for one full year, I think that I've built a strong point of view as having been a member who enjoyed the ERG and then an office lead in Australia. And then I actually was a regional lead for a short time. And then I moved into this global pillar for context. So the first thing that I think has helped drive clarity and effectiveness of this ERG is having a mission statement. And we call this tool internally, something really fun that you're all welcome to borrow, but we call it having a vision to values strategy. So if you think about the power of like a mission statement or maybe a vision of what your future state could be, right? Our vision is that all women can find and achieve like economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce, which is an extension of our company mission and vision. So then how are we going to achieve that to me is the mission statement of women at LinkedIn, which I pulled up in case anyone who's listening like wants to hear about it, but it almost doesn't matter what the mission is like the mission is your communities or your companies way that you're going to achieve the end state vision. So after we came up with a mission statement, which we've had for many many years, we actually evolved that mission statement and changed it to again, like the needs of today's workforce, women today. And so I'll tell you what it is. Our mission statement is to be an inclusive community that focuses on empowering and inspiring women to grow their careers while maintaining their authenticity. Spiderman claps. It's a big one. It's long. It's definitely meaty, but what I love there is like what are we doing in order to achieve like gender equality or belonging for women? Well, we're focusing on two things, empowering and inspiring. And then that lets us build a strategy underneath, which you all heard are the three pillars, right? Like expanding our skills, growing the community, amplifying our impact. And so anyway, if any of you are thinking about this, a vision to values strategy is a plan on a page that's literally like, what's your vision? What's your mission? What are your pillars that are going to get you there? And then at the bottom should be the values that you're going to like do all those initiatives through. And finally, what are the results that are going to show you you did those? And I'm in the process of building like a vision to values kind of summary for a totally unrelated like community here at LinkedIn that I work on in my day job. And it's really just a fake like favorite and fascinating tool to help you figure out, do you have a plan that makes sense and is like aligned with values vision and mission? Now, the question was what else? What two or three things that I think are like essential for an ERG? I think beyond just having a mission statement on a plan is something that you already said, Annemaria, it's having executive sponsorship or company support. So what that has looked like for us is having, you know, budget from our diversity inclusion belonging team. Also having an executive sponsor, we now have two. And one of those is a female. One of them is a male. That tells me that my CEO like cares about our mission and our results because one of his directs, actually, yeah, one of his directs and one of his next level directs is dedicated to advise us. And if you don't have that executive buy-in yet, that's totally fair and okay. But feel free like to use this model as a reason and a business case to say like we need an executive sponsor. It's because we want to deliver results that ladder up to the bottom line of the company. For us at LinkedIn, like the bottom line isn't just revenue, it's members being engaged on LinkedIn. So our platform being like, you know, a good quality place to be. And in addition to our results like revenue, are we seeing quality outcomes on LinkedIn? Which guess what that means is are people getting new jobs on LinkedIn? Are people advertising successfully on LinkedIn? Those things are like North Star metrics and women at had to come up with what are our metrics and they're going to help with that. Well, it's going to be women getting promoted internally at LinkedIn. Or it's going to be, for example, getting equity into our leadership roles across the genders. So driving for a higher percentage of female leaders, females in engineering are the things that we are working toward. There are KPIs. And that also just finally added bonus helps all of us feel like we're doing more meaningful strategic work. You can then go back and talk about what you did with women at LinkedIn in your next interview for like a leadership role at the company internally. So those are my kind of two cents on what I think is a must have for an ERG to drive. The vision to value it is pretty cool. I have to say just how you've explained it and how I think it sits somewhere in the middle and at the bottom you can distilled that into the pillars and actually what initiatives are we going to do to get to that value through the mission. And then at the top it sits the company, the company mission and values and how the ERG contributes to that. So I think it's a really nice sandwich there in the middle that allows because probably sometimes we struggle now and thinking I'm just thinking out like maybe sometimes we struggle to link the activities of a community ERG to the business success because maybe the gap is to begin between a specific activity that you're choosing to do and the company OKRs or the company's mission. Yeah. But if you distill that and have like a pit stop in the middle this vision to value, it almost feels like a nice anchor in between the big picture of the organization and then the very operational things that ultimately add value to the women that are a part of the group. So I absolutely love that. Corey, tell us what is hard. Tell us what's not working. Tell us where the blockers are. Tell us what is hard because everything you've said sounds fantastic. It sounds great. And I also know that it cannot all be rainbows and butterflies, right? So to someone is probably contemplating to start a near G or grow a near G or expand that type of work. What are some of the things that they should know that it's going to come their way that are going to be challenging? Definitely a real element and