Who owns Internal Mobility?
Is it Talent Acquisition? Talent Management? The argument ends here!
In our day-to-day of building and managing the worqdrive software community and the employees who use our tools, we’ve gotten to witness the balance and tug of Talent Management and Talent Acquisition as entities within an organization.
You see, our initial customer formed an alliance. A smart alliance, not like a reality-show alliance. Not one of convenience, but an alliance that is 100% strategic. They determined early on in our relationship that there is no Internal Mobility without the unique combination of Talent Management and Talent Acquisition. The solution cannot exist without their joint participation.
So, it naturally begs the question, is this why we are struggling so mightily as an industry to get real, meaningful mobility done? My $.02, um, yeah!
This is a big problem we’re facing. Our enterprise organizations need to be specialized. And where there are specializations, there are silos. And where there are silos, I would argue less meaningful, cross-functional things get done.
Getting real internal mobility done requires internal alliances. It requires true partnership. It requires compromise. It requires … JOINT OWNERSHIP … (gasp!).
I get it, the concept of joint ownership to many means that no one owns it. And in many cases, I’ve seen this be so true and frustrating. But the reality is, Mobility is about growth AND recruiting. It’s about learning and development, and elevating people into new jobs. It’s not one thing, it’s many things. And it is why we are struggling.
But, it doesn’t have to be this way. If you’re a Talent Management leader, are you seeing low engagement rates, diminishing log ins to your L&D platform? Then, you need to talk to your HR leader. If you’re a Talent Acquisition leader, and you’ve never had more open reqs and fewer resources to get things done, you also need to talk to your HR leader.
Or better yet, talk to your HR leader and each other. You’re on the same team, you likely share the same leadership. You’re all feeling the same pain. When you come together, you can solve many things. You might even get emails (like we received) from your talent:
“Thank you for setting up such a program. I would love to climb the ladder here and feel this program is designed for employees just like me.”
These are the messages we’re all looking for. We all do the work we do to impact our employees, the help them grow, to help them to their next step. And to ensure that next step is with us! We can only do this with partnership, collaboration, teamwork, and shared ownership. We can only do these things when we break down our silos and talk.
These silos don’t need to exist. You can come together. You can come together to do what we all aim to do: Serve our people. For all the organizations that claim to be “people first,” your people are out there waiting for you to prove it. It’s simple: come together, align, and move forward as one in service to the careers of your most valuable resource, your employees.