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Restructuring Your Organization for Talent Mobility

One of my favorite parts about building Topia was working through the organizational design we needed to make our business work. We were one of the first companies to tackle the complex talent mobility space—starting with supporting families with relocations—and that meant there were few precedents for how to organize ourselves.

As we founded the company, we built innovative software and had all the standard functions of a rapidly growing technology company, but we also managed a concierge business to support relocating employees and their families with moving their stuff, securing housing, and finding schools, managed complex finances on behalf of our corporate customers, and coordinated with a global supply chain that included many different services across more than 100 countries. We wanted to be like traditional relocation service companies, but not too much like them. We wanted to be like the Big 4 consulting firms who populated the space, but not too much like them. We wanted to be a world-class software company, but we knew that relocation required much more human support than a traditional software company.

Every few months, as we grew or entered new business areas, Rachael King, Topia’s VP People from 2014 to 2018, would come to my desk and start the org design conversation. Rachael, an HR expert with experience at Cisco and Vodafone, was one of my first executive hires at Topia. I knew that, as we built a complex company in an emerging business area, how we organized ourselves and the culture we built could make or break our success. Every few months—with a whiteboard nearby—we looked at what we were trying to achieve and how to do it. We looked at where the people and functions we needed currently sat in our company—often across different teams or geographies—and how we might restructure to bring them together into a new design. We’d then move people and functions from certain parts of the company and unify them in another, or create a new team to tackle new problems. We documented all of this on a whiteboard before putting it into action.

In 2017, we decided to shift a part of our business area to be delivered by a partner. For a variety of operational and financial reasons, this made the most sense for our business and customers. Executing it was not as simple, however. To make this shift, we kicked off a cross-functional project that required creating a new business area. Like we had done so many times before, we pulled team members with specific skills—operations experts from our finance team, customer experts from our concierge team (called Move Advocates), supply chain experts, engineering, and product experts—to create a new business area to complete this project and then manage it. This required restructuring some teams and creating new ones with a different assortment of skills and functions.

This is much the same scenario that today’s business leaders face amid the Talent Mobility Revolution. There are no playbooks or precedents for what this revolution means, or how companies should change their organizational design to succeed. Traditional companies are not set up to respond to and capitalize on this revolution; rather they continue to operate with an outdated organizational design and team structures. The majority of companies have the components of talent mobility—geographic, job, location, and employment movement—fragmented across different parts of their companies with different teams managing them. This makes it complicated to have a unified business and talent strategy—and to truly unlock business agility.

To succeed amid the Talent Mobility Revolution—in the future of jobs—companies must dynamically reorganize and unite all parts of talent mobility in a single department managed by a newly created Chief Talent Mobility Officer (CTMO). With a clear talent mobility definition and updated organizational design, we can then look at how companies and business leaders should reinvent their physical office spaces and operations for business success, which we’ll cover in subsequent chapters.

Companies and business leaders that are stuck in the past with a traditional view of organizational design and leadership roles will fail in the Talent Mobility Revolution. F3 Companies make agility the core of their business strategy. They reinvent their organizational design around talent mobility, uniting all of the building blocks in a single department that seamlessly interacts across all areas of the business to respond to disruptions and opportunities from the seismic forces of globalization, automation, and demographic changes. This chapter looks at how to successfully reorganize for talent mobility.

Traditional Company Design

For decades, companies have organized with a standard set of organizational functions—or departments—each responsible for specific business activities. These functions emerged to bring order to the many activities happening across companies and the many employees working at a company. Together these functions, how they interact with each other, and the reporting lines within them colloquially became known as the organizational design, or org design, a type of company blueprint for who did what and reported to whom. If business leaders wanted to, they could literally print a page with their entire company’s functions, reporting hierarchy, and what each employee did.

Employees for their part typically worked in one of these functional areas and grew their career by progressing through different levels. Junior engineers became senior engineers and then engineering managers and senior engineering managers. There was a defined set of activities handled by each department, and as employees progressed in a given specialization, they acquired expertise in that area. Outside of some specific companies that actively facilitated rotations across departments, there was little movement of employees between business areas.

How Companies Historically Organized

Company organizational design developed with a standard set of departments: sales, marketing, finance, operations, engineering, manufacturing, legal, and human resources. As businesses evolved, departments like procurement (to handle purchasing), travel (to manage employee travel), product (to innovate and design new offerings), and customer service (to manage customer relationships) emerged, among others. Each of these departments has a standard set of activities that it carries out with a leader who plans and directs work. As we discussed in the last chapter, for human resources these activities included recruiting, employee compensation and benefits, corporate relocation, performance management and reviews, and the operations and compliance related to hiring and managing staff.

