THE STATE OFStuck.
It launched. Membership grew. Events happened. From the outside, things looked fine. But somewhere along the way, the momentum quietly disappeared — and now it feels like the program is running on fumes. There's a name for that state. And there's a way out.
If three or more of these are happening right now — this page is for you.
ERG leaders keep burning out — and the people replacing them are starting from zero, every single time.
Every ERG operates differently. Some have charters, some don't. Some have clear leader roles, some are five people making it up as they go.
The program manager is constantly putting out fires instead of leading. Strategy work keeps getting pushed to "next quarter" — and never happens.
If someone asked what success looks like, no one could give the same answer. Not the manager. Not the leaders. Not the execs.
Engagement was fine for the first year or two — then it just… plateaued. Nobody can pinpoint when exactly. It just stopped growing.
Every "fix" lately has been buying something new — new software, new training, new committee. None of it has actually moved the needle.
The data dashboard exists. Kind of. But no one really trusts it enough to make decisions from it.
You're not running a failing program. You're running one stuck in Broken Adolescence.
An ERG program launches the moment it goes public — not the moment it's ready.
That sentence is the entire reason this happens. The Infancy phase ends at launch — whether the foundation was finished or not.
So when a program goes live without governance, without a defined vision, without documented processes, without a real plan for data — it's still considered "out of Infancy." It's just out of Infancy without anything to stand on.
Early Adolescence is the phase where the foundation built in Infancy gets applied. Members join. Leaders test the SOPs. The vision gets pressure-tested. The data plan starts producing real signal. But if Infancy got skipped, there's nothing to apply. Nothing to test. Nothing to refine.
So the program just sits in Early Adolescence. Indefinitely. That's Broken Adolescence — not a separate phase, but a stuck state. The program is moving in circles instead of moving forward, because the thing that's supposed to push it forward was never actually built.
What it costs to stay here.
Broken Adolescence isn't free. It just charges quietly. Here's the bill that's been adding up while everyone's been busy putting out fires.
Leader churn nobody can stop.
The average ERG leader serves 12-24 months before burning out — and most of that time is spent rebuilding what the last leader built. Every cycle resets the program back to zero. Institutional memory is impossible because there's no institution to remember anything.
A program manager who can't actually manage.
The PM is fielding the same questions from every new leader, mediating between ERGs that operate on different rules, and re-doing strategy work that should have been documented years ago. That's a $90K–$150K salary spent on maintenance, not growth.
Engagement numbers that look fine until they don't.
For the first year or two, membership grows on its own steam. Then it plateaus. Then it dips. By the time leadership notices, the program is already 6-12 months into decline. The fix gets expensive precisely when the budget gets questioned.
Member experience that varies by ZIP code.
An employee's ERG experience depends entirely on which ERG they joined and which leader was running it that quarter. Same company. Same program. Wildly different results. That's not "ERG flavor" — that's an operating model that doesn't exist.
An ERG software subscription that didn't fix the problem.
Somewhere between $15K and $50K a year spent on a platform that's just digitizing the chaos. The dashboard reports membership, sure — but it can't fix unclear goals, undocumented processes, or a program that doesn't know what it's measuring.
Executive trust that's quietly eroding.
Leadership notices the program isn't moving. They don't have data they trust, so they default to gut feel. The conversation shifts from "how do we invest more" to "what's the ROI." And the program team doesn't have the answer ready.
Broken Adolescence doesn't get better with time. It gets worse.
Most program problems improve when you wait. Broken Adolescence is the opposite. Every month that passes without fixing the foundation, the cost compounds — because more leaders cycle through the broken system, more decisions get made without infrastructure, and more institutional confusion gets baked in.
Here's what staying in Broken Adolescence actually looks like on a timeline.
Numbers still look fine.
New program energy carries momentum. Leaders are excited. Engagement is real. Nobody's worried yet — but the cracks are already forming underneath.
The plateau arrives.
