How to Leverage Talent Rotation in Your Organization

Talent Rotation is an effective tool through which companies can develop their talent while also leveraging their shared knowledge. With evolving tech stacks to address ever-changing business use cases, organizations strive to stay current now more than ever. A surefire method to stay ahead of the competition is to have a culture of continuous learning and maintain a dynamic, diverse talent pool.

Here are a dozen tips to consider in building a great talent pool through effective rotation and talent flow.

 1)   Share

Share your best talents. Proactively rotate high potential employees that consistently deliver extraordinary or above average results. Leaders should be willing to offload their best talents.

2)   Cross-Pollinate

We are in a world of rapid democratization through digitization. Our talent should be democratized as well. Top talents should be a universal resource in a company, not locked up in a limited role within a group. Startups do a great job of this to bring a multiplier effect. This is a great way to break artificial delimiters and build the intellectual muscle of the company.

3)   Super Size

Super size the high performer’s role. This removes monotony, reduces the chance of coasting on autopilot, and encourages team members to have continuous learning goals. Be selective whom and when you super size: adding more responsibility may induce anxiety instead of excitement. Likewise, it wouldn’t be a good fit for someone that prefers depth.

4)   Criteria

Rotation has to be based on potential and capability—not on available bandwidth. It should not be used as a vehicle to hide incompetency. Doing so is a sign of entitlement culture that is set to fail. Likewise, we should constantly prune low performers unless they are committed to serious improvement.

5)   Accelerate

Talent flow is akin to deal flow in financial space and idea flow in a creative world: the more the merrier. Without talent flow organizations would become like a fridge full of stale food; it will no longer be interesting and refreshing! Make everyone’s roles interesting. Create a conscious culture where ideas have merit regardless of roles/titles. Be willing to hit the refresh button as often as the system permits with out destabilizing it.

 6)   Skill Diversity

Bring outside in and inside out perspective. Rotate folks for example from customer facing roles to development, development to solution engineering, test to development, tools to test, etc. Diverse teams are willing to have risky/tough conversations, which they would otherwise avoid. Diverse teams have a better chance of attracting top talents.

7)   Safety Net

This is critical to encourage folks that are hemmed in perfectionism and timidity. High potential employees moving laterally may not stack up well with their new peers, so let go off premature comparisons. Homogeneous and cohesive organizations have antibodies that resist diversity. We should selectively mute them. Ease the transition of fear to joy in new roles just like parents do with their children in every phase of their development. We should have a culture that tolerates mistakes but not incompetency.

8)   Innovate Career

Career innovation is as important as the product itself. In a highly competitive environment, if organizations do not innovate the career of their employees, their competition will do!!

 9)   Succession Plan

No one should be indispensable, be proactive about it. Mature teams tend to homogeneous and cohesive, develop blind spots; past success prevents them from achieving future success. Businesses should take the cue from sports franchises where building bench strength and trading talents are eternal.

10) Burn Outs

Typically employee burnouts are not because of over worked situation but more often through resentment of giving up what matters most for them. Find out the native genius in everyone and unleash it. You have more chance of exposing innate strength of your employees through role rotation.

11) Reboot

We are most often over managed and under led, over worked and under utilized. As these symptoms develop in an organization, consider leadership changes. As new leaders transition in to their roles, the teams under them are transitioning too. This is equivalent to a total talent reboot.

12) Talent Magnet

You can’t have success without first facing failure and various roller coaster rides. Encourage a culture of taking managed risk and mastery through efforts. Make it a place of happening where teams learn from each other’s success as much as they learn from their mistakes. As talents get fully utilized, recognized, and offered opportunities to grow it will also attract similar talents from the competition.