are in the midst of.
In order to solve the problem his boss has assigned him, Juan realizes he needs to get someone with marketing expertise to help his team better understand the problem that the customer has articulated. He approaches Delana, the marketing manager, to explain the problem, and he asks to borrow talent to work on a solution. Delana says she understands the importance of the project and can see how her team member will gain important insights by working with an engineering team for a brief period. So while Juan has given talent away to another team, he gets talent in return. Thus, he has the right set of skills to solve the problem at hand and provides Kris with an opportunity to learn and grow in an area of rising importance to the company. Furthermore, one of the marketing team members gains perspective from the engineering team that will help her become more successful in the future—a win for everyone.
THE TALENT SCARCITY MINDSET
While “You get what you give” is nice in principle, it is the most challenging shift in prevalent attitudes to overcome when implementing the Inside Gig. This is because most managers operate from a mindset of talent scarcity, a mental model that suggests “These are my employees.” In other words, “Hands off. Don’t touch!”
This may not be a fair portrait of your management style, but companies do ask a great deal of managers. They’re given ambitious goals, tight time frames and even tighter budgets. No wonder they aren’t willing to part with “their” talent. In fact, they would often be happy to have the talent of other managers as well. The pressure that managers face to achieve their goals despite limited resources creates a mindset of talent scarcity. Budget cuts only exacerbate this tendency. Managers have an ongoing fear that if an employee is lost to a resignation, internal transfer or promotion, there is a significant likelihood the lost position will go unfilled or be eliminated permanently, leaving them to accomplish the same objectives with even fewer people.
The scarcity mindset induces managers to hoard talent. Once they find good employees, they don’t want to let them go. Sometimes managers make great hires with particularly valuable skills and don’t want to lose them because they have a disproportionate impact on the ability of their teams to meet their goals. In other cases, managers have invested in mentoring, coaching or training employees until their performance is key to team success. Either way, managers value those employees and don’t want to see them go elsewhere. While managers may rarely admit to hoarding talent, their actions often speak louder than their words.
Talent hoarders take various actions. They might hold employees down by giving them lower performance ratings than they deserve so that other managers aren’t tempted to poach them. More commonly, when employees ask about promotional opportunities, some managers are quick to say, “I think you’re doing a great job in your current role, but you aren’t quite ready yet for a promotion.” Or if the company has a talent review process in which it discusses potential candidates for special developmental opportunities or promotion, talent hoarders become very quiet about their hidden gems. If managers from other departments inquire about having certain employees transferred, talent hoarders often trash-talk those employees to discourage other managers from taking interest in their stars. Over time, managers who hoard talent gain a reputation as people to stay away from because they’ll hold employees back in their careers. They are toxic to the organization.
Leaders who are rewarded for producing results but not for promoting people internally have no reason to welcome the prospect of losing high-performing team members to other parts of their companies. The 2019 Deloitte Human Capital Trends report indicates that 46 percent of survey respondents say that managers actively resist internal mobility.1 The Institute for Corporate Productivity’s (i4cp) talent mobility study of more than 650 global companies found that half of the survey participants (and 74 percent of companies identified as low performers) report that the biggest obstacle to talent mobility rests with managers who refuse to encourage movement.2
The talent model that underpins the Inside Gig is antithetical to outdated, bewildering management styles that suppress talent. Even though the talent scarcity mindset is understandable, the business climate has radically changed. This attitude must evolve, too. As organizations compete for scarce talent resources that can make or break their ability to achieve growth plans, holding on to talent within companies is far more important than a manager’s desire to keep their team intact.
The innovation that’s needed is a shift to a mindset of abundance rather than scarcity of resources in an organization. When managers and team leaders let go of ownership of their talent, it is liberating for everyone. This more inclusive attitude helps managers look beyond their own employee groups to solve problems, and allows their employees to explore passions and interests across other groups, teams or departments. This sense of being “boundaryless” as an organization enhances a firm’s ability to innovate.
Different disciplines have their own methods of approaching and solving problems. What possibilities could arise when a customer-facing rep is asked about her thoughts on a supply-chain issue, or a marketing employee is seconded by an engineering department? You’ll never know until you try. But it is a truism that when you examine challenges from different perspectives or with another set of tools, you shine a light on answers that might not previously have been considered. New skill sets can also be brought to issues, adding value and enhancing work products to make them more valuable to consumers. A culture that considers all talent as a company asset and allows and expects people to move seamlessly across the organization will build employees who are well rounded, understand the firm as a whole and have perspectives broader than those focused on a single function.
TALENT MOBILITY
Talent mobility has traditionally been defined as shifting talent around to promote further employee development. For large global companies, this usually meant assigning employees projects to build global competence. Given the complexities of today’s business world, organizations frequently try to move people laterally to boost their breadth of perspective. Talent mobility both increases the visibility of employees within the company and exposes such employees to new experiences (new managers, countries, markets, functions or sub-functions), greatly improving overall competence. In today’s networked and knowledge-based business environment, establishing relationships across an organization and enhancing employees’ wider understanding of the inner workings of either a function or the company as a whole delivers considerable value to the firm as well as to the employees themselves. This is particularly true when cultivating versatile leaders to handle diverse functions. Furthermore, the need to retain and develop top talent grows especially important to organizations as it becomes more difficult to hire the right employees to achieve business priorities.
Talent mobility improves levels of employee engagement by allowing people the opportunity to move around within an organization to foster new skills, be exposed to stimulating experiences and prove themselves. To fuel a company’s growth, talent mobility is needed to keep employees learning and engaged in order to retain them, as well as to build a broader understanding of the business, enhance overall organization performance and achieve competitive advantage. Given rising talent shortages, the approach of simply hiring new talent when demand increases or a different skill set is needed doesn’t work as well as it once did.
Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital Trends report shows that 20 percent of C-suite leaders (executive-level managers who often have “chief” in their title) rate talent mobility as one of the top three most urgent issues for their companies, while 76 percent of survey respondents rated it as important for their organizations.3 This is largely because many companies are experiencing historically low unemployment rates and a growing skills shortage. To make matters worse, only 15 percent of global employees are engaged at work, an amazing level of wasted potential.4 Interestingly enough, while only 10 percent of the workforce in Western Europe is engaged, 33 percent of the U.S. workforce is engaged. This suggests that management practices are providing a competitive advantage to U.S. employers, although they, too, are leaving a great deal of worker productivity on the table.
CASE STUDY: THE GAP INC.
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