Leaders start cycling out. Membership stops growing. The PM is firefighting full-time. Executives quietly ask harder questions about ROI.
The budget conversation.
The program is technically running, but it's no longer producing returns that justify the cost. The conversation isn't "how do we improve this?" It's "do we need this?"
The longer the program stays in Broken Adolescence, the harder the fix becomes. Not because the work changes — but because the trust that funds the work is being spent down every quarter the problem goes unsolved.
Five things that look like fixes but aren't.
When a program is stuck, the instinct is to add. New tools. New trainings. New layers of oversight. Here's why none of it works — and why it keeps not working.
Buying ERG software.
Software reinforces a working system. It doesn't create one. Putting a platform on top of an unclear strategy makes the chaos searchable, sortable, and reportable — not gone.
Running a one-off training.
Training new leaders on how to operate inside a broken program just delays the next burnout cycle. The leaders aren't the problem. The structure they're trying to operate inside of is.
Rebranding ERGs to "BRGs".
Changing the name doesn't change the operating model. A renamed ERG with no foundation is still a renamed ERG with no foundation — now with a more impressive acronym.
Adding more ERGs.
Launching new ERGs on a foundation that isn't holding doesn't grow the program. It multiplies the problem across more groups, more leaders, and more confusion.
Recruiting bigger executive sponsors.
More senior sponsors won't compensate for missing infrastructure. They'll just experience the same chaos at a higher level — and start questioning the program faster.
An ERG program is a plane.
This is the visual that made Broken Adolescence click for thousands of ERG leaders when it was first introduced. The plane is the foundation. The runway is Early Adolescence. The destination is the program vision. And most programs are sitting on the runway, fully launched, with a plane that was never finished being built.
Passengers are members. Flight attendants are ERG leaders. The airline is the executive team. Everyone boarded expecting a flight. The plane never had a chance of taking off.
That's not the program's fault. That's not the leaders' fault. It's the launch decision that was made before the foundation was ever ready.
"It's not a crashed plane. It's an unfinished plane on a runway. And that's exactly what most ERG programs look like."
Stuck in Broken Adolescence vs. actually moving through the arc.
Same companies. Same size budgets. Same leader pool. The difference is whether the foundation got built — and whether the program is allowed to actually develop.
The program is moving in circles.
- Leaders rebuild the wheel every year — and burn out doing it.
- Every ERG operates on different rules. Experience varies wildly.
- The PM is reacting. Strategy work never gets done.
- "Success" is undefined. Nobody can answer what it means.
- Engagement plateaus. Then dips. Then leadership starts asking hard questions.
- Every new tool feels like progress for a quarter. Then it doesn't.
- Budget gets questioned. Trust quietly erodes.
The program is actually developing.
- Leaders inherit a documented operating model. They lead — they don't rebuild.
- Every ERG runs the same playbook. The experience is consistent.
- The PM leads strategy. Operations run themselves.
- Success is defined, measurable, and shared across all stakeholders.
- Engagement grows because the foundation grows with it.
- New tools work because they reinforce a system that already does.
- Executive trust compounds. Budget conversations get easier, not harder.
There's one way to leave Broken Adolescence.
Go back. Build the foundation that should have been built before launch. Then re-enter Early Adolescence with a complete program — so the phases can actually start doing what they're designed to do.
The Fresh Start program is how programs do this — with structure, in a defined timeline, without starting over from scratch.
See the Fresh Start program →What Fresh Start does:
- Diagnoses exactly where the foundation is missing — no guesswork.
- Rebuilds the 3Ps: Purpose, Process, Programming.
- Documents governance, SOPs, and data infrastructure that should have existed at launch.
- Defines what success looks like — shared across members, leaders, and executives.
- Gives the PM a real operating model to manage from, not maintain through.
- Sets up the program to actually move into Mid Adolescence.
Broken Adolescence is the diagnosis. Fresh Start is the fix.
Knowing what's wrong is the first step. The next one is doing something about it — before the budget conversation gets harder than the work.