Last week, I laid out the diagnostic: middle managers don't block ERG engagement for one reason. They block it for one of three — motivation, ability, or system.

This week, we go deeper on the first two. Because each requires a completely different playbook. If you missed Part 1, you can catch up here.

But before we get into tactics, let's name the thing that makes this hard:

You probably don't manage a single one of these managers. You're in People Ops, or DEI, or you're an ERG PM. The managers blocking your momentum don't report to you. You can't mandate their behavior, put it in their goals, or write them up when they ignore the ERG calendar. On paper, they don't have to listen to you at all.

What you do have is something subtler and, frankly, more durable — influence over the environment those managers operate in. The defaults. The language. The templates. The friction. You can't order a manager to support ERGs, but you can make supporting ERGs the easiest, clearest, lowest-risk thing for them to do — and make the unsupportive version take more effort. That's the whole game when you have responsibility without authority.

Every tactic below is built for that reality.

When managers aren't motivated, the goal is not to shame them into caring — and you couldn't enforce that anyway. The goal is to connect ERG support to what they already care about: team performance, talent development, retention, trust, leadership readiness, and employee engagement.

You're not changing their priorities. You're showing them that ERG support already serves the priorities they have. That's a pitch, not an order — which is exactly the kind of move you can make from where you sit.

ERGs are often framed as culture spaces. Not enough as talent development spaces. That's a mistake.

ERG leadership and participation can reveal skills that may never show up in someone's day-to-day role: facilitation, public speaking, project management, stakeholder management, budgeting, community building, strategic planning, cross-functional collaboration.

The manager-facing message should be: ERGs are not just employee communities. They are leadership labs.

That's a much stronger pitch than: "Please let employees attend ERG events."

This is where a lot of companies miss the plot. They say ERG leadership is a development opportunity, but they don't teach managers how to recognize, reinforce, or reward that development. So the claim stays cute. The system stays weak.

Your move, no authority required: you control how ERGs get framed in every piece of communication that reaches managers. Stop describing ERG involvement as participation (your goal) and start describing it as skill-building (their goal). Name the specific competencies, the way you would for any stretch assignment. You're not telling managers what to do; you're handing them a more useful lens.

The Progress Principle (Amabile + Kramer) argues that meaningful progress is one of the strongest drivers of motivation at work.

Employees often join ERGs when they're looking for something their daily role may not fully provide: connection, growth, visibility, belonging, confidence, community, or a place to contribute beyond their job description.

Managers need to understand that ERGs create meaningful progress. Not vague "belonging is good" progress. Specific progress — an employee builds confidence by speaking at an ERG event, finds a mentor through a program, gains leadership experience by planning a campaign, or feels seen during a moment when they were close to disengaging.

That matters to managers because employee engagement isn't abstract. It shows up in retention, energy, trust, and willingness to contribute.

Your move: you're almost certainly closer to the engagement and retention data than the average manager is. Connect the dots for them. When you share an ERG story, attach the outcome a manager actually loses sleep over — "Over the past two years, this department's attrition has dropped as engagement in ERGs has risen." You're not assigning work; you're translating ERG activity into their language.

This one comes from Leading from the Middle by Scott Mautz. If you want middle managers to support ERGs, start by acknowledging the pressure they're under.

Don't start with a guilt trip. Start with reality.

Say the quiet part out loud: "We know managers are balancing deadlines, workload, morale, performance goals, and business needs. This isn't about adding another job to your plate. It's about giving you a clearer way to support engagement without having to figure it out from scratch."

That one shift lowers defensiveness.

Your move: this one costs you nothing but tone. You can't pull rank, so don't try — lead with empathy instead. A People person who opens with "I know your plate is full" gets a very different reception than one who opens with "managers need to step up." You have full control over which one you are.

If managers are skeptical, don't only show them executive statements. Show them other managers.

Middle managers watch each other. If they see peers supporting ERGs in practical, low-drama ways, it reduces perceived risk.

Show them: "Here are three managers who are doing this well, and here's exactly what they do." Mentions ERG events in weekly team meetings. Helps employees plan coverage for major events. Asks team members what they learned after attending a session.

Make good behavior visible and replicable.

