Opening up to leadership talent

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In Opening Up to Leadership Talent, organizational transformation, leadership guide, and Open Organization Ambassador Jos Groen explains how open principles can serve as the foundation for talent management—particularly in hybrid organizations transitioning from conventional organizational structures and cultures to open ones.

The Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) in the Netherlands (where I live and work) reports that in Q3 of 2021, there were even more vacancies than unemployed people. Since the CBS has been measuring stress on the labor market, this has never happened before. The tight labor market makes it more important than ever for employers to have insight into what young professionals find important and why they choose for an organization—and, even more importantly, to have insight into how best to retain young professionals in organizations today.

This generation of young professionals consists largely of millennials, also known as Generation Y. Millennials are the generation born between 1981 and 1996, meaning that today, in 2021, they're roughly 25 to 40 years old. Millennials have grown up in an era full of technological advances in information technology, such as the internet, smartphones, and social media. The subsequent generation, Generation Z, is also entering the workforce today; individuals from this generation were born after 1996 and are also known as "digital natives." They were born in the digital age, do not know a world without the Internet, and, as my fellow Open Organization Ambassador Jen Kelchner has observed, implicitly operate according to values and principles we might describe as "open."

Young professionals' views on careers differ greatly from those of previous generations. They have different requirements and expectations not only of the work they do, but also of the organizations where they do it. Issues such as room for growth and development and an organization's attention to social issues play a major role in their choice of employer. Organizations will have to pay attention to this—and implement changes to attract and retain the younger generations accordingly.

Retaining young professionals, however, is challenging.

For starters, there's high job mobility among this group of employees. Research by career website magnet.me, which queried more than 300 young professionals, shows that 61% of interviewees changed jobs within 24 months. The most important reason for leaving? Limited growth opportunities within an organization.

Similarly, research by Careerwise also shows that only 60% of young professionals expect to remain employed by their current employer within one year. This research (which included more than 2,500 young professionals between the ages of 18 and 35) also indicates that the most important reason respondents plan to look for a new job is that there is too little attention paid to professional development at their current organizations.

Where previous generations worked for years—or even their entire careers—with a single employer, this is no longer a matter of course for younger generations. If workers from these generations experience too little room for professional and personal growth in the workplace, they'll simply look for the next challenge. For organizations, this means that paying attention to talent development is more important than ever.

To help foster a conversation about these changes and their urgency today, I'm offering this Open Perspective on talent management. Here you'll read more about how executives, managers, and other leaders can respond to the development needs of young professionals today—with emphasis on the ways they can embrace open principles and practices to do it. Along the way, I present some case studies for your reflection and consideration. Drawn from my own experience as an open leader, these examples ask you to reflect on your own leadership choices and challenges as you consider becoming a more open leader yourself.

I consider this an opportunity to collaborate with new generations of leaders to build more open and sustainable organizations. It takes courage. Are you open to it, too?

—From the introduction (by Jos Groen)

Open Perspectives is a series of short, timely publications featuring voices from a community of experts on open organizational culture, design, and leadership as they explore what they consider the most pertinent and pressing issues facing modern organizations.