Unleashing your talent through internal mobility

More effectively scaling talent across your organization isn’t just smart. It’s good business. Further leveraging your internal talent mobility strategies and processes can differentiate your organization from competitors and provide an edge.

Sixty percent of job leavers in the U.S. cited lack of career growth as the main factor in leaving their firms. In a sample of over four million work histories, a McKinsey and Co. analysis determined 80 percent of role moves occurred across different organizations, rather than from within. In other words, people were leaving their employers to further their career development elsewhere, rather than either feeling or being able to advance at their current employer. And, in LinkedIn’s 2023 Workplace Learning Report, only 15 percent of respondents say their organizations encouraged them to move into a new role.

According to Gartner global labor market data, lack of future career opportunities is the top driver of employee attrition, ranking above compensation. For both business and talent leaders improving internal mobility can be an “unlock” in increasing retention, improving engagement, nurturing a thriving work culture and driving productivity. 

Over the last 20 years, I’ve worked with a variety of organizations, across industries, in designing and operationalizing their talent development systems and processes. With a particular focus on enhancing internal mobility and ensuring the alignment of getting the right people into the right roles at the right time. It is both science and art.

There are many variables that can impact internal mobility solutions ranging from workforce configuration to the resources an organization can or is willing to allocate in developing talent. What is clear is that your talent development processes can either work for or against you. To what degree are your business functions operating as talent magnets and skills accelerators across your firm or continuing as functional and siloed talent storage units and skills vaults?

One simple and effective way to drive internal mobility whether you are kick-starting an approach, or continuing to improve existing efforts, is through the perspective of the 3Ps: pools, pipelines and plans. Three important building blocks in identifying, moving and developing talent across the enterprise.

Develop talent pools

Talent is a finite resource. But it may be in abundance if only you are looking through the right lens. Approach your talent pools like a geoscientist would analyze the seismic interpretation of a subsurface reservoir. Do you have a deep understanding of where your skills and capabilities are across your organization? Have you fully identified, grouped and analyzed your talent pools? Are you truly unlocking the value of resources across your enterprise?

Brittany Heflin, a Talent Leader at Boston Consulting Group, shares that in the era of accelerating change a key question is “What does talent want and what will keep them?”

“Talent in and of itself is constantly evolving. At the individual level, people are no longer sticking to one career path or talent focus area, some of this by choice and some of it by demand,” she says. “With tech changing at a rapid pace and the potential to augment talent, some are looking forward and starting to learn new skills that will place them in new talent pools. At an organizational level, leaders are starting to see this ever-changing shift of talent and open their minds to who can fill what role, both in terms of existing skills and experiences, as well as different geographies and locations. This is exciting but can also make staffing plans complex. Instead of a linear design of talent, you now have a complicated web that’s constantly evolving. So how do leaders and talent managers keep up with this pace of change?”

Questions

• Do structured, coherent and integrated talent pools (e.g., skills families or similar architectures) exist to identify and centralize talent across the organization?
• Are there specific business leaders who are empowered to advocate and lead across talent pools?
• Are there criteria and metrics in place to evaluate the health of talent pools?
• Is there an enterprisewide perspective in prioritizing and segmenting across talent pools?

Build talent pipelines

Nothing is worse than a leaking pipe. Particularly, one that leaks talent. And especially when it comes to the talent you have invested significant resources, time and effort in developing for the future of your firm. You’ve got to get the plumbing right in any organization. It’s not just moving people through pipelines; more importantly, it is the capabilities, key customer relationships, business and technology expertise, organizational relationships and networks and the accumulation of crucible leadership experiences that will further assist in identifying and differentiating the individuals who will lead your organization into the future.

Questions

• Is there clarity on supply and demand in the skills that matter most?
• Has there been calibration of current and future footprints within your workforce outlook?
• How are talent pipelines evaluated as being healthy or not?
• How well is potential managed across pipelines to ensure development and delivery of resources to organizational needs?

Design career plans 

Design for career journeys and pathways for tomorrow. Not for today. Robust career planning is somewhat limited today. For many, the first instinct is to look externally to consider their next career move rather than to explore internally. Gartner research suggests that close to three-quarters of employees consider external options first.

What are the ways that employees and managers can build a line of sight to the possibilities that exist both within their function and also across the enterprise? Not all plans need to look the same as the combination of business needs and employee potential, interests and aspirations will drive the near to mid-term opportunity space for future roles. The point is to design processes that a) increase the frequency of conversation between managers and employees, b) enlarge the aperture of optionality for employees to consider, and c) continue to build engagement and retention by enabling employees to see the longer-term employee value proposition of the firm. Organizations are not static. Neither should be career plans.

Questions

• Is there a scalable, structured way of designing individual development plans as part of the rhythm of your annual talent processes?
• Are managers accountable for designing, reviewing, and discussing development plans with employees?
• Are development plans created in line with career pathways that span across business functions?
• Are the plans executablecan you deliver on the plans and manage at scale?
• Is there clarity in a path to achieving the individual’s potential and targeted positions? Are development plans designed to work towards reaching those roles within the organization?

Building management muscle in accelerating talent

Cultivating a manager’s mindset to think “organization first” is half the battle in designing and sustaining a leading internal mobility system. The best internal mobility processes will not withstand the blowing gales of managers’ mindsets in “hoarding talent.” The mindset of managers developing and sharing resources versus developing and hiding resources will be a cultural shift for many.

Therefore, a top-down, leader-led approach is critical in narrating the organizational value that is captured through internal mobility. According to Gartner research, 44 percent of managers fear internal mobility will cause them to lose high performers to other teams. Only through developing a company-first mindset, similar to how Satya Nadella crafted through the “One Microsoft” vision can you change both managers’ minds and hearts, not behaving out of fear of losing talent, but rather, in better leading by and through unleashing talent across the firm.

As with most things involving managers’ mindsets, incentives play an important part in driving outcomes. How are managers rewarded or not for developing and deploying talent across the enterprise?

Questions

• What criteria help managers determine internal staffing moves that are in the best interest of the organization? 
• How do managers maintain a “line of sight” to the priority business needs and the allocation and flow of internal resources? 
• How can managers meaningfully understand the internal work experiences available and how they might contribute towards the individual’s development?

Internal mobility is a talent philosophy involving a series of choices and tradeoffs an organization commits to integrating across its enterprise talent development system. It amplifies as a form of “cultural connective tissue,” ensuring the sum is greater than any organizational parts. Pendulums swing within organizations. Particularly, as economic headwinds ebb and flow.

It is clear that internal mobility can be a differentiator when talent leaders ensure the 3 Ps (pools, pipelines and plans) are well-designed, nurtured and operationalized by the business in order to sustain and drive individuals to develop key skills, experiences and capabilities while elevating the employee value proposition and differentiating the work experience.