When Top Talent Runs Out of Room

Every leader wants an organization filled with top talent. But recruiting great people is only part of the challenge. Eventually, you have to figure out what to do with them.

When I refer to “top talent,” I’m not simply talking about the person who is best at his or her current job. I’m talking about people who perform at a high level, make the people around them better, and demonstrate the potential to take on greater responsibility.

These are the people we want on our teams. And when you have them, they create an interesting leadership problem.

Top talent rarely wants to stay still.

That’s part of what makes them top talent.
The characteristics that make these people valuable, things like motivation, humility, confidence, resilience, teamwork, and accountability, also tend to make them want to grow. They want new challenges. They want to learn. They want greater responsibility.

If we don’t provide those opportunities, eventually someone else will. This has always been true. But AI is about to make the problem more interesting.

The Career Ladder Is Getting Flatter

Historically, developing top talent followed a fairly predictable path.

You did your job well.
You were given more responsibility.
Eventually, you managed other people.
And as the organization grew, another layer of management appeared and someone moved up.

AI is going to disrupt some of that. As AI takes on portions of the work people currently perform, organizations may not need to add people or layers of management at the same rate they once did. At the same time, people who learn to use AI effectively may dramatically expand what they are capable of accomplishing.

That creates an interesting tension: Our best people may become more capable at exactly the same time our organizations become flatter.

So, what do we do with them?
I see three paths.

1. Grow the Business

The first is the most obvious. Grow the organization and allow opportunities to grow with it. New customers create new problems. New products create new responsibilities. New markets require new capabilities. Eventually, someone has to lead those efforts.

Ideally, the people already demonstrating the ability to do more are the ones we give those opportunities. Growth creates room, and room allows talented people to stretch without requiring someone else to move out of the way.

Unfortunately, businesses don’t always grow fast enough to keep pace with their people. When that happens, we have two harder choices.

2. Equip Them and Launch Them

Sometimes we need to accept that developing great people means eventually losing some of them. Instead of pretending otherwise, perhaps we should build organizations that recognize this reality.

Recruit talented people.
Give them meaningful work.
Teach them everything we can.
Challenge them.
Invest in them.
Help them become more capable than when they arrived.

And if someday they outgrow the opportunities we can provide, help them take the next step, even if that step is somewhere else.

That can feel like losing, but I’m not sure it is. Great leaders build people. They don’t hold them back simply to keep them.

If someone spends five years making your organization better while you spend five years making that person better, that seems like a pretty good exchange. And when the time comes, celebrate them.

If this is the reality of your organization, then accept it and build your business model around it. Become a place where talented people come to grow. Develop them intentionally, give them meaningful experiences, and expect that some will eventually leave. Their departure doesn’t have to represent a failure in retention. It can be the natural outcome of a development strategy that benefits the individual and the organization.

The goal shouldn’t be to keep every talented person forever. It should be to create an organization where talented people want to come, want to grow, and someday leave better than when they arrived.

But there is another option. Instead of helping our best people find their next opportunity somewhere else, perhaps we can create that opportunity by redefining the work itself.

3. Redefine the Work

This is where I think AI really changes the equation.

In the past, we might have simply shuffled responsibilities. Someone was ready for more while others weren’t keeping pace, so we reorganized the company, created new positions, shifted responsibilities, and sometimes made the difficult decision to part ways with people who could no longer meet the organization’s needs. Those decisions aren’t going away. In fact, some may become even harder.

AI gives us the opportunity to rethink jobs from the ground up. Instead of simply asking, Who should do this job? we can ask a much more important question: What should this job become?

Which responsibilities should remain human?
Which can be automated?
Which can be accelerated by AI?
Which require judgment, creativity, relationships, leadership, or deep expertise?
And perhaps most importantly, who on our team has the potential to operate at that next level?

This is where AI implementation becomes talent development. A talented analyst might spend less time gathering and processing information and more time interpreting it and helping leaders make decisions. A project manager might spend less time administering work and more time coordinating people and solving problems. A technical expert might move from personally completing every task to directing AI-enabled workflows and validating their output.

In other words, we don’t necessarily give our best people more work. We give them higher-level work.

But there is a difficult side to this. Organizations only have so much work and so many resources. Creating room for top talent may require taking responsibilities from other positions, fundamentally changing jobs, or eliminating positions that no longer make sense. Those are difficult decisions because they affect real people.

But avoiding them is also a decision.

As leaders, our responsibility isn’t to preserve an organizational chart or protect every job exactly as it exists today. It is to build the organization we need while doing our best to develop and care for the people entrusted to us.

Top Talent May Look Different Too

AI may also change who we consider top talent. The best performer today won’t automatically be the best performer in an AI-enabled organization.

Experience, expertise, and work ethic still matter. But curiosity, adaptability, critical thinking, judgment, willingness to learn, and the ability to work effectively with others may become increasingly important. Some people will resist AI. Others will use it simply to perform their existing work faster.

But I suspect our best people will do something different. They’ll use AI to become capable of doing things they couldn’t do before.

Those are the people we need to identify, develop, and challenge.

The fundamental responsibility of leadership hasn’t changed. Our job is still to help good people grow. What is changing is what that growth looks like. Sometimes we will grow the business and create room for them. Sometimes we will equip and launch them, knowing their next opportunity may be somewhere else. And sometimes we will have to redefine the work, making difficult decisions so our best people can step into roles that may not even exist today.

Our best people are going to keep growing, and AI is going to keep changing the work. The challenge for leaders is making sure our organizations are willing to change with them.

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When Top Talent Runs Out of Room was originally published in Horizon Performance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.