With defined functional areas, it was not uncommon for silos to emerge between the different parts of the business. In certain instances, this caused challenges, but for the most part, in a stable business environment, these silos were manageable—teams came to work each day, completed their tasks, and then went home. Limited interaction was required across different departments, as innovation cycles were slow and new disruptions and opportunities infrequent.

In 2006, Lehman Brothers was still set up like this. The bank had a clearly defined organizational structure and hierarchy where everyone clearly understood their role and expectations. There was limited interaction across departments, unless required for the normal course of business operations. As an investment banker in the corporate finance area, I rarely interacted with the sales and trading, technology, or administrative teams, for example. The team that I worked with and the managers that I worked for were consistent—and we developed into a kind of specialized work tribe where everyone knew their place and value.

“Traditional company structures were vertical with many levels and grades. Employees did set work that was centrally planned for long periods of time and measured by annual performance reviews,” says Rachael King, who has seen the evolution of company organizational design throughout her career.

The Chief Human Resources Officer

The Chief Human Resource Officer (CHRO), or VP HR, was the traditional leader of the human resources department. Typically, she had a set of direct reports who were responsible for managing the different HR departmental functions. CHROs were experts in HR operations, and generally had deep technical knowledge of compliance with labor laws, compensation, benefits, and recruiting. They generally developed this expertise through a career in the HR area and, in many cases, by earning HR qualifications at universities. Historically, HR leaders came from an HR background, and there was little movement from other business areas into HR and vice versa.

The traditional CHRO was an administrative or operational role, often referred to as personnel coordinators or bureaucracy by others across the business. In the last decade, as business leaders started recognizing the critical role of talent attraction and retention to their financial success, the CHRO role started evolving from being viewed as an administrator to being included as a partner in business and staffing decisions. In today’s Talent Mobility Revolution, the CHRO role is further transforming—moving from a business partner to a new cross-functional role that drives business strategy and agility.

“Historically, if you were in HR, you studied HR in school and earned some kind of certification or professional qualification. You progressed into HR leadership roles by putting in time in the HR business area and developing your HR expertise,” says Rachael King. “Now, you don’t need to come from an HR background to lead an HR organization. In fact, business leaders are increasingly becoming HR leaders. The CHRO job is now much more about driving the talent agenda, culture, and business strategy.”

In the 2015 Harvard Business Review article “People Before Strategy: A New Role for the CHRO,” Ram Charan, Dominic Barton, and Dennis Carey discussed the changing nature of the CHRO role and the relationship with the CEO, comparing the CHRO’s shift from an administrative to strategic focus as similar to that of the CFO in prior decades. This shift has accelerated over the last five years and continues amid the Talent Mobility Revolution.

“It’s time for HR to make the same leap that the finance function has made in recent decades and become a true partner to the CEO,” they wrote in 2015. “Just as the CFO helps the CEO lead the business by raising and allocating financial resources, the CHRO should help the CEO by building and assigning talent, especially key people, and working to unleash the organization’s energy.

“CEOs might complain that their CHROs are too bogged down in administrative tasks, or that they don’t understand the business. But let’s be clear: it’s up to the CEO to elevate HR and bridge any gaps that prevent the CHRO from becoming a strategic partner.”^*

Talent Mobility Fragmented Across the Company

In traditional company org design, the components of talent mobility—geographic, job, location, and employment movement—are spread across multiple different business areas. In fact, in this model, the CHRO doesn’t even manage or influence some of them. Rather they are spread across different company functions and leaders, with significant variances across companies. This makes it near impossible to execute a cohesive talent mobility strategy—and unleash the agility needed to respond to the frequent disruptions and opportunities created by the seismic macro trends of globalization, automation, and demographic change.

