Chosen to Grow: Dismantling the Informal Market in Stretch Work

The moment before the role exists

In many UK workplaces, the most consequential development opportunities never appear on a job board. A director needs someone to lead a cross-departmental review. A service manager needs cover for a secondment. A project board needs a credible chair for six months. These requests are often resolved through a short conversation, a remembered name and a quiet assurance that the person is a 'safe pair of hands'.

That moment — before a role is formally created, advertised or graded — is where a great deal of career progression is decided. It is also where bias can operate with the least scrutiny. The informal market in stretch work is not inherently harmful. Speed, trust and local knowledge matter. But when allocation depends on who is visible, who is already known to decision-makers and who is assumed to have the capacity, the result is a development system that rewards familiarity rather than potential.

The task for leaders is not to abolish informal judgment. It is to make the allocation of growth opportunities visible enough to be challenged and fair enough to be trusted.

Why 'safe pair of hands' is not a neutral judgement

The phrase sounds like a compliment, and often is. Yet in practice it bundles together several assumptions: that the person has done similar work before, that they will not need much support, that they will protect the manager from risk. Those assumptions may be reasonable in a crisis. Applied repeatedly, they become a filter.

Research and practitioner evidence from UK organisations consistently point to affinity bias — the tendency to trust people who resemble us in background, communication style or career history. A manager who feels comfortable with a particular colleague may read that comfort as evidence of competence. A colleague who is less practised at self-promotion, or whose working pattern makes them less visible in the office, may be overlooked even when their capability is strong.

The 'safe pair of hands' rationale also carries a hidden cost for the person who is always chosen. Being the dependable option can mean absorbing extra work without extra recognition, while others receive the visible projects that lead to promotion. Development work should not become a tax on reliability.

The confidence-capability gap

One of the most persistent patterns in stretch allocation is the conflation of confidence with readiness. A person who volunteers readily, speaks fluently in meetings and has a sponsor in the room will often appear more 'ready' than a colleague who is equally capable but less inclined to self-advance.

This matters for diversity because confidence is not evenly distributed. It is shaped by prior experience of being heard, by working patterns, by caring responsibilities, by disability or neurodivergence, and by the accumulated signals a workplace sends about who belongs in senior spaces. The Equality Act 2010 provides a legal framework for fair treatment, but it does not by itself change the everyday judgments that determine who is offered a stretch assignment.

A fairer approach asks a different question: not 'who seems ready?' but 'what evidence do we have of this person's capability, and what support would make the opportunity viable?' That shift does not lower standards. It widens the pool from which standards are assessed.

A stretch register: mapping who gets chosen

Before changing a process, it helps to see it clearly. A stretch register is a simple, low-bureaucracy tool for recording development opportunities that fall outside formal recruitment — secondments, acting-up periods, project leads, shadowing arrangements and short-term cover.

For a three-month period, ask line managers and department heads to log each stretch opportunity as it arises. Record the role, its duration, how it was filled, who was considered, who was chosen, and the stated rationale. The register need not capture personal data beyond what is necessary; its purpose is pattern detection, not surveillance.

When the register is reviewed, look for concentration. Is one team repeatedly offering opportunities to the same individuals? Are certain groups — by gender, ethnicity, disability, age or working pattern — under-represented among those chosen? Are opportunities flowing mainly to people who already hold a sponsor or a visible profile? The point is not to produce a perfect dataset, but to replace anecdote with a provisional map.

Four tests for a fairer allocation

When a stretch opportunity arises, leaders can apply four practical tests before making an informal offer.

First, the visibility test. Could this opportunity be described in a short note to a wider group of potential candidates without disproportionate delay? If the answer is no, ask why. There will be genuine exceptions, but they should be rare and recorded.

Second, the criteria test. What does 'safe pair of hands' actually mean here? Write down the three or four capabilities the work requires. Then ask whether those capabilities have been assessed for more than one person. If the criteria are only being applied retrospectively to justify a preferred name, they are not criteria at all.

Third, the support test. If the chosen person is from a group currently under-represented in that level of work, is the offer accompanied by the backing that makes success realistic — a named mentor, a reduced portfolio, a clear escalation route? Stretch without support is not development; it is exposure.

Fourth, the rotation test. Has this person already had a comparable opportunity in the past twelve months? If so, what is the case for offering it again rather than broadening the pool? Rotation is not about quotas. It is about preventing the informal market from hardening into a closed circuit.

Making the process visible without bureaucratising it

The objection most often raised is that formalising stretch allocation will slow everything down. In practice, the opposite can be true. A clear protocol — a short note to a defined talent pool, a recorded rationale, a quarterly review of the register — takes less time than repeatedly resolving the same informal requests through private negotiation.

Leaders should also consider how acting-up arrangements are recognised and rewarded. In UK organisations, acting-up allowances and temporary grading are unevenly applied. If a person is doing the work of a more senior role for six months, the development benefit should not come at the cost of fair pay or pension treatment.

Finally, connect stretch allocation to existing talent processes. Many organisations already have talent reviews, succession plans and development conversations. The question is whether those processes capture the informal opportunities that shape careers, or whether they only record formal training and promotion. A stretch register can sit alongside them as a lightweight evidence source.

What leaders can do this quarter

Start small and start visibly. Choose one department and one quarter. Ask managers to log stretch opportunities as they arise, using a shared template of no more than five fields. Review the log in a leadership meeting and ask three questions: who is being chosen, what rationale is being used, and what would need to change for the pool to be wider next time.

Then make one commitment. It might be that every stretch opportunity over four weeks is offered to at least two people. It might be that acting-up arrangements are reviewed monthly for pay and support. It might be that the next cross-departmental project is advertised through a short expression-of-interest note rather than a direct approach.

The goal is not to eliminate judgment from development. It is to ensure that the judgment is informed, testable and shared. When stretch work is allocated through an informal market, the people who flourish are those who are already known. A fairer process helps more people become known — and gives the organisation a wider field of talent to draw on. That is not a dilution of standards. It is a more intelligent way of finding the people who can grow into them.