“The design of opportunity marketplaces [is] perhaps the key leadership challenge for most organisations seeing to ethically maximize human capital returns”. This big statement comes for the just released report ‘Opportunity Marketplaces’ authored by MITSloan Management Review and Deloitte Insights (access it here). Time spent reading the full report will be time very well spent, but following is a brief summary and series of extracts from the report.
The report describes an opportunity marketplace as “systems, digital platforms, and virtual places where organisations provide – and workers find – the opportunities most relevant to their mutual benefit and success.
Essentially this is where organisations can offer their employees options for professional development, mentorship, project participation, and networking, among others. This gives the worker the choice to pursue those opportunities they most value. This in turn increases the chances of the individual and enterprise aspirations being aligned, thus creating additional value for both.
The report notes that most leaders and workers are not satisfied with corporate investments in their development, with 74% of respondents believing that developing worker skills and capabilities is important to the organisations strategy, yet only 34% are happy with the organisations investment in them. An outcome of this is that workers are more likely to leave the organisation. Many workers reported that they feel undervalues as assets and as potential contributors to future value creation. One very surprising and worrying finding is that more than twice as many respondents say it is easier to get a new job outside their organisation (40%) the within it (17%).
Three key factors are identified in the report that can enable an opportunity-centric enterprise to succeed:
- A clear leadership vision for how the human workforce will create value.
- A cultural shift recognizing and rewarding individual initiative and agency.
- Access to tools and resources to boost competencies, self-investment, and shared development interests.
A clear message from the report is that “one of the surest ways for leaders to create better opportunities for their organisations is to create better opportunities for their people”. That is, advancing opportunities that empower and align workers can help their leaders achieve new levels of strategic value.