Your move: peer proof is the single most powerful tool available to someone without authority, because it doesn't come from you — it comes from managers' actual peers. Your job is just to find the managers already doing this well and put a spotlight on them. You're not the authority in the room; you're the one who curates which examples the room sees.

Managers are more likely to support what they can see. Show them the wins — not just attendance numbers. Attendance alone doesn't prove value.

Show outcomes like: employees who joined mentoring after attending an ERG event, ERG leaders who developed facilitation skills, cross-functional relationships created through ERG involvement, employees who felt more confident speaking up after participating (or my current favorite - correlation to company engagement scores).

If the only ERG data managers ever see is a calendar of events, they'll keep thinking of ERGs as events. Show them evidence of movement.

Your move: you own the reporting. Nobody has to approve a decision to stop sending attendance counts and start sending outcomes. Change what you measure and broadcast, and you change what managers believe ERGs are for — without a single conversation about compliance.

Ability problems are different. The manager may support ERGs in theory but doesn't know how in practice.

This is where companies accidentally create failure. They tell managers "Support ERGs" without defining what support means. So each manager fills in the blank differently.

One thinks support means approving event attendance. Another thinks it means staying out of the way. Another thinks it means only supporting ERGs when business is slow. That inconsistency creates a terrible employee experience.

Here's the good news if you're working without authority: ability problems are the ones you're best positioned to fix. You don't need power to solve a clarity problem — you need tools, defaults, scripts, and decision rules. And building those is squarely your job, not the manager's. This is your home turf.

Don't ask for permanent buy-in. Ask for a pilot.

"For the next 90 days, we're asking managers to test three ERG support behaviors: Share one ERG opportunity with your team each month. Ask employees about ERG-related development during 1:1s when relevant. Help employees plan coverage when they want to attend major ERG events."

Then gather feedback. What felt easy? What felt confusing? What got in the way? That's how you move managers through the messy middle without expecting them to become ERG champions overnight. Spotlight and find a meaningful way to thank participants in the pilot.

Why this works without authority: a pilot is an invitation, not a mandate — which is the only thing you can actually offer. "Try this for 90 days and tell me what you think" is something a peer can say. "Do this permanently" is something only their boss can say. Ask for the version you're allowed to ask for.

From Switch (Heath brothers): if a behavior depends on someone remembering, caring, and manually choosing it every time, it will eventually fall apart.

Manager support cannot depend on personal conviction alone. You need defaults.

Add ERG reminders to manager newsletters. Add ERG participation prompts to 1:1 templates. Add ERG leadership reflection questions to development plans. Add ERG support expectations to new manager onboarding. Add ERG event dates to workforce planning calendars.

Make the supportive behavior easier than the unsupportive behavior. Because if the path isn't designed, managers default to whatever's most urgent. And ERGs are rarely the most urgent thing on a manager's calendar.

Why this is your highest-leverage play: defaults are pure influence-without-authority. You may not control whether a manager cares, but you often can get an ERG prompt added to the 1:1 template or the onboarding checklist — because those are systems, and systems are shaped by People teams, not by individual managers. You're not changing minds. You're changing the path of least resistance, and the behavior follows.

An inhibitor is anything that blocks progress. For ERG engagement, manager-related inhibitors aren't dramatic — they're small, unaddressed frictions that quietly make participation harder than it needs to be. You probably can't order managers to change any of this. But you can remove the friction that makes the unsupportive behavior the default. Here's what each inhibitor looks like, and how you influence it without authority.

Unclear attendance policies.

The inhibitor: an employee sees an ERG lunch-and-learn but has no idea if attending counts as work time, so they skip it rather than ask.

What you can do: you may not set the policy, but you can get one sentence of clarity blessed by someone who does. Get HR or a sponsoring exec to approve a single line — "ERG events during work hours are approved work time" — then put it everywhere managers and employees already look: the ERG page, the event invites, the manager newsletter. You're not asking managers to decide; you're removing the decision.

Awkward permission dynamics.

The inhibitor: to attend, an employee has to ask their manager out loud, turning participation into a favor.

What you can do: change the script you give employees, since they're the audience you actually control. Tell members they can add events to their calendar and give a heads-up rather than ask permission, and model that language in your own ERG comms. When the norm shifts on the employee side, managers receive a notification instead of a request — no authority required.

Dismissive comments.

The inhibitor: a manager says "must be nice to have time for that," and the message lands that this isn't real work.

