Tonushree Mondal is the Founder & CEO of Tonushree Mondal Consulting, a leading boutique HR consulting firm.
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Engagement and retention have become urgent focus areas for most organizations, as the Great Resignation continues to dominate the workforce and key talent drifts away. Too many employees are burned out, unwilling to go above and beyond, or take on discretionary work—or else they’re distracted by the lure of other opportunities.
Many organizations try to counteract the trend by offering increased pay and promotions, contributing to a never-ending cycle of salary and title inflation. But gaining an edge in the retention battle is unlikely to be achieved using monetary rewards alone. Organizations seeking a more stable workforce—and an employer-of-choice reputation based on developing future leaders from within—need to significantly improve their internal mobility programs.
Indeed, we have seen that career development continues to score low in most engagement surveys and, typically, the reasons are a lack of transparency around career paths and insufficient conversations and opportunities. Employees want learning experiences and the chance to make an impact. Even in organizations where there are well-laid career paths and tools, the velocity of internal lateral mobility can be low.
Unleashing the potential of an organization’s internal mobility program involves understanding the five stages of a mobility model’s maturity and making the mindset shifts that can drive success.
Image Courtesy of Tonushree Mondal
Stage 1: Organizations in this stage are either very small or operate in siloes with little to no internal mobility. Leaders in these organizations have very low talent-risk tolerance. They believe in the deep specialization of technical areas and focus on vertical ladder climbing.
Stage 2: Leaders in organizations at this stage are open to internal mobility and communicate the right messages to employees and managers, yet these leaders often are unable to support it in a meaningful way. They find business pressures too overwhelming to pull the trigger on robust internal movement. Here too, the risk tolerance for talent mobility is low.
Stage 3: Organizations in this stage have well-designed career paths and talent review processes, but the programs are not well-integrated. These organizations conduct training programs and expect that by democratizing the process with greater career-path transparency, the right level of lateral movement will naturally occur. However, talent hoarding of high potentials by managers is often prevalent and limits actual movement. Employees raise their hands only to be disappointed by no real action.
Stage 4: Organizations in this stage have robust talent review processes and their high potentials are periodically moved into other areas and given stretch assignments. They may even sponsor a talent marketplace, but it may be underutilized. Leaders in these organizations believe in building breadth and depth of capabilities through movement. They enable it by making strategic high potentials move. Employees view the process as credible and want to be selected.
Stage 5: By the time organizations are at Stage 5, they typically have strong career paths and talent review processes and a culture of frequent movement of talent. They may have a robust, well-utilized talent marketplace and track metrics effectively. Their internal and external brand becomes well known as a place where there is a systemic process for grooming leaders and growing careers. Engagement scores and business results can be linked back to strong talent mobility.
The Mobility Maturity Spectrum
As those descriptions illustrate, many organizations want to progress along the spectrum of the internal mobility maturity model but find themselves stuck. Realizing the full potential of this model requires mindset shifts, the right infrastructure and the proactive creation of opportunities. Still, mindset shifts often are the hardest part of this change effort and are different for business leaders, managers and employees, as detailed below:
• Business leaders: Unless leaders at the executive level truly believe in the value of internal mobility to groom future leaders, the initiative is unlikely to gain traction. Therefore, having the right leaders at the very top who think the same way is a prerequisite to success.
• Manager ‘talent hoarding’: According to research conducted by I4CP, 43% of employees think that their managers hoard talent. Unless leaders hold managers accountable—and encourage, measure and reward their efforts at exporting talent outside their own teams—this behavior can be the silent barrier to success.
• Employees: Employees can be risk-averse and often fear moving out of their comfort zone due to the loss of market worthiness of their skills. Until they are convinced of the value of growing a portfolio of skills that positions them better for future roles, they may be the main bottleneck.
In addition, tools need to be put in place to ensure a strong foundation for all to leverage internal mobility. Specifically:
• Career paths should be designed like rock climbing walls where the handholds and footholds are designed in the form of roles, with clearly defined skills and experiences.
• Talent review processes need to focus more on discussing multiple rotational assignments for high-potential employees and integrating these opportunities with career paths.
• Talent technologies and marketplaces could bring mobility options closer to the employee in a transparent and easy manner.
Proactive Talent Movement
Creating career opportunities is a function of growth, turnover and proactive talent movement. In the normal course of business, vacancies are created within organizations when there is significant growth or employee turnover. However, left to those two forces alone, internal mobility will not be sufficient. A proactive approach to creating opportunities requires managing obstacles to mobility, underperformers and high-potential employees by crafting jobs differently and making bold moves.
Ultimately, unleashing the power of internal mobility requires organizations of any size to recognize that there is more to creating a pipeline of talent and leadership than monetary rewards and promotions. Well-designed career paths, talent review processes and a commitment to rotational job moves can mark the competitive difference between companies that stagnate and those that thrive. But the key to that mature mobility model lies in the right mindset for executives, managers and employees—one that embraces change and encourages personal and professional growth.
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