Managers want to retain good people in their teams, and so they take a narrow view. Instead of championing people in their teams for promotions elsewhere, they either actively discourage them or fail to support an application. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some people believe their managers may even hijack application processes to prevent someone from pursuing an internal promotion. This leads to the next common problem.

When managers' performance – and potentially their bonus – is managed by formulaic performance targets, they are incentivised to work in a silo with their team. If a key person leaves the team, even to go elsewhere in the business, the manager's metrics may suffer. So it is in their interests to block internal moves.

It's understandable. Managers have worked hard to build a strong team that's delivering good performance. Within that team are people they trust to do the job well, and they're loathe to lose them. When reliability is critical, no manager wants to lose someone they depend on.

As Ingrid Haegele says, managers often think they are supporting retention when in fact, they are creating restriction. This is both a structural and a cultural problem.

The responsibility for positive internal mobility shouldn't lie with managers. They already face a lot of pressure to deliver, and the vast majority of managers work incredibly hard and give their best. The reason that managers hoard talent is because it helps them meet their current targets. By looking at different outcomes and supporting managers to see how moving talent around the business can be beneficial in the long term, mobility becomes part of the culture.

What do we mean here? We mean that culture and direction come from the top. When senior leaders are enthusiastic, positive and proactive about developing and retaining talent across the business, it runs across the whole business. The C-suite needs to see internal mobility as a valuable tool in building competitive advantage and growth, and drive the policies that make it happen.

Where managers can have a positive impact is in their conversations with the people in their team. Whether these are casual, catch-up conversations, or more formal performance reviews, these are the places where managers and individuals should be able to have a frank, open discussion about career development.

Many managers receive no training to help with this – and that's not fair. If you're expecting your managers to identify talent, suggest learning and development opportunities and support individuals to use their talents so that both they and the business benefits, you need to train them to have those conversations and know what to do next.

One of the biggest downsides of losing people from your business is the vital knowledge they take with them. Losing this can leave a big gap in your operations – and it's too late to do anything about it.

Of course, even if you have a great internal mobility programme, people may still leave your organisation. So now is the time to build knowledge retention into your business. The best way to do this is to build up resources that can be accessed by anyone in the business.

The most obvious example of this is a CRM – Customer Relationship Management system. This is where all useful information about a customer account are logged. Not just what they've bought and when, but detailed relationship knowledge and conversation details.

Now, AI allows you to build knowledge centres for all operations, policies, interactions and corporate history. A good system allows people to update and access easily, allowing the knowledge sharing you need to maintain momentum at any time.

A good internal mobility programme needs to be measured. You need to know what's working and what's not. And, most importantly, you should be able to relate the way you are using talent to metrics such as sales, profitability, efficiency and innovation. This is particularly the case if you are newly adopting a programme, so that you can prove it in practice, but even those businesses with long-standing mobility schemes will measure their success as a separate item, rather than making it part of more general measurement across the business.