What you can do: you can't police what managers say, but you can make the supportive response the easy, obvious one. Hand managers a ready-made line — "Glad you're going, tell me what you take away" — inside whatever you're already sending them. Most dismissiveness is reflex, not malice; give them a better reflex and many will use it.

No guidance on workload conflicts.

The inhibitor: an ERG call and a deadline collide, the employee has no direction, so the ERG loses by default.

What you can do: offer a decision rule managers can borrow — "if an ERG commitment collides with a deadline, flag it early and plan coverage." You're not enforcing it; you're saving them the work of inventing an answer. Managers adopt defaults that make their lives easier, and a clear rule is easier than improvising every time.

No coverage planning.

The inhibitor: an ERG lead can't run an event because no one covers their queue, so leading piles on top of their real job until they burn out.

What you can do: build the backfill plan for them as part of the ERG event toolkit — a simple "who's covering what" template the ERG lead brings to their manager. You can't assign coverage, but you can make saying yes to coverage a two-minute conversation instead of a logistics project the manager has to solve alone.

No clarity on whether ERG leadership counts as development.

The inhibitor: someone chairs an ERG for two years — budgets, events, volunteers, leadership presentations — and none of it shows up in their review, teaching everyone that ERG leadership is a hobby.

What you can do: this is the highest-leverage one, and it's pure influence work. Get ERG leadership named as a development experience in the systems that already exist — partner with HR to add a line to development-plan templates, and arm ERG leaders with documentation of the skills they built so they can raise it in their own reviews. You don't control the promotion; you make sure the evidence is in the room when it happens.

The throughline: you may not have authority over managers, but you have influence over the environment they operate in — the defaults, the language, the templates, the friction. Before you add another ERG event, ask: what is currently making participation harder than it needs to be, and what's the lowest-authority way I can remove it?

Without scripts, managers improvise. And when managers improvise around ERGs, identity, fairness, workload, or DEI topics, things can get messy very quickly.

Give them practical language. A few examples:

When an employee wants to attend an ERG event during work hours:

"Thanks for flagging it. Let's look at what needs coverage and make a plan so you can participate without the work getting dropped."

When someone says ERGs feel exclusionary:

"ERG programming is designed to support connection, learning, and community. Many ERG events are open to allies, and the goal is to create more access to understanding, not less."

When the team is in a busy season:

"This is a high-volume week, so let's be thoughtful. If this ERG event is important for your development or connection, let's discuss what can shift and what needs coverage."

When an employee leads an ERG initiative:

"That sounds like real leadership work. Let's talk about the skills you're building and how we can reflect that in your development goals."

Scripts don't make managers robotic. They make them less likely to cause harm because they were caught unprepared.

Why scripts are an authority-free power move: a manager is far more likely to use language you gave them than to follow an instruction you gave them. A script doesn't feel like being told what to do — it feels like a helpful shortcut. You're not commanding the behavior; you're making the right behavior the easiest words to reach for in the moment.

"Support ERGs" is too big. "Create a culture of belonging" is too vague. Shrink the change. Give managers small, repeatable actions.

Mention one ERG opportunity in a team meeting. Ask one employee what they learned from a session. Help one employee plan coverage. Recognize one ERG leader's skill development. Share one ERG resource.

Small behaviors reduce the intimidation factor. Most managers don't need a giant ERG thesis. They need a next right action.

Why this matters when you can't mandate: a big ask from someone without authority is easy to ignore. A tiny, specific ask is easy to just... do. "Mention one ERG opportunity in your next team meeting" doesn't trigger a turf battle over whether you get to tell them what to do — it's too small to resist. Small is how influence gets past the authority gap.

Motivation and ability problems are real. But last week, when I asked which of the three problems sounded most like what you're dealing with, the replies were lopsided: most of you pointed at the third one. The system. I had a feeling we should save the best for last.

Because sometimes managers behave the way they do not because they don't care and not because they don't know how — but because the system around them rewards productivity and quietly punishes ERG support.

Next week we go there — including the three Adaptive Leadership principles that change everything, and the manager-facing support guide you should actually build.

✌🏿 The ERG Homegirl

P.S. Which of these 10 tactics resonated most? Hit reply — I read every response, and the patterns shape the next series.