Developing Skills Through Job Rotation

Sharing leadership talent across a team or an organization is a foreign idea in many workplaces. Leaders rely on star performers to achieve the tasks and projects critical to success.

The idea of willingly allowing these team members to work elsewhere within the team or organization seems like a surefire way of undermining results. As a result, leaders commonly protect their high performers and broach no conversation about sharing their skills anywhere else. 

Holding top performers hostage to one area of a team or organization actually results in undermining talent development and creates stagnation. When leaders protect talent and discourage talent mobility, the larger organization suffers. 

Creating a pipeline of leaders requires a strategic commitment to developing leadership skills. Indisputably, nothing is as effective in developing leaders as job rotation. 

Team members who take on new roles and assignments under new leaders, often in different environments, develop their leadership talents more quickly. They are also more likely to be retained by the organization over the long run. 

Better yet, team members tend to make a permanent home where their skills are aggressively invested in, especially through job rotation.  

The best organizations and leaders understand the importance of moving the most talented team members into new and challenging roles. This means convincing some colleagues not to hoard and protect talent because of their fear of losing their go-to team members. 

Once an entire organization embraces the power of job rotation and talent mobility, the most skilled team members flourish. Leaders who want their colleagues to evolve must learn to rotate.