Edie L. Goldberg, Ph.D., the President of E. L. Goldberg & Associates, is a nationally recognized expert in Talent Management.
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In the tightest labor market in memory, attracting and retaining top talent is key. But your high performers want greater access to learning opportunities—and they want new and exciting prospects for their careers.
You have an opportunity to attract and retain talent by offering them what they want within your organization before they look for it on the outside. Right now, it might be easier for your employees to find a new job elsewhere than to find another one inside your company.
One solution to the tight labor market is internal talent mobility (ITM). Usually, talent mobility means moving your people around to encourage employee development. ITM helps employees build new skills and improve competence because it exposes them to new managers, situations and perspectives that enhance their capabilities.
Managers can be reluctant to lose their best talent to other teams within the company, which poses one of the biggest barriers to ITM. This is understandable because we ask so much of managers who have so few resources. However, when managers hold their employees back from taking on new opportunities to learn and grow professionally, those employees could leave the organization altogether. And with 11 million open positions today, and over 4 million people quitting their jobs each month, there are plenty of opportunities from which to choose.
Because managers are so resistant to internal mobility, we can turn to a more innovative approach to ITM that moves from strictly thinking about jobs to considering more project-based work. Rather than leaving a role altogether, what if we broke up an employee’s work into a series of projects and then made room for a project that was 5% to 20% of that employee’s time? The beauty of this more flexible approach is that when you give an employee time to work on another project that interests them, you get talent from elsewhere in the company that can contribute to your department’s projects.
But ITM not only offers growth experiences that develop your people; it also can make your company more agile. It makes you more capable of responding to change. The ability to quickly staff a project to meet an emerging company need is critical for being responsive to changes in the business environment. As the last few years have shown, titanic, disruptive change can come out of nowhere.
Do’s And Don’ts Of Internal Mobility
While this more flexible approach to internal mobility may be more palatable to managers than completely letting their employees move into a different role, you could still get resistance. This is because managers face a mountain of work and need all of their employees—and likely a few from other departments too—to get their work done. By sharing stories of managers who have borrowed talent within the organization and been able to get work done quickly and at a lower cost, you can help managers begin to see the value. When those same managers give their employees time to work on projects and see the value this brings back to the team, this sharable experience builds comfort in the process. Storytelling plays a critical role in changing the manager’s mindset from one of talent scarcity to a mindset of talent abundance.
One of the biggest pitfalls of this new approach to getting work accomplished is when projects offered to employees represent nothing more than busywork or undesirable tasks where little learning will take place. To attract talent to project-based work, it must provide a learning opportunity. The project-based opportunities offered need to be plentiful to attract employees to come back to seek out more experiences. Thus, managing the quality and quantity of opportunities within the company is very important to gaining and maintaining momentum.
Finding Hidden Talent
An ITM strategy unleashes the people in your organization to contribute their skills and expertise anywhere within the company. By uncovering the hidden talents in your organization—the skills your employees have but don’t use in their core job—you can optimize your human resources by moving employees to deliver on your company’s most critical projects. This is the magic behind ITM. Today, we have the golden opportunity to find hidden talent within our companies.
Given rising talent shortages, the approach of simply hiring new talent in response to internal demand doesn’t work as well as it once did. You and your HR team need to discover the hidden talents inside of your organization and learn how you can optimize and mobilize your talent as much as possible. Internal talent mobility is a way to develop your team, but it has other benefits. It helps you become more agile and responsive, and it can extend your capacities during an epic labor shortage.
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