The 4C Model creates employee resource groups that are business‐focused and impactful to business results.”
—Jessica Rice, Global Head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Under Armour
ROBERT RODRIGUEZ, PhD
EMPLOYEE RESOURCE GROUP EXCELLENCE
GROW HIGH PERFORMING ERGs TO ENHANCE DIVERSITY, EQUALITY, BELONGING, AND BUSINESS IMPACT
Copyright © 2022 by Robert Rodriguez. All rights reserved.
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Published simultaneously in Canada.
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To Mom and Dad: Thanks for all the sacrifices you made to help give me more opportunities and a better life. This book extends your legacy of always giving back to the community. Little did you know that your decision to move our family to Minnesota would lead to the start of my lifelong connection with employee resource groups. All my love.
To Bailey and Benjamin: I can have no greater ambition in life than to be the best father I can be to you both. You are yet too young to have launched your professional careers, but if you should be fortunate enough to work for a company someday that has employee resources groups, I hope that you will join an ERG and that your ERG experience will be as rewarding as mine has been. I love you both.
To Sofia: You'll always be the love of my life. Thanks for your unwavering support, not only during the writing of this book, but in sharing me as my ERG consulting commitments often requires extensive travel away from our home. Who knew that it would be an ERG event that would bring us together? Te Amo.
To companies: Thanks for all you do to support employee resource groups. May this book help you create the conditions that will nurture ERG excellence.
To ERG members and leaders: This book is dedicated to you, due to your willingness to give back and commit your time and energy above and beyond your day jobs to help run and maintain your employee resource groups. This book is my gift to you for all that ERGs have provided me during my lifetime. I will be forever grateful.
Introduction: The Milli Vanilli Syndrome
My Personal Connection to Employee Resource Groups
The city of Matamoros in Mexico seems like an odd place to point to as the origination point for this book that eventually was destined to be titled Employee Resource Group Excellence. Matamoros is a city in the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas. It is located on the southern bank of the Rio Grande, directly across the border from Brownsville, Texas.
Matamoros is the birthplace of my father, German. My father is the oldest of eight children, all of whom were born and raised in or near Matamoros. When my father reached the age where he could work, he would go across the border to work in Brownsville, Texas. It is in Brownsville that my father eventually met my mother, Janie. Janie is Mexican American, but she is a United States citizen, born in Texas. After a short courtship, German and Janie married and settled in the city of Lubbock, located in the panhandle region of Texas.
Lubbock is the city where I was born in 1969. My memories of Lubbock are rather vague, as we lived there only until I turned four years old. Our family, along with my aunts, uncles, and cousins, used to travel to the Midwest every year as migrant workers. We would go to cities like Traverse City, Michigan, to work the cherry fields and Wahpeton, North Dakota, to help with the sugar beet harvest. We eventually settled on the west side of St. Paul, Minnesota, which is where I grew up and spent my youth during the decades of the 1970s and 1980s.
This upbringing is what led me to eventually join employee resource groups. You see, Minnesota is a great place to live, and was a great place for a child to grow up. However, during my formative years as a child, there was not a large Hispanic population in the Twin Cities, which is what Minneapolis and St. Paul combined are called. Other than my extended Hispanic family that settled in Minnesota with us, there were not many other Latinos. Even today in 2021, the percentage of Hispanics living in Minnesota is still only approximately 5 percent. It was definitely much less back in the 1970s.
My parents, who were well intentioned, encouraged me to connect with the local Anglo kids in the neighborhood. Soon you would find me on the hockey rinks in the winter and baseball fields in the summer. Friends and neighborhood kids to hang out with were not too hard to find, but almost none were Hispanic like me. Additionally, my parents encouraged me to assimilate within the predominantly
