When it comes to talent management, there’s one phenomenon that you don’t want to accidentally overlook: talent hoarding. If your organization’s leaders aren’t helping their employees find internal opportunities when they’re ready to grow professionally, then you could be dealing with a culture of talent hoarding. Read on to discover how blocking growth opportunities damages your reputation and relationships, and why restricting internal mobility can cost your organization hundreds of thousands of dollars over time.

When managers have direct reports who consistently do their jobs well, it can be hard to see these employees go. Your managers might worry that their department’s productivity would suffer if their top performers moved into new roles. Instead of giving their high-potential direct reports new challenges to encourage their growth, some managers prefer to maintain the status quo because they don’t want to lose their top talent.

Unfortunately, this sort of behavior can hurt your employees in the long run—and your organization!

What Is Talent Hoarding?

Talent hoarding happens when managers attempt to retain their best employees, even when those workers are ready to progress in their careers. Often these managers have good intentions, and they might not realize that they’re engaging in talent hoarding behavior. It often starts with genuine praise for a job well done. As top performers continue to shine, their managers give them great reviews and express how valuable they are to the department. The managers hope the praise will help them retain their direct reports.

The problem occurs when those employees’ career goals develop beyond the scope of their current roles and responsibilities, but their managers aren’t willing to lose such valuable assets. When these employees express interest in taking on more challenging projects or filling open roles elsewhere in the company, their managers encourage them to stay where they are.

From the managers’ perspective, they’re trying to retain top performers and keep their departments as productive as possible. But talent hoarding—whether it happens intentionally or not—often does more harm than good.

RECOMMENDED READING | ‘5 Ways PeopleFluent Supports Your Continuous Feedback Initiatives’

The Negative Consequences of Talent Hoarding

When employees’ career goals evolve and they’re ready for a new challenge, their managers’ retention efforts can actually push them toward external opportunities. Attempting to hoard top talent is a short-sighted strategy, and those high-achieving employees usually leave the organization anyway.

Talent hoarding is detrimental to almost everyone in one way or another. In the workplace, its negative effects can be felt everywhere—on employees, their managers, and even the entire organization.

Next, we’ll explore these in more detail.

1) Impact on Employees

When managers actively discourage internal mobility, it sends the message to employees that their career aspirations aren’t a priority. This can leave workers feeling frustrated, undervalued, and wondering whether or not their efforts are “worth it” anymore. Discouraging internal mobility is likely done as a way to retain top performers in a department, but talent hoarding limits employees’ career growth potential and can cause them to:

• Lose trust in their managers
• Experience a decrease in morale
• Lower productivity
• Disengage from their work

According to Gallup, only 23% of employees are actively engaged with their work as it is, and more than half (52%) of the world’s workers are watching out for or actively seeking their next job opportunity. If you want to retain your best workers, your managers need to be willing to let them move on when the time comes so their skills can be deployed elsewhere in the organization.

It’s important to foster a culture of continuous learning and professional development, and managers need to be supportive when their direct reports are ready to move on. Research from Gartner found that when employees feel supported by their organization to grow in their careers:

• Their likelihood of being a high performer increases by up to 39 percentage points
• Their willingness to stay with their employer increases by up to 19 percentage points
• Their engagement at work increases by up to 61 percentage points

Stifling your top performers’ growth won’t motivate them to stay with your company. The more likely scenario is that these employees will eventually feel like they’ve run out of internal options for career advancement and they’ll start seeking chances to grow elsewhere.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE | ‘7 Assessment Methods to Kickstart Your Workforce Skills Evaluations’

2) Impact on Managers

In 2023, the global economy lost an estimated $8.9 trillion due to low employee engagement. Talent hoarding is part of the problem. In their quest to keep their top performers, managers who exhibit talent-hoarding behaviors do themselves, their teams, and their organization a disservice. When employees start disengaging because they have no more room to grow, their productivity and performance begin to decline. This becomes an expensive problem for managers as missed deadlines and reduced outputs can be a significant drain on their departmental budgets.

Managers who discourage internal growth opportunities also run the risk of damaging their reputation among other employees. Your talent might stop sharing ideas and aspirations with managers who become known for limiting professional growth. This can hamper a department’s potential for innovation, and it could also prevent high-quality workers from wanting to join these managers’ teams.

Talent hoarding also leaves managers unprepared to replace top performers who eventually separate from the organization. Workers who are ready to grow will eventually go if they’re not receiving support from their current employer. In 2024, just one in five employees felt confident in their ability to make an internal move at their current organization. Managers need to nurture their top talent’s career growth and have succession plans in place for when these workers inevitably move on, but talent hoarders are often caught off guard and aren’t prepared to fill the skills gaps that are left when their employees leave.

HANDPICKED FOR YOU | ‘3 Ways Succession Planning Improves the Employee Experience’

3) Impact on Organizations

Talent hoarding has far-reaching consequences beyond stunting an individual employee’s career growth. Organizations have to manage increasing turnover rates with each person who leaves to pursue an external advancement opportunity. Rising turnover rates mean rising costs for organizations. Backfilling an open role can cost an estimated three to four times the position’s base salary. To put this in perspective, filling a role that pays an annual salary of $60,000 could actually cost a company $180,000.

High turnover rates caused by talent hoarding can also damage an organization’s reputation. Potential candidates might hesitate to apply for roles with companies that become known for having poor internal mobility options. This can lead to a cycle of having vacant positions for extended periods of time because not enough qualified candidates apply, which ultimately increases costs for the organization.

In addition to the financial implications, talent hoarding limits innovation. When managers keep high-quality talent to themselves, they aren’t considering what’s best for the company as a whole. Instead, the organization’s highest-potential employees get “stuck” in a handful of departments and aren’t able to stretch their skills and creativity in new ways that could benefit the entire company. This can lead to talent being siloed, and slow down or prevent organizational growth.

MORE FROM THE BLOG | ‘9 Future of Performance Management Report Findings to Help You Overhaul Your 2025 Strategy’