I'm glad you asked it because I didn't mean to portray too many butterflies and roses because right all of the ideas I've shared so far are like great in theory and they sound like amazing and beneficial and they all are contingent on awareness and participation. So the first thing I would say that is a challenge at our company which we recently reached about 18,000 employees last time I checked is getting people to be aware that we even exist as an ERG or that our programming is available to them. So the things that contribute to that are like a large amount of noise. There are many different company initiatives. There are several ERGs. Then there's also the volume of just information channels. People get so many emails these days and chats and when you join the company, you're not automatically granted into all the communications. So some people never even knew that there's a global newsletter or a team's channel for women at LinkedIn because they were never made aware after their first day of onboarding. But I would say the third level of like awareness that we do struggle with is getting leaders and managers to be aware of also what we're offering so that they can help trickle it down and cascade it. We have not nailed that yet and we've worked on working with like things like our executive sponsor team and our regional and global co-leads who are many of whom are managers. They've worked on recruiting manager champions and a list of leaders with whom we have personal connections so we can then go to them and say, hey, help us amplify this event or help us participate in this event. So the word spreads better. That's definitely going to always be a challenge, especially like in a big company, especially maybe at a tech company. Yes. And secondly, I said, you know, the challenge of participation in such like a busy chaotic world, especially when we're all working in either a hybrid format or many of whom are in like virtual only format. I think we realized a few years ago that getting people to put you stay in events, which by the way are obviously amazing if not like the best channel to get people to connect, meet, people learn. They're actually also by the nature of like being a woman who works and maybe also someone who's a caregiver and someone who's juggling a lot of responsibility is like the least accessible way to get involved because you don't have a lot of extra time lying around. And we also noticed in this world of like again recently being very highly virtual, people have virtual fatigue from just being on Zoom. So even if you're free, even if you're hungry to develop, you might not want to join another Zoom meeting, which I think has been something that prompted us to work on what other channels and like asynchronous channels can we use to invest in our members. So if you notice, that's why we mentioned something like the podcast, which came out of ideas in different regions and then North America started our own very scrappy podcast. My colleague, Kristen Spalane, shout out, completely authored and like created the podcast. It then became so popular that people wanted it to be global. So it's now on a bigger stage. But that's like an asynchronous way for people to like benefit from the ERG. And it doesn't have to be time bound to a certain moment in time. Another channel that came to my mind is Steer. Like the Leadership Development Program is a time commit, but it includes on demand content that you can take at your own pace if you'd rather than attend like a cohort model learning program for a few months or quarters. And I do really appreciate that we're trying to do things more async. So the last thing we're doing is I mentioned this early in this discussion is monthly conversation starters, right? Those are just simply chat conversations. And they came from an idea outside of LinkedIn from a colleague of mine who works at Glassdoor or used to work at Glassdoor. And I loved thinking about like how can we use the tools at our disposal to connect women across the ERG beyond just events. And that was yeah, what we started doing. But guess what? Another big challenge is getting people to participate. People are so bombarded with teams and emails messages that some months we have really low traction, some months we have high traction. It's hard to know exactly what is hitting the mark, but maybe it's the content. Like is it relevant or is sending it at the right time in region? Those challenges are always going to be there I think for anyone. Even if you're starting in ERG like a small company in one office. Yeah. So let's keep sharing ideas of how we can combat that and offer a little something for everyone. Yes. I like I think a lot about this idea of a menu just like you go to the restaurant and say, Oh, is it the big hunger, the small hunger? You didn't do a lot of time. It's the bites. The steak takes longer, the salad is super fast. Like all of those things, it would be really interesting. And if this is how we would design our ecosystem. So I love that you're thinking about saying and saying short bits and bites and longer things and cohorts. And I think it's up to us to offer that menu and then it's up to the end. And also I think it's more this I think about it more and more when we compete with people's attention is how do we surface the value? What is the value? Like stories of value, stories of success, the difference that showing up and participating and being involved can actually make in someone's lives. I think that are the stories that people like to hear for them to say, Oh, I want to prioritize this because we are competing with attention and it's just bandwidth. It's not just time. It's energy. It's mental capacity. There's so much happening in the world, like outside of work in the world. And I think I loved how you mentioned that the women carry a lot of things in their backs on their hands in their hands in their arms. They're families in their heads. They're families that caretakers. So absolutely, I think there's there's yeah, this is a challenge with other communities too. And quite frankly, I don't think it's ever going to go away because it's just yeah, it's just how the how the world works. But I'll also reassure and I also see from Melanie Sheikah's there is a time for every single person. There's someone