Office politics, turf wars and organizational "silos" in companies are stifling the potential of good employees and contributing to the "leadership vacuum" that chief executive officers often complain about, according to a global study by IBM's human capital management practice.
"Leadership development is a process that needs to reach far down into the organization, tap high-potential individuals early in their careers and provide them with the core skills they need to identify new opportunities, develop innovative solutions and deliver results," International Business Machines Corp. [IBM-N] reported this week in announcing the results of a survey of 400 human resources executives in 40 countries.
Often, however, CEOs are unaware of the talent right under their noses because of "organizational silos" and a lack of collaboration between managers in their organizations.
These silos — a corporate structure that encourages competition rather than co-operation between division heads — and time constraints that inhibit even the best-intentioned managers from working together to deepen the talent pool are barriers to the identification and development of employees who have the ability and ambition to move into leadership ranks, the study said.
For instance, the rotation of high-potential employees through a variety of different roles was identified by almost half of the survey participants as an extremely valuable leadership-development strategy — but "putting this into practice still remains a challenge," IBM reported.
"One roadblock is the reluctance of operating divisions to surrender top performers," the report said.
Even companies that do invest in developing their work forces "run the risk of losing talent to competitors if employees are not given challenging roles that allow them to apply their new skills," it said.
The survey said competition for talent will make it increasingly difficult for corporations to recruit employees with the expertise they need. Therefore, they must look to their existing work forces and learn to "apply existing knowledge and skills to new challenges."
However, only 13 per cent of the survey participants said their organizations were "very capable of identifying individuals with the specific expertise [they need] within the organization."
Employees who are given the opportunity to build and apply their skills will be more inclined to stay than jump ship, IBM said. As the labour market tightens, those who feel thwarted will leave for better opportunities.
"For many companies participating in the study, turnover continues to increase — 47 per cent of the organizations surveyed said that employee turnover has increased over the past two years, while only 16 per cent said it has decreased," IBM wrote.
