Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Well-run organizations can fall into the trap of ‘hoarding’ their star engineers. They keep them ‘on the bench’, they don’t deploy them for risky, challenging projects. That’s an unnecessary inefficiency. As in sports, allowing your strongest players to go play in the field gives them practice. It also improves general team performance and boosts team morale. So send your players out to play!

Imagine a dusty attic overflowing with heirlooms, gathering cobwebs. The dusty attic is today’s software engineering organizations, and the heirlooms are their engineers. Top performers – an organization’s most important assets – are under-used and ‘benched’, their potential is locked away as if they were antiques.

I saw this myself at a Kathmandu engineering consultancy. A team lead who I had been quite impressed by, was often kept on the sidelines for “big emergencies”. This happened as his colleagues struggled with their project timelines. I was confused and frustrated by the experience… the under-utilization of talent, the missed opportunities and hampered efficiency were so easy to fix! It was tough to try not intervening as an outsider.

That experience got me thinking. Why would companies find themselves in such a situation, and how might they break free from such self-limiting approach to people management? So here I’ll expand a bit on my “use-it-or-lose-it” understanding and the hoarding psychology in organizations. I’ll discuss the negative consequences of such hoarding and argue for the alternative.

Consider your organization as a massive orchestra. How would it feel if your most skilled musicians are rarely given solos? What if your director reserved their virtuosity for special occasions, the big projects. The rest of the ensemble would be struggling while their talents remained unused. It sounds like silly scenario for an orchestra, but this is what’s happens in so many teams!

The organizational hoarding manifests in several ways. Top performers are often stuck with mundane tasks. They will ask for more challenging work, to no avail. They might be excluded from critical decision-making. Or they might be kept in the dark about talent resources and collaboration opportunities. Quite often they’re kept away from political power and leadership opportunities as well. This creates a culture of apathy and information silos. Because power is hard to come by, knowledge and expertise are tightly controlled. It’s like having a library locked away, its knowledge inaccessible to those who need it most.

As a consequence, top performers feel unused, their skills plateaus, and their motivation wanes. Teams suffer from knowledge gaps and missed partnership opportunities. Inefficiencies increase, progress slows. The organization loses competitive edge, stifling innovation and getting slow development cycles.

We’ve all known hoarders one way or other. Think of that family with a “special room” overflowing with unused items. They hold onto these possessions for “just in case” situations, as they miss opportunities to declutter, donate, and enjoy these items. That is unfortunately how organizations hoarding data, tools, or even knowledge, are acting. It’s limiting their organizational agility and hindering innovation. Such teams must move from their ‘scarcity’ mindset, to a more ‘abundance’ mindset.

The cumulative effect of unused talent across countless organizations is vast. Hoarding mentality – and the scarcity mindset it originates from – is universal, and has far-reaching consequences. A master gardener plants, a talented musician performs, and so organizations must let their top-performers work. This releases the talent and the potential of individual contributors, builds stronger teams, and drives innovation.

There are alternatives to the limiting world view. You can choose to instead create an org where top performers are challenged, empowered, and seen as integral parts of their team. They share their knowledge, and encourage knowledge-sharing and learning across all levels. This would reveal a multitude of benefits: individuals experience growth and recognition. Teams gain increased synergy. And the organization thrives on innovation and agility.

Engineering teams must abandon the hoarding mentality and embrace consistent utilization for their performers.

Consistent utilization of top performers generates other obvious benefits too. Companies like Alphabet and Netflix make the advantages visible firsthand. Apple’s culture of “hackathons” encourages senior engineers to actively share knowledge and contribute to diverse projects. Apple uses its top researchers not just for research, but also for code reviews and mentorship. In both cases, consistent use has led to faster development cycles, improved product quality, and a more agile workforce.