Although it varies across companies, here is where the key building blocks of talent mobility sit generally in a traditional company:

•   Relocations. Traditionally handled by Corporate Relocation, a part of HR

•   Expatriate assignments. Traditionally handled by Corporate Relocation, a part of HR

•   Long distance commutes. Traditionally handled by Travel, a part of Procurement, or an executive assistant

•   Frequent travel. Traditionally handled by Travel, a part of Procurement, or by an executive assistant

•   Short-term projects. Traditionally handled by Corporate Relocation, a part of HR, or by the business unit manager directly

•   Rotation and training programs. Traditionally handled by HR, but not by Corporate Relocation

•   Engagement, disruption, or globalization tours of duty. Traditionally handled by the business unit manager, sometimes, but not always, in partnership with Recruiting

•   Work-from-home and work-from-anywhere. Traditionally handled by Real Estate, in partnership with the business unit manager

•   Contractors, freelancers, and gig workers. Traditionally handled by the business unit directly or by Procurement

•   Immigration requirements for employee movement. Traditionally handled by Legal

•   Tax requirements for employee movement. Traditionally handled by Tax, as a part of Finance

•   Budgets for employee movement. Traditionally handled by Finance

Does that sound confusing? It is. In traditional company organizational design, the components of talent mobility are spread across many business areas—corporate relocation, recruiting, real estate, legal, travel, procurement, HR, tax, finance, plus the business units themselves. With all this confusion and the pace of business today, it’s not uncommon for managers to initiate and handle employee movement themselves, creating operational and compliance complexity. I have seen this time and time again in my own career and in the companies that I worked with as Founder and CEO of Topia.

In 2007, while working at Lehman Brothers, I accepted an opportunity to leave Hong Kong and work for a number of months in Delhi, India. At the time, Lehman Brothers was advising India’s largest real estate developer, DLF, on a $23 billion initial public offering (IPO), the largest in Indian history. The deal was at a critical stage and needed an extra pair of hands. I jumped at the opportunity to join in. This kicked off my own talent mobility experience—a short-term project, long-distance commute, frequent travel, and work-from-anywhere sojourn. It also opened my eyes to the fragmented, inefficient, and complex talent mobility activities at a traditional company.

After I accepted the opportunity, someone from the legal team immediately called me to get my Indian travel visa started. Then the travel team called to book my flights and hotel. Then my boss—the business unit manager—told me that I needed to get a car and driver, which was de rigueur in Delhi, especially for a solo 23-year-old female. “Book it and expense it via your EA,” he said. Realizing that, as a part of this work, I’d be working-from-anywhere, I knew I needed better connectivity than the standard corporate laptop with a blocked USB port and slow virtual private network (VPN) provided. So I called the IT department to help get me set up for this more remote working scenario. Despite living and working in India for close to nine months, I never interacted with anyone from the HR or finance team.

My experience in India was a lens into the Talent Mobility Revolution—and the importance of employee movement for the future of jobs. It also gave me a lens into the different activities required to make dynamic talent mobility happen—and just how fragmented they were across departments and people at traditional companies like Lehman Brothers. What was supposed to be a frictionless process to get me on the ground in India as soon as possible was anything but. I knew companies would need a dramatically different org design to succeed in the Talent Mobility Revolution and to deploy workers when and where they needed them.

“We are starting to see companies recognize that talent mobility should be one organization within companies and start to structure it like that,” says Nick Pond, who is the Mobility Leader for EY’s People Advisory Services. “Companies are starting to see companies take a unified approach to talent mobility and redesign strategic workforce planning around the concept of ‘build, buy, move.’ Talent mobility is inherent in the employee journey. Cutting-edge companies now know that a cohesive talent mobility strategy and function is key to making this happen.”

Talent Mobility Company Design

With the forces of globalization, demographic change, and automation, F3 Companies now recognize that talent mobility—the ability to leverage employee movement to drive employee engagement, accelerate innovation, and unleash growth—gives them a competitive advantage. With a clear definition for talent mobility in place, companies then reorganize to unify the fragmented components of talent mobility under one department with one leader. Only with alignment and accountability can companies succeed amid the Talent Mobility Revolution.

A Single Talent Mobility Function

I have attended HR conferences every year for the last nine years. At these conferences, there was always a discussion about whether global mobility (e.g., corporate relocation) should report into the talent function or into the compensation and benefits function. After a lot of spirited debate, attendees nearly always conclude that it should report to talent. Then they go back to work and not much changes.

I always sat through these conversations a bit perplexed, feeling that so many companies were entirely missing the point. Corporate relocation should not report into the talent function. It is a building block of an entirely new talent mobility business strategy. To succeed amid the Talent Mobility Revolution, companies must combine all types of employee movement—geographic (e.g., legacy corporate relocation), job, location, and employment—into a single talent mobility business area. Talent mobility should be a new organization—on par with operations or finance or sales—that replaces and expands the traditional HR organization and unites the areas of talent mobility fragmented across companies today. In the dynamic twenty-first-century business environment, characterized by seismic shifts from globalization, automation and demographic change, talent mobility is the basis of business and people strategy. It should report directly to the CEO with a single leader accountable for business agility as disruptions and opportunities strike.

