• Obstructing top performers from leaving for higher roles may be harming your business, studies show.
• In fact, data shows that encouraging career agility has a range of benefits for firms.
• How can leaders create a culture of mobility that rewards both themselves and their workforce?

It may go against a leader’s instinct to let an employee leave a role they excel in, but keeping them there may be harmful in the long run, studies show.

Harvard Business Review has cited several studies on the issue of mobility, and this week HBR has featured one such study involving more than 650 firms from across the world, which found a direct correlation between talent mobility and market performance, with high-performing companies twice as likely to promote talent mobility compared to low-performance companies.

Writing for Harvard Business Review, CEO of The Institute for Corporate Productivity, Kevin Oakes says: “Of course, it’s human nature to want to hang on to the superstars in your group, department, or division. But ultimately, that’s detrimental to the organization, and to the individuals involved.

“Multiple studies on talent mobility show that actively moving employees into different roles is one of the most underutilised, yet most effective, development and cultural enhancement techniques in companies today”.

With this in mind, what can bosses do to promote more positive attitudes towards their top talent looking for new opportunities?

“Building a culture of mobility is a trait of very healthy organisations”, says Oakes, who adds that the benefits are clear: “Cross-functional collaboration increases, departmental cooperation is enhanced, innovation improves, and companies begin working more as one cohesive team instead of separate fiefdoms.”

Give managers incentives

“The first key to changing this dynamic is to re-evaluate how an organization recognizes and rewards its managers” Oakes says.

“In a select percentage of some of the best companies in the world, it’s understood that to consistently rotate talent — especially high-potential talent — they need to build it into a manager’s performance objectives and make this part of the performance review process.”

Get comfortable with change

Oakes write on: “Employees at top-performing companies are not only more likely to say change is normal and in fact part of the business model, but they usually describe it as an opportunity.

“Several of these organisations even induce change on a regular basis under the theory that consistent change actually boosts productivity.”

Grapevine Leaders

Liam Soutar, August 2021