TALENT MANAGEMENT AND THE DUAL-CAREER COUPLE.

Companies invest heavily in grooming star talent for leadership—but most of them haven’t figured out how to manage the growing population of employees who care deeply about their partners’ or spouses’ careers at the same time that they want to advance their own. As a result, many high potentials are heading for the nearest exit. The author has seen this happen again and again in her research on dual-career couples in tech, health care, professional services, and other industries. She says the crux of the problem is that companies tend to have fixed paths to leadership roles, with set tours of duty and rigid ideas about what ambition looks like. That creates flexibility and mobility challenges for employees—and recruitment and retention headaches for employers. Organizations must adopt new strategies for managing and developing talent. They can remove barriers to advancement by allowing people to develop skills and networks in more-creative ways—through brief “job swaps,” for example, or commuter-leader roles. But often a culture change is needed. Instead of stigmatizing flexibility, companies must learn to embrace it.