Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #142

This issue covers Gartner's 2023 HR trends, succession planning metrics, internal mobility, talent hoarding, internal talent marketplace, and women in the workplace.

October 23, 2022

Welcome to this week’s issue of Talent Edge Weekly—the weekly newsletter for human resources practitioners, bringing together insights about work, the workplace, and the workforce from various sources.

If you find value in this issue or any of its resources, please share them with your network by using the social media icons at the top of the newsletter.

Have a great week, and I look forward to sharing more ideas in next week’s Edge!

Brian 

Brian Heger is a human resources practitioner with a Fortune 150 organization and has responsibilities for Strategic Talent and Workforce Planning. To connect with Brian on Linkedin, click here.

THIS WEEK'S CONTENT

  • The Top HR Trends and Priorities For 2023 | Gartner | Covers the top five 2023 HR priorities and challenges. I include a bonus Gartner resource that helps summarize the core elements of an HR strategy on one page.

  • Succession Metrics Tracking Template | Brian Heger | A one-page editable PDF that provides 10 succession planning metrics for which organizations can document a baseline, set desired targets, and track progress.

  • What Outperformers Do Differently to Tap Internal Talent | MIT Sloan Management Review | Outlines four talent practices organizations use to increase the utilization of lateral job moves as a source of career development.

  • Talent Hoarding: Is It Limiting Your Talent Marketplace’s Effectiveness? | Deloitte Blog Capital H | Provides ideas to help managers embrace talent mobility rather than talent hoarding. I reshare a bonus resource on five indicators of talent hoarding.

  • Report: 2022 Women in the Workplace | Lean In and McKinsey & Company | A new 62-page report that provides the most extensive study of women in corporate America. Offers several ideas for addressing barriers.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

This Gartner resource provides ideas for Chief Human Resources Officers and their teams to consider as they plan and refine their 2023 priorities. The reference includes the top five HR priorities and challenges based on a survey of over 800 HR leaders across 60 countries and all major industries. The broad categories for these priorities are 1) Leader and Manager Effectiveness, 2) Organizational Design and Change Management, 3) Employee Experience, 4) Recruiting, and 5) Future of Work. For each priority, insights are provided on what is driving the priority, why action is imperative, and recommended next steps. For example, concerning the Future of Work priority, it’s noted how assumptions around which workforce planning (WFP) has operated no longer hold in today’s environment. One recommendation is that, rather than assuming organizations can predict the future skills needed, they can start by trying to anticipate near-term shifts in critical work itself by evaluating tasks and workflows. Page 18 provides other examples of the required shifts in WFP. As HR leaders continue to plan and refine their 2023 priorities, I am also including this bonus Strategic Planning Guide from Gartner that contains a one-page template (pages 5-6) for capturing aspects of an HR strategy. HR leaders can use both resources to guide their thinking on 2023 priorities.

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This one-page editable PDF includes 10 succession planning metrics that organizations can refer to as they track and measure the effectiveness of their succession management practices. While 10 metrics are provided, organizations can select the vital few (or include others) they want to track and in which they want to make progress. Sample metrics include: % of non-ready now successors with a development plan; % of successors deemed high retention risk; % success rate of successors after assuming the role (e.g., one-year mark). For each metric, there is space to insert a baseline (what is your current state) and the desired state (where you want to be). Then, four additional columns can be used to help you track your organization’s progress over specific time periods. For the time periods, you can type in whatever time reference you want to use, such as quarterly, biannually, yearly, etc. Aside from providing a way to track your organization’s progress on succession management, you can use the information you collect to inform aspects of your organization’s talent strategy and narrative. The metrics included are intended to help generate ideas on the types of succession metrics you can track. They are not an exhaustive list, and they may not be the right metrics for your organization. You should determine which talent outcomes you are trying to achieve and then identify the metrics (whether or not on this list) that are the best indicators of progress in those areas.

