When developing talent collides with a team’s own interests
In organisations that invest in developing talent, a contradiction tends to show up. On one hand, we encourage managers to develop their people, groom successors and support internal mobility. On the other, we judge them mainly on current results, a stable team and hitting operational targets on time.
In that setting, moving the best employee to another department may be a win for the organisation, but for their immediate manager it means losing capability, having to find a replacement and risking the plan. This is one of the mechanisms behind what is known as talent hoarding – holding on to talented people within your own team, even when their skills could be put to better use elsewhere in the organisation.
Internal mobility does not always work the way we assume
The data suggest that internal mobility is not merely a matter of good intentions. In a Gartner study from June 2024, fewer than one in five leaders surveyed agreed that their organisation was able to move talent effectively in line with business needs.
In a separate Gartner study of 3,375 employees carried out in May 2024, one respondent in three believed they could have a greater impact on the organisation’s results in a different role at the same company. Gartner points to managers holding on to their best people as one of the barriers to mobility. These are Gartner’s findings, not a measure of how widespread the problem is in Polish companies. They do, however, describe a mechanism worth examining in your own organisation.
Employee development versus a manager’s daily reality
Another telling gap is the one between the importance we attach to development and the support employees actually receive. According to LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report 2025, only 15% of the employees surveyed said their manager had helped them put together a career plan in the previous six months – 5 percentage points fewer than in 2024.
That figure does not in itself prove that talent is being hoarded. It may equally reflect how little time and resource managers have. What it does show is how few of those surveyed experienced this kind of developmental support. And that raises an important question: does the organisation really create conditions in which it pays a manager to support an employee’s growth beyond their own team?
When the manager bears the cost and the organisation reaps the benefit
From an HR consulting point of view, the problem starts where developing an employee remains one manager’s responsibility while the benefits of mobility are meant to appear at the level of the whole organisation. If a line manager carries the cost of losing a key person without an agreed succession plan, time for a proper handover or help in rebuilding the team’s capability, promoting internal recruitment may not be enough on its own.
On paper the company may encourage mobility. In practice the manager still has to answer very concrete questions: who will take on the departing employee’s work, how is the team’s performance to be maintained, and how long will it take to close the resulting skills gap?
Career paths are not enough. The rules for moving talent matter too
That is why, when designing talent management systems, it is worth looking beyond career paths and promotion criteria to the rules governing how talent is shared between departments. Clear rules on taking part in internal recruitment, agreed handover periods, succession plans for critical roles and credit for developing people outside one’s own team in managers’ appraisals can all help.
None of these are off-the-shelf answers. They need to fit the structure, size and working style of the particular company. What matters is that responsibility for talent mobility should not rest with a single manager alone.
It is worth checking what the organisation actually rewards
What the organisation measures matters too. If a manager is judged solely on their department’s results and on keeping the team fully staffed, and nobody tracks how skills move between teams, we may miss the situation in which local stability is limiting the whole company’s room to grow.
Talent does not become an organisational asset simply by appearing in a company talent database. What also counts is whether the employee can put their skills to work where they are needed – and whether the way the organisation is run genuinely allows for that.
Paulina Jarecka – HR Consulting Manager, an Executive MBA graduate, certified coach, trainer in soft skills and psychometric tools, and an AC/DC assessor. For years she has combined managerial experience with HR consulting, supporting organisations in HR strategy and processes, leadership development, job evaluation, audits and organisational change. She is drawn above all to projects where developing people translates into a real change in how teams and organisations work.