that probably was in the community for two years and they didn't had the capacity and the bandwidth and the mental availability to be involved. And after two years, they're like, I finally have it now. Yes. I want to roll out my sleeves, right? And that is totally okay. Just like someone that has been rolling up their sleeves for two years might say, I need a breather now. I'm going to take two steps back. And because we are volunteers in these types of work, internal communities. And so that it's good to manage that level of energy and just know when to step in, when to step out and just pull our efforts, our collective efforts. Awesome. One last thing, Corey, before we move to the kind of the checkout question, you've mentioned already that one of the pillars is the you had the data and insights pillar inside the foundation, which is something that's that's new. But as you were talking about the different initiatives, I can I could definitely see that there's a lot of awareness on the mentioned, oh, we tried to really adapt to members needs and we tried to really look at the things that are ringing impact and we're trying to measure. So there's definitely it comes across as if there's these awareness and very intentional effort that it's being placed when it comes to measurement and tracking of impact and looking into the data. Now, I know that you're not part of that team. Is there do you have any insights to share with us? Because this is such a massive pain point when it comes to internal communities of all kinds, including the RGs. Anything you've seen or heard like nuggets with them that you can share with the listeners. Oh, I definitely will try and you're right. It is something that is going to be constantly not only like a battle. I think to get data and get clean accurate data, but it's not ever going to go away. That need for it or that desire for it because we all want to be like smarter and more strategic in our decisions because that I think those events or those programs that we decide to push forward they'll land better. So the first thing that we've done in the last like several years before we had a dedicated like data and analytics team is we do a women at member survey every year. It's probably one of our biggest initiatives of the whole calendar year is we at the start of, uh, forgive me, the fiscal in July. We say like give us your feedback. What do you want to see from your ERG? And we do a local like internal campaign to say, Hey, the person who gets the most survey responses like we'll get, you know, acknowledged. We also try to reach out to members or forgive me, non members. So aspiring members outside of our existing community because if we just send the survey to the communication channels we have like the distribution list that's an opt-in, we're missing a huge batch of employees that don't really know about us yet. So anyway, we try to promote that in every company channel we can. And then our analytics team now looks at those results and aggregates all sorts of feedback, whether it's anecdotal on like what types of topics are most interesting to members versus a quantitative metrics like how many of you felt like you had a career opportunity to be promoted last year or how many of you feel as though you have the opportunity to succeed here at LinkedIn. So real like metrics. The second thing that we do that reminded me of is as an organization we also do a pulse survey. So twice a year we ask employees for feedback using Glent, we do an employee voice survey. And our team and our leadership team specifically gets access to some of that data that pertains to questions around belonging, questions around diversity and inclusion. And I do think that that's a really excellent way as well that our company shows that they care about the insight and the feedback. And then too, they action it by deploying it to our ERG leaders. Now, they don't make that data like publicly available or widely available, but I think those insights are how we decide things like our strategic pillars. And then the third thing that we're doing better than ever this year, but always a worker progress is trying to track the impacts of our programming and our events. So what that means is everything from like tracking how many people came to an event, to working with our content and editorial team to track like how many people posted on LinkedIn using the hashtag that we marked in our initiative. It's really challenging to do it. And there's no like bulletproof solution that I've found yet. But we did build like for the first time ever a global event tracker. So instead of the regions or the offices each tracking like how many people came to each event, we're building now a global event tracker for first showcase month in March, which is like a bare minimum. We want to see how many employees engage with that programming. And then too, we're trying to expand that this year to the entire global leadership committee across the whole 12 month year. And we'll see like then we can actually see are we doing different things and are we improving each year or are we actually staying the same like staying flat right now. I'll tell you exactly our metrics. So we have a little over 3,000, maybe 3500 members in our communication and distra list. So I count those as like members and active ERG participants. That does not capture everyone, but that is to me just a fraction of what is possible at LinkedIn. We have 18,000 employees. So Michael as co lead of membership and engagement is to increase that and increase every month like the engagement we get in our conversation starters, but watch this space and I'll let you know next time we I was like, what's our memory number count? (laughs) We're rooting for you. We're rooting for you, Corey. - Thanks. - It's such a hard one. The metrics and the impact and the tracking because a lot of people, and anyone guessed that came in the podcast, they're like, everyone's like, how do you track connection? How do you track people? Like, how do you put a tag where the impact of a connection? And also, I've been reflecting so much on this. And there, yes, we can track the numbers and the participants, but the true actual impact, it's hard to track it because it's not time bound, meaning I probably attended an event at the ERG two years