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Career development is a critical component of an organization’s employee value proposition. This fact is one reason organizations continue to tap into underutilized sources of career development, such as projects and short-term assignments. But as noted in this article, another untapped source of career development is lateral job moves — a career move into a new position within the same company, where the occupation changes but the level of seniority remains the same. Interestingly, only 10 percent of job opportunities today are filled with internal lateral hires. This article shares four talent practices that 'outperformer' organizations use to drive internal lateral mobility. While not mentioned in the article, improving the utilization of lateral moves will require organizations to remove the stigma of lateral moves as being a sign of a career stall or stop, rather than career growth. One way to do this is through more effective positioning and marketing of these opportunities. What sought-after skills will this opportunity enable the employee to develop? What critical and differentiated experiences will be gained? Also, since many lateral moves do not come with a salary increase, organizations will need to consider how to overcome this barrier. What obstacles does your organization need to hurdle to tap the potential of lateral moves as a source of career development? How can your organization overcome these barriers?  Perhaps this can be a topic of discussion at your next talent strategy meeting.

Internal mobility—the movement of employees across different work opportunities within an organization— is a key enabler of a firm’s talent strategy. Yet organizations face several barriers to internal mobility. As pointed out in this article, one of these barriers is talent hoarding—where managers intentionally or subconsciously attempt to retain their best employees beyond the natural course of the working relationship and often to the detriment of the employee’s personal development. Since many managers might not even realize they are demonstrating talent-hoarding behaviors, gaining self-awareness is the first step to helping managers embrace talent mobility rather than talent hoarding. With that as the backdrop, I am resharing my post, Five Indicators of Manager Talent Hoarding, which provides a simple way to assess one’s tendency to hoard talent. Two questions/indicators include: 1) Some of the most talented people on your team are unknown to the organization. 2) You limit your top talent’s exposure to work assignments outside your team because you believe other managers will want to target them for internal movement. This resource and the Deloitte article can be used by talent and HR leaders to help their organizations make the mindset and behavioral shifts necessary to support internal mobility.

Lean In and McKinsey have just released their 62-page 2022 Women in the Workplace report. This is the eighth consecutive year the report has been produced, and the effort represents the largest study of women in corporate America. The report is based on information from 333 participating organizations employing over 12 million people, survey feedback of more than 40,000 employees, and conducted interviews with women of diverse identities—including women of color, LGBTQ+ women, and women with disabilities—to get an intersectional look at biases and barriers. The report contains several insights, which are broken into various sections. 1) The state of the pipeline. (e.g, for every woman at the director level who gets promoted to the next level, two women directors are choosing to leave their company), 2) Three primary reasons women leaders are leaving their organizations (e.g., feeling overworked and under-recognized), 3) Flexibility and remote and hybrid work. (e.g., remote and hybrid work has been particularly beneficial for women with disabilities since it’s easier to manage mobility issues, chronic pain, and mental health conditions), 4) The impact managers have on shaping women’s work experiences (e.g., only 38% of respondents say that their manager works with them to ensure their workload is manageable). Page 45 begins a section on best practices to support the advancement and retention of women. The practices are categorized by 1) table stakes, 2) leading practices, and 3) emerging practices. Organizations can have the most significant impact by focusing on leading and emerging practices. Other ideas are discussed.

MOST SHARED RESOURCE FROM LAST WEEK

A one-page PDF that includes 18 questions that CHROs and their teams might be asked about different aspects of talent, including talent strategy, succession, and DEI.

CHRO APPOINTMENT OF THE WEEK

This past week there were 31 Chief Human Resources Officer announcements posted on CHROs on the Go – a subscription that provides the easiest way to stay informed about hires, promotions, and resignations in the CHRO role.

This week's CHRO appointment of the week is:

  • ​Immuneering Corporation CAMBRIDGE, MA. (NASDAQ: IMRX), a biopharmaceutical company, names Leah R. Neufeld to the newly created position of Chief People Officer. She joins Immuneering from Luzsana Biotechnology, where she served as CHRO since August 2021.

To learn how to gain access to all 31 detailed Chief Human Resources Officer announcements from this past week and +1500 archived announcements, visit CHROs on the Go .

If you are already a member of CHROs on the Go, you can log in to access all of the announcements and site functionality.

TWEET OF THE WEEK

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

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OUR RESOURCE LINEUP

​​brianheger.com provides free access to +1,000 curated articles, research reports, podcasts, etc. that help practitioners drive better business results through strategic human resources and talent management.

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​Talent Edge Weekly is a free weekly newsletter that brings together the best talent and strategic human resources insights from various sources. It is published every Sunday at 6PM EST.