A Few Tactics for Reducing Talent Hoarding in Organizations | Multiple Resources

Last week, I made a post about talent hoarding — managers’ tendency to prevent or discourage employees from pursuing internal opportunities. In that post, I shared new research that shows when managers temporarily stop hoarding talent, workers’ applications for pursuing new internal opportunities increase by 123%. In another research paper in the Journal of Management (provided by newsletter subscriber Sergei Gorbatov of AbbVie), the researchers found that managers often engage in several “guarding tactics” when hoarding talent. As leaders find ways to reduce talent hoarding behaviors in their organizations, I am resharing this HBR article, Let Your Top Performers Move Around the Company,  by Kevin Oakes, CEO of The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), that provides a few tactics: 1) Have managers develop a performance goal of consistently rotating internal talent (especially top talent) out of their team and into other internal groups. 2) Reduce bureaucracy that has “hiring managers to go through significantly more steps if they want to bring an internal employee into their group or department instead of hiring someone from the outside. One other tactic I have found helpful is to use talent review discussions to challenge managers on the reasons they often provide for not sharing talent, such as “the employee is in critical role or working on a critical project,” or “the employee is not quite ready for their next opportunity.” These discussions can sometimes identify hidden opportunities for sharing talent and promoting internal mobility.