Here is what the new talent mobility function should include for each of our four types of employee movement:

•   Geographic movement. Management of all planning, tracking, benefits, pay, budgets, taxes, immigration, compliance, operations, and policies related to geographic movement; management of all workforce planning for business expansion into new geographies; management of all personal needs for relocating employees and their families; management of the supply chain partners who support mobile employees (such as relocation and real estate companies)

•   Job movement. Management of internal and external recruiting, employer brand, job marketplace and matching, skills categorization, and onboarding and offboarding for hiring and firing workers; management of learning programs that support job tours of duty and career development; management of all operations and policies across the company related to employee job movement

•   Location movement. Management of all policies and operations for work-from-home and work-from-anywhere arrangements, including flexible work structures, benefits, and compliance; management of all systems that enable work everywhere including virtual collaboration and messaging software; management of all real estate and space planning aligned to the employee footprint

•   Employment movement. Management of all policies, operations, systems, and compliance for hiring, firing, and staffing contractors, freelancers, and gig workers across teams; management of benefits and worker protections for freelancers; management of the processes for managers to select workers for projects from a broader workforce pool including all four worker classifications

In addition to these four vertical areas, the new talent mobility function should be responsible for a set of horizontal human resources functions that include the traditional HR department responsibilities. The talent mobility area should manage these across the whole workforce, including all four worker classifications.

The horizontal talent mobility activities include:

•   Payroll and systems (see Chapter 9)

•   Performance, compensation, and leveling (see Chapter 6)

•   Benefits, health, and wellness (see Chapter 8)

This new talent mobility function centralizes all aspects of managing the company’s workforce and interfaces regularly with other company departments—like an octopus stretching and retracting its tentacles far and wide. It reports to the CEO and collaborates closely on business strategy and rapidly responds as disruptions and opportunities hit.

The talent mobility function should look like this:

One of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies recently went through a transformation to create a unified talent mobility department and hired a new Global VP to lead this. His remit included reorganizing and modernizing the talent mobility area to unify geographic, job, and employment movement, and the systems, operations, policies, partners, and onboarding and offboarding processes needed to make talent mobility a success. He set to work in both digitizing and modernizing each of these individual areas—for example evolving traditional corporate relocation to be broader, digitally enabled geographic movement, and including contingent (or freelance) workers in the definition of the workforce. To do this, he broke traditional org design conventions and silos to unite the components of talent mobility in a single functional area.

“I did consulting work like this for a long time,” he told me. “I love helping traditional companies get ready for the future. Designing a single talent mobility function to unlock company agility is an important first step on the journey of transformation for companies.”

“We’ve got companies today operating in a global business environment that’s filled with disruptions from technology and competitors. And there’s a wave of new types of employees—like remote and contingent workers, and individuals that crave purpose and adventure—that they want to attract to their firms,” says Robert Horsley, Chairman Emeritus of Worldwide ERC^® and Executive Director of Fragomen, the world’s largest immigration firm. He sees a multitude of traditional companies starting to transform amid the talent mobility revolution.

“At the same time, we’ve got a generation of people saying, ‘I want to work where I want and when I want,’ whether it’s at the office in Hartford, at the client site in Hungary, or in their own home,” continues Horsley. “To achieve this, companies are adopting what I call a ‘mobile workforce mindset,’ asking ‘How do I acquire, develop and deploy my people through the lens of talent mobility?’ Companies are starting to reorganize around these principles with a single talent mobility area at the core. But it’s still really early days. And most companies are not yet there yet.”

Bringing the Talent Mobility Pieces Together

To create a single new talent mobility function, business leaders must bring together the components of talent mobility—geographic, job, location, and employment movement—into a new business area. They include the operations within each component, as well as the horizontal people operations areas, within this new talent mobility area. This might seem simple here. But it’s not. As discussed above, the talent mobility activities have historically been spread across a variety of departments and business owners in a traditional company. This means that, to transform for talent mobility, leaders must break down silos across their traditional org design to move and combine activities into a new area. This is easier said than done.

In traditional organizations, talent mobility activities are spread across a complex patchwork of company departments, such as HR, travel, finance, tax, legal, real estate, IT, and individual business units—creating immense friction for talent mobility like I encountered at Lehman Brothers when moving to India.

Once you’ve defined talent mobility and built the blueprint for your new talent mobility business area, it’s time to identify where the components of talent mobility currently sit in your company and then create a plan to bring them together into a single new business area.

