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To attract talent, managers must be willing to give up talent.
What possibly hurts more than a break-up? Losing your best employee.
It is tempting to want to hold on to someone on your team that is reliable and competent — but according to a recent study by MIT Sloan, the habit of 'hoarding' employees is actually detrimental to managers.
What this looks like in practice
Managers engage in a variety of hoarding behaviours. In a more direct manner, managers can block promotions. Many companies require employees to get their current manager’s approval to apply internally, so managers can "simply say no".
However, a more subtle form of hoarding may include reducing the visibility of superstar employees to the rest of the organisation. For example, managers may choose not to expose employees to high-profile developmental opportunities or work assignments that would enable them to gain broad internal recognition. Do stories of managers failing to sing their subordinates’ praises during performance calibration sessions, internal talent reviews, and succession planning conversations, sound familiar to you? In many cases, employees are unaware of the lack of public external support because their managers still praise them privately.
Naturally, managers feel more incentivised to hold on to their top-performing employees — after all, their own raises, bonuses, and promotions often hinge on the performance of their team. Moreover, managers are rarely sanctioned for hoarding.
According to the study: "Put differently, business performance is a 'must do', while developing employees is merely a 'nice to have'." That being said, it can actually be beneficial to let your favourite team member go.
The ROI of letting your best employee go
Per the study, managers with higher rates of promoting subordinates received significantly more internal applications when a spot on their team opened up. Perhaps more notably, they received significantly more applications from top-rated employees.
Similarly, these managers received more applications from employees in other functions who could expose them to new ideas and skills that could lead to innovative solutions.
Interestingly, these trends persisted even as managers change jobs. Managers who helped their previous subordinates earn promotions were found to receive more, better, and more functionally diverse applicants when they first took over a new team.
Conversely, managers who failed to support subordinates’ promotions had a much harder time attracting talent to their teams. In fact, employees were noted to actively avoid applying to work for managers whose teams had high turnover rates, often simply based on the assumption that the subordinates had left because their managers were not supportive of their career advancement.
The study also brought up the concept of what one employee called 'coercive promotions', or when managers would give an employee a better title, and sometimes a slight pay bump, to continue doing the same work. In other words, these were promotions in name only that were simply intended to keep employees on the team for a bit longer.
The study further managed to distinguish between promotions that resulted in employees working for other managers, and promotions that kept employees reporting to the same manager. This has resulted in the discovery that while managers who support promotions that lead to work with other managers attract more internal job applicants, those who give promotions that keep workers in place see no positive effect.
Therefore, the study gathers: to attract talent, managers must be willing to give up talent.
Looking beyond short-term gains, hoarding talent is a losing long-term strategy for managers. Not only is hoarding actually costly, but employees would also know which managers hoard talent.
Lead image / 123rf.com
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