ago, and now finally, the opportunity presents itself for me to put into practice whatever learn or the piece of nuggets or information I take away, and suddenly I feel empowered or enabled, and I get to create that impact for myself, and it's thanks to the fact that I attended an event or I had a mentor, I talked to someone or I attended steer or whatever, right? Totally. So fascinating topic. Last question, Corey, you are a community person, you're a community woman, and I know we talked about the women at today, but you have said to yourself, you're involving all sorts of communities internally, you're also leading our L&D shakers, L.A. hub as well. So this is hard of who you are and your identity. And curious, what's a personal transformation that working with community has open for you or enabled for you? Like, why are you doing this? Just madness. Wow. Yeah, why do I love this madness? That's a great question. You know, when you asked me that and teed me up with that question, I had to really like, I wanted to think about what have been the most meaningful transformations, but it wasn't difficult. Like it came to mind immediately. So I'm going to share with you all the two things that have happened because of investing in this community in particular, women at LinkedIn. But I think obviously there are so many other examples that can trickle out into our lives. So the first time I decided to lean in and like, invest in community was because I was at the office in San Francisco where I started, by the way, at LinkedIn when I was 25. I was living in a new city, so I didn't have a lot of friends yet. And I was naturally like, therefore a yes woman, because I just needed to meet people and make connections. So I went to an info table at like our little, you know, lunchtime office space career and like culture gathering. And someone from women at LinkedIn was tabling. And I said, you know, oh, I'm so excited to like get to know people. I'd love to get involved. Like if I can help, I was at RA in college in the US, we call that like a resident advisor. So I had always naturally like gravitated toward roles where I could help build the community. And at the table, she said, okay, well, you know, we already have our leadership committee for this year, but you should definitely join our mentorship program that we're piloting for San Francisco. And I was like, great, I need a mentor, I need help. And that was the first ever interaction I had with the community. So the lessons there are like one, you don't have to lead it to be a part of it or benefit from it. And two, you don't necessarily have to even join like the community to enjoy one or a moment of its offerings. So by being brave and saying yes to the mentor program, I was matched with someone in SF who was a senior director and she came from a really different background than me. She had like a PhD and was like doctoral research. It was her big experience. So she was a marketing leader. And I was in a customer sales world, but she ended up asking me some of the most powerful questions I had ever been asked yet in my career. Like, you know, why do you want to do X? Like what motivates you Corey to feel really fulfilled? And I had to reflect and think about like what in my job had made me feel fulfilled the most in the like first three or four years of working. And that helped me decide I wasn't going to pursue a path in marketing. Like I was going to pursue a path in sales enablement. And then that wasn't even her field, right? But she was creating a safe space because we were paired in this mentorship program other than like working directly for each other. And that woman became the sponsor when I applied for my next role three years later. And guess what, that role was in Australia. So I moved to Sydney because of that mentor Angie, because of saying yes at that table. And I can completely contribute that to like women out like Dinn bringing us together when we wouldn't have worked together otherwise. You know, thanks Angie if you're listening. But the second way that this community has then proceeded to like build and benefit me is by offering like opportunities to connect. So I shared this example because it was like a slightly different scenario. But a few years later, I had the opportunity to participate in what we call mentorship circles. And if anyone has never heard of this concept, I didn't mention it yet today. Instead of being one on one like paired with a mentor, we decided we wanted to build little mini communities that could like support each other. If any of you have read Cheryl Sandberg's book, Lean In, this idea kind of came from her own model, her organization like leanin.org kind of spurred the concept of these little mini book clubs being support circles of women. And we called them like inspiration rings the next year. But first we called them mentorship circles. And I was matched up with three or four people, probably five who are all based in San Francisco. And that ended up leading to one of my closest friends now who, you know, I went to her wedding and she came to mine. And those are the like less tangible benefits that come from community and leaning in that like you can never really quantify. It's not like she necessarily helped me get my next job, but she did help me like in so many ways in my life. And it's for me to read a book that helped me decide that I wanted to move back from Sydney. Like so those friends all connection. It's all because of these meaningful like communities I've found at LinkedIn. Thanks for asking that. Wow, beautiful and repuls. I love to ask that questions to people that are leading communities, but also just part of communities. And it's always inspiring. And I'm left with goosebumps. So thank you for sharing. Shout out to all the mentors and all the people that opened doors for other people, I think. Yeah, the world's a better place for it. Hooray, you were fantastic. I appreciate so much your time and your generosity to share the lessons that you've learned so far. And thank you very much. I can't wait to bring this episode to a listener so they can get inspired. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you for the opportunity. It was so, so fun, but like also felt really rewarding. So thanks everyone. Keep it touch. [MUSIC PLAYING]