Most of the conversation about internal mobility starts with the employee. Are they ambitious enough? Loyal enough? Patient enough? Two pieces of research this week point somewhere else. The harder question is whether managers can actually see what their people are capable of.

And right now, the evidence says many of them can’t. Not because they don’t care. Because the way we have learned to see capability is breaking on two sides at once.

People want to grow where they are. Their managers often don’t know what they can do. And AI is making the work in front of those managers harder to read, not easier.

Key takeaways

  • Internal mobility fails less from a lack of employee willingness than from managers who can’t see the skills their people already have.
  • In an SHL survey of U.S. and U.K. workers, about two-thirds said they would have to leave to advance, and only 42% said their manager fully understands their skills beyond their current role.
  • A Nielsen survey for Monday.com found more than half of senior leaders say evaluating employee work has become harder since adopting AI.
  • The fix is not more monitoring or a new set of AI-era signals. It is making judgment and capability visible on purpose, and building managers who can see it.

What’s happening

On October 20, HR Dive’s Kathryn Moody reported on a new SHL survey of more than 2,000 employed adults in the U.S. and U.K.. About two-thirds of the workers surveyed feel they will have to leave their current employer to advance their careers, even though they want to stay. Most said they would retrain for a more senior role or a different role entirely, and nearly 9 in 10 said they would sit through a formal skills assessment to show employers what they can do.

The gap is on the other side of the desk. Only 42% of workers said their managers fully understood their skills beyond their current role. Workers also pointed to managers who may be reluctant to lose skilled direct reports, and 59% of U.S. workers said their employer favors outside candidates over internal development.

A day later, TechCrunch’s Ram Iyer covered a Nielsen survey commissioned by Monday.com of 1,700 directors and senior managers across seven countries. More than half of those leaders said evaluating employee work has become harder since adopting AI, with output arriving polished in their inboxes. Nearly half said they now spend more time reviewing and guiding their teams’ output. And 78% said they have changed how they evaluate employees, giving more weight to things like prompt-writing, delegating tasks to AI and experimentation.

The same survey found 39% of leaders use AI to draft performance reviews, and 58% expect to oversee more AI agents than human employees within the next year. Monday.com’s Michal Miller Levi summed up the pressure this way: “AI is just moving faster than the organizational processes.”

Put the two together and you get one story. Employees are saying, “Let me show you what I can do.” Managers are saying, “I’m finding it harder to tell what anyone is doing.”

Why internal mobility is really a visibility problem

In The Next Turn, I describe two changes happening at the same time. The definition of work is changing: what people believe work is for and what it should give back. The structure of work is changing: how work actually flows now that AI is part of the infrastructure. This week’s research sits right where those two meet.

On the definition side, the SHL numbers are not a picture of disloyal workers. They are a picture of people who want the exchange to work and don’t see a path inside it. That is the value exchange from Chapter 5, and it is the retention pressure point I describe in Chapter 11, “Where It Breaks.” When growth is invisible, staying starts to look like drift. Leaving starts to look like the only way to be seen.

Leaders think they are discussing performance while employees are evaluating value.

The Next Turn

On the structure side, the Monday.com findings show what happens when AI compresses the work and hides the process. Leaders see the product without the path. In Chapter 7, I call this the collapse of effort as a signal. Polished output used to suggest time, skill and care. Now it may suggest a good prompt. Managers who relied on those cues to judge capability are losing them.

Here is the part I want leaders to slow down on. When the old signals fade, the instinct is to grab new ones. That is what I hear in the finding that most leaders are now weighting prompt-writing, AI delegation and experimentation. Those may be useful skills. But they are still signals. If we swap “stayed late” for “wrote clever prompts,” we have changed the proof system without asking what we are trying to prove.

What they are often feeling is not the collapse of standards, but the collapse of the signals they once used as a replacement for standards.

The Next Turn

The standard underneath both stories is the same: can this person exercise sound judgment in this work, and could they do it in a bigger or different role? In Chapter 8, “The Rise of Judgment,” I argue that judgment is becoming the center of value. It is also the thing most likely to stay invisible unless someone goes looking for it.

The bundled role hides the person

There is one more layer. In Chapter 10, I write about how the traditional full-time job bundles many different kinds of tasks into one fixed role. That bundle is convenient for an org chart. It is not a good lens for seeing a person.

When a manager only knows someone through the tasks in their current job description, everything outside that box disappears. The analyst who is quietly the best facilitator on the team. The coordinator who has taught herself to build workflows. The technician who is the one everyone calls when a new system breaks. If the manager doesn’t know those skills exist, the organization doesn’t either. And then it goes looking outside for what it already has.

This is not a generational issue. The SHL survey reported no age breakdown, and the pattern applies to anyone whose growth depends on being noticed. It may feel sharper for early-career employees, who have the least history to point to, and for experienced employees whose depth has been filed under one title for years.

Nor is it a story about bad managers. The Monday.com data suggests many are carrying more review work and more tools than before, while processes lag behind the technology. Seeing capability used to happen by default, through proximity and visible effort. Now it has to be designed.

Your next turn

Here are five moves for leaders and managers this week:

  1. Ask the question directly. In your next one-on-ones, ask each person: “What can you do that this role doesn’t let me see?” Write down the answers. Treat them as data, not small talk.
  2. Make reasoning discussable. When work arrives polished, don’t stop at “Is it done?” Ask “Talk me through how you decided.” and “What did AI do here, and what did you decide?” Judgment shows up in the answers.
  3. Separate standards from signals in your review criteria. If you have added prompting or AI use to how you evaluate people, ask what standard each one is standing in for. Keep the standard. Hold the signal loosely.
  4. Unbundle one role on paper. List the distinct capabilities the role actually draws on, then note which ones each person on your team has shown, including outside their job description.
  5. Name the hoarding risk out loud. If managers are rewarded only for their own team’s output, moving a strong person feels like a loss. Talk with your leadership team about how you recognize managers who grow people into new roles.

Frequently asked questions

Why do employees feel they have to leave to advance?

In SHL’s survey, about two-thirds of workers said they would have to leave to advance even though they want to stay. The findings point to visibility: only 42% said their manager fully understands their skills beyond their current role, and many saw employers favoring outside candidates. People don’t see a path, so they look for one elsewhere.

How is AI changing the way managers evaluate employees?

In a Nielsen survey for Monday.com, more than half of senior leaders said evaluating employee work got harder after adopting AI, and 78% said they changed how they evaluate people. Polished output no longer reveals the effort or thinking behind it, so managers need to ask about decisions and reasoning, not just finished deliverables.

What can managers do to improve internal mobility?

Start by learning what people can do beyond their current role, and make judgment visible through better questions. Define the standards a role actually requires, separate them from the signals you have been using, and reward managers who help their people move up or across instead of holding on to them.

The real retention question

We often frame retention as a question about the employee. Will they stay? This week’s research suggests a better question for leaders. Can we see them clearly enough to give them a reason to?

The work is getting harder to see. The people are not getting less capable. Leaders who build ways to see judgment and capability on purpose will find talent they already have. Those who don’t will keep hiring it back from someone else.

So here is my question for you: who on your team is capable of more than you currently know, and what would it take for you to find out this month?

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