Here are the steps you should follow to bring the talent mobility pieces together and reorganize for agility:

•   Update your definition of talent mobility to include geographic, job, location, and employment movement (see Chapter 1 for details).

•   Appoint a Chief Talent Mobility Officer to lead your new function, partnering with the CEO and accountable for leading your reorganization and your new function (see next section for details).

•   Create a schema for the talent mobility business function, including geographic, job, location, and employment movement, plus key horizontal people operations (follow the diagram in this chapter).

•   Using your schema, create the org design for your new talent mobility business function, deciding how you will staff the various areas and remit of each manager. Create your org design without using specific employee names; rather focus on the structure and remit of each job first.

•   Once you have your schema and org design, create a single working document that everyone working on the transformation team can refer back to and know what the end goal is.

•   Identify where the components of talent mobility are in your current org design. Which departments do they sit in? Who manages them? What do the team structures look like? Who else do they interact with and impact in the company? (A whiteboard helps a lot here!)

•   Looking at your schema and the activities spread across your current org, next identify if there are any parts of your new talent mobility function that the company is not yet doing. You will need to create a new team and operational processes for these (for example, leveraging the freelance economy for staffing).

•   Once you’ve designed your schema and org, and identified where the current components are in your company and those that you’ll need to develop, it’s time to create your new talent mobility function. To do this, move the current teams from across your company under a single new talent mobility organization, and create the new teams you will then staff.

After watching this transformation proceed, Robert Horsley believes that “. . . all parts of companies will be tied to talent mobility in the future. There should be no specific discussion of when someone is mobile or not—because all employees are,” says Horsley. “I see companies across the world moving in this direction, starting to combine geographic and job movement, and increasingly thinking about how to pull other areas under the talent mobility umbrella. To do this, companies should be thinking bigger and more broadly about how talent mobility can be the basis of agility and success. A transformation of their thinking, organizational designs and leadership around talent mobility is needed to do this. Everything in the company that’s workforce-related should be aligned with a workforce that is seeking to be more mobile, however you define mobility.”

The Chief Talent Mobility Officer

Once the new talent mobility department is created, it’s time to appoint the leader for it. The leader of the new talent mobility business area is the Chief Talent Mobility Officer, or CTMO, who is accountable for business agility.

Role and Remit: From CHRO to CTMO

The CTMO, a new take on the traditional CHRO, is the executive role that brings together talent and business strategy for companies staring down the Talent Mobility Revolution. The CTMO should report directly to the CEO and function as a close partner in creating business and workforce strategies amid today’s constantly changing business environment. If the company sees a business opportunity in China, it’s the CEO and CTMO who should look at how to tackle it. If the company is losing talent to more agile competitors that allow employees to work from anywhere in the country, it’s the CEO and CTMO that should lead the design of new policies, systems, and cultural norms to unleash more location movement. If the company faces a shortage of specific skills, the CTMO should look at how to fill them between geographic, job, and employment movement. If jobs are overtaken by artificial intelligence, it’s the CTMO who should identify new job opportunities and learning paths for the affected employees, and ensure they are supported through transitions to new jobs.

While the traditional CHRO has historically been as focused on compliance, operations, and, in recent years, business partnership, the CTMO takes this a step further. The CTMO is fully accountable for business agility—ensuring the company has the skills and people it needs for its strategies and operations. The CTMO looks at the workforce as including all classifications of employees and seamlessly orchestrates movement within it. The CTMO is a combined talent and business role. She must understand the inner workings of the company’s business, respond to the macro trends creating regular disruptions and opportunities, and manage a complex and diverse workforce inside and outside the company. Appointing a strong CTMO, often with a strong business background, and creating a close partnership between the CEO and CTMO is a critical part of business success amid the Talent Mobility Revolution.

Although the concept of a CTMO is new, companies have started on this journey by hiring people with business and consulting backgrounds to lead their talent mobility teams and transformations. Although these leaders often report to a traditional CHRO who is responsible for traditional HR operations, their remit and influence is vast across the company, and roles often involve more business orientation than traditional HR roles. In my role as Founder and CEO of Topia, I have seen this start to play out at many of our customers across the Fortune 1000. At one customer, a large financial services firm, a new CHRO was recently appointed from a prior role in finance. At another, the CHRO is leading a project, in conjunction with the business, to transform the entire company into having what they call a liquid workforce, rooted in talent mobility.

Catalant Technologies is a software platform that companies use to access and manage workers—including FTEs, alumni, retirees, and independent consultants. In its survey and report “Reimagining Work 2020: How Winning Executives are Building an Agile Workforce,” 52 percent of companies said that both the CEO and CHRO or Chief Talent Officer are the key stakeholders in driving the future of work.^*

As the Talent Mobility Revolution increasingly takes hold, the most forward-thinking companies will transform the CHROs into CTMOs responsible for their future of work strategy working as close partners to the CEO, Board, and business leaders.

The CTMO Profile and Skill Set

With a clear talent mobility definition, new talent mobility organization, and CTMO job designed, it’s time to look at what the CTMO skill set should be. A great Chief Talent Mobility Officer requires a different skill set than a traditional HR professional. The CTMO must be business-oriented, strategic, and innovative, able to juggle a complex set of emerging trends inside and outside of the company.

The CTMO may come from an HR or business background, but must be experienced and skilled in creation, transformation, and leadership across a dynamically changing business. He must be able to quickly identify opportunities, rapidly iterate as disruptions hit, and continuously align a complex set of stakeholders inside and outside of the company. While the traditional CHRO has deep expertise in the technical aspects of HR, the CTMO is more of a general business leader who has the emotional quotient (EQ) to understand and engage a diverse workforce. The CTMO does not need specific technical expertise in the talent mobility and people operations functions; rather the CTMO must be able to orchestrate the interlocking talent and business strategies across the company and manage experts in given HR areas.

Summarized, the CTMO profile and skill set looks like this:

•   A strategic thinker, who understands the interplay between business and talent strategy

•   Creative, innovative, and agile, with the ability to see the future, make it happen, and respond to disruptions and opportunities as they arise

•   Deeply collaborative and able to work closely with the CEO and diverse business leaders in a matrix structure to respond to opportunities and disruptions

•   A great communicator with the ability to persuade, influence, and align teams behind new jobs, projects, and strategies

•   A strong orchestrator and manager who can set work priorities, rapidly get people where they’re needed to complete work, and enable people for success

•   A leader with good financial and operational acumen who can assess talent and business strategy across financial, operational, and compliance requirements to get the right people in the right place without any problems for the company

Although evolving a CHRO into a CTMO is new and companies are just making a start toward it, there has been a consistent evolution in the traditional CHRO role over the last few years with increasing numbers of business leaders moving laterally into the role. In the 2017 Harvard Business Review article “Why More Business Executives Should Consider Becoming a CHRO,” authors John Boudreau, Peter Navin, and David Creelman discuss four reasons why those with nontraditional HR backgrounds may succeed as twenty-first-century HR leaders: a focus on business results, not only people outcomes; their role in pushing fellow leaders, not just supporting them; their desire to embrace opportunity, not only reduce risk; and their application of diverse business skills to the role.^* These are the same perspectives and skills that are needed for a CTMO who can drive business success amid the Talent Mobility Revolution.

“Companies and individuals need to make an investment to transform for talent mobility,” says Peggy Smith. “Work is being completely rewritten through agile projects—and a new talent mobility leader at the highest levels of the organization must enable that.”

This Talent Mobility Revolution is what I saw starting at Lehman Brothers as a young banker navigating fragmentation and friction as I moved to India. I saw the Talent Mobility Revolution accelerate through my nine years as Founder and CEO of Topia. As it did, the most forward-thinking companies started to redefine talent mobility, create a new business area that unified its parts, and appoint talent mobility leaders with strong business orientations to lead this transformation. But these critical reorganizations and the evolution of the CHRO into the CTMO are in a very early stage. While some companies have made steps down this path, virtually no companies or teams have made the full transformation into an agile organization with talent mobility at its core and all of its parts unified in a single business area and strategy.

Reorganizing for talent mobility is the second step to succeeding in the Talent Mobility Revolution. To win in the twenty-first century, amid the seismic trends of globalization, automation, and demographic change, companies must restructure their teams and departments for agility. Those that make this shift will succeed. Those that do not will be left behind and leave their workers exposed.

_____________________________

^* Ram Charan, Dominic Barton, and Dennis Carey, “People Before Strategy: A New Role for the CHRO,” Harvard Business Review, July—August 2015.

^* Catalant, “Reimagining Work 2020: How Winning Executives are Building an Agile Workforce,” https://gocatalant.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/reimagining-work-2020-full-report-2018-04-09.pdf.

^* John Boudreau, Peter Navin, and David Creelman, “Why More Executives Should Consider Becoming a CHRO,” Harvard Business Review, May 3, 2017.