Winston Churchill is often credited with saying ‘he who fails to plan, is planning to fail’. 

Whilst the exact origin and context is not known, it’s safe to assume that Churchill wasn’t talking about disability ERG/Network leadership. But he could have been.

The most impactful ERG/Network leaders work with the end in mind and develop a simple set of actions to achieve their goals.

No two disability ERG/Networks are the same, yet most share the same goal – to build a more inclusive working world for employees with disabilities and long-term conditions.

Plans will vary between disability ERG/Networks but most will tend to focus on actions in two areas:

• Building the confidence of disabled colleagues.
• Supporting the business to improve its practice by learning directly from the experience of its own people.

This month, we invite you to consider when was the last time you and your ERG/Network leadership team spent time:

• Confirming your strategic goals.
• Agreeing the steps needed to reach the goal.
• Assessing the resources required. 
• Assigning roles and responsibilities.
• Measuring progress against a set of agreed KPIs.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough

This quote, often attributed to Einstein, reminds us of the need for disability ERG/Network leaders to be able to articulate their purpose and plans in a succinct way. 

To help you get to the heart of what you are trying to achieve this month, we publish our refreshed Strategy On A Page (SOAP) template.

The SOAP allows disability ERG/Network leaders to boil everything down to its simplest form and align it with wider the business vision, mission, goals and actions, all of which can all be seen at a glance.

Peer Leadership Roundtables

One of the most valuable aspects of PurpleSpace membership is the opportunity to build your leadership capacity via quality conversation with other disability ERG/Network leaders.

Each month we convene groups of disability ERG/Network leaders to stimulate discussion on the issues that matter most to our members.

Connect with your peers during these interactive one-hour sessions for disability ERG/Network leaders. These sessions are a great way to share good practice and challenges, swap ideas and build your ERG/Network leadership capacity. 

We have two sessions to choose from to explore how planning enables progress:

• 14 February 08:00 – 09:00 GMT (19:00 – 20:00 ACT)

• 23 February 16:00 – 17:00 GMT (11:00 – 12:00 EST)

Australia and New Zealand Peer Group

On the 9th of February we reconvene our community of disability ERG/Network leaders in Australia and New Zealand.

Time:

• AWST – 13:00 – 14:30
• ACST – 14:30 – 16:00
• AEST – 15:00 - 16:30
• NZST – 17:00 – 18:30

Sign up here. 

Resources and Recommendations 

Tap into our Networkology know-how and check out some of the external learning that links into this leadership lesson:

• Annual Review Checklist helps you to ask the right questions to measure your ERG/Network’s current performance and identify future priorities. 
• Working to Purpose resource explains the role the ERG/Network can play in enabling the business to deliver its disability confident business objectives and helps you to position the ERG/Network group as a vehicle for change.
• Our Ten Point Plan is designed to help those in the process of setting up an ERG/Network (or those who are thinking of doing it) and to be a useful reference for organisations that have had an ERG/Network for some time and are looking to refresh their structure or activities.