Inspect Your Talent Mobility Practice and Inspire Internal Careers

To kick off 2015, the Human Capital Institute is featuring original content on talent mobility, and to re-familiarize myself with the topic I spent some time skimming through a colleague’s notes concerning contemporary research. Somewhere between reading about a study citing that only 36% of businesses have access to reliable data on top performers that were not included in succession plans and a blog post about how U.S. based companies are taking 25% more time to make a hire, I stumbled on a somewhat eye-popping statistic.

Eighty percent of organizations have an internal mobility police.

Wait a minute – what? Is this like a traffic cop that manages the flow of talent within an organization?

“Move along - you’ve been a data analyst long enough”

 Or is this perhaps more akin to a detective that digs into the talent profiles of business units to uncover certain HR improprieties?

“See according to these personnel documents it seems like you have 3 direct reports that are designated high-potential employees yet those computer whizzes back in the precinct found while digging through these old emails that you’ve repeatedly denied them promotion opportunities. Oh and one more thing, are you familiar with our official position on talent hoarding? “

Admittedly I’m letting my love of police procedurals take me on a bit of ride – I bet that an internal mobility police resembles a Chief of Police ensuring all the talent mobility rules and regulations are followed and enforced in order to keep an organization’s employee population in a positive state of continual development and fluidity. Yeah that’s the ticket.

Wanting to learn more I asked the researcher – “What’s this internal mobility police thing all about?”

“Internal Mobility Police?” he repeated, quizzically. “I’m not exactly sure. Let me find out.”

Looking deeper into the recent content on our site regarding talent mobility it’s fairly obvious to me that the concept of talent mobility is more than just the separate notions of succession planning, workforce planning, internal development and promotion. It’s all of these things combined.

Talent mobility, when implemented and executed efficiently, is a hallmark of an organization’s culture.  But it’s not exactly the type of process that is easily switched “on” – in fact as Brenda Rigney, Vice President of People Operations at Earls Restaurants Ltd commented in a recent phone interview, in order to achieve the desired state of leadership mobilization there first must be an intentional and strategic HR transformation.

To attempt to do it any other way would be putting the cart before the horse.  She describes their mission this way;

“We established a mandate to unleash the people potential at Earls by integrating people, process and technology into one focus. When we were growing the department, we didn’t add on HR professionals, we added people from marketing, finance, operations and technology.” This journey to become a more innovative and agile department provides the backdrop for an upcoming webcast, Mobilizing Leadership Across all Job Titles for Long-lasting Engagement.

For organizations where senior leadership is content with its internal talent development and succession planning process, is there a different catalyst to expand their capacity for internal mobility? HCI research may have hit on one big reason with their latest report in conjunction with Oracle Human Capital Management, Recruit from Within: Leveraging Internal Mobility to Alleviate Talent Scarcity.

Organizations with an internal talent sourcing strategy report less of a struggle to fill leadership positions than those organizations who search outside. So while development culture and talent mobility go hand-in-hand – so too does the ability to address skills gaps and decrease time spent searching for quality candidates. This re-emphasizes the point that a culture of internal mobility exists where collaboration, transparency and knowledge-transfer are fundamental pillars of the HR function.

“Internal mobility police was a typo – it should be internal mobility policy.”

Wow. That makes a lot more sense.  And when you sit down to really evaluate it – a comprehensive process and concerted effort toward deploying internal talent throughout the workforce to better enable development opportunities, eliminate unwanted attrition, foster collaboration, spur innovation, and align employees purpose with business goals, doesn’t that make all the sense in the world?

For more information about talent mobility - look no further than the following upcoming webcasts:

Mobilizing Leadership Across all Job Titles for Long-lasting Engagement, Tuesday Jan 13th, 1:00pm EST

Leveraging Internal Mobility to Alleviate Talent Scarcity, Wednesday, Jan 21st, 1:00pm EST