Retaining Great Talent in the Public Sector: What Makes People Stay

ANALYSIS | Purposeful leadership, trust, and growth opportunities drive commitment, while neglecting underperformance quietly erodes retention.

Authors: Dr Marianne Broadbent and Adam Kyriacou

Originally published on The Mandarin on May 7, 2025

In the public sector, turnover isn’t always a problem—it can be healthy, even necessary. But when high performers leave because their potential isn’t fully tapped, or because misalignment persists between leadership and values, it becomes a serious vulnerability. When the pressure of election cycles, economic downturn and public scrutiny is dialled up, retention need to be intentional.

At Future Leadership, we’ve observed six consistent themes when it comes to retention. These themes emerge from our public appointments work and leadership reviews, and are consistent with ongoing public sector survey data, including the APS State of the Service Report and state-level surveys such as the NSW People Matter Employee surveys.

1. A Sustained Sense of Purpose

Where a sense of purpose is too frayed, thin or broken, disillusion sets in. Examples of challenges are where there is, say, a strong and relevant policy development (in the view of the policy development group) that does not proceed as it is not seen as politically palatable or no longer fits with a shifting government agenda. The ability to provide thoughtful and contested advice is the essence of public sector service. But this needs to be accompanied by the ability to deal with its rejection in a considered and resilient way.

Maintaining a sense of impact, even in the face of rejection, requires skilled leadership and strong internal narratives about the value of policy craftsmanship.

2. Quality Leadership at All Levels

Leadership is the multiplier—or the bottleneck. In many departments, engagement levels vary not by policy area or pay grade, but by the quality of leadership in specific teams. Poor leadership can be endured for a while, but prolonged exposure corrodes trust. It becomes quite undermining of commitment and morale. This is the case for both direct reporting lines and one or two levels of leadership removed.

Our advisory work, participating in federal and state engagement report debriefs, shows that visibility of and engagement with leaders, clarity of expectations, fairness and feeling a sense of empowerment matter immensely.

3. Genuine Trust and Effective Teaming

Building trust isn’t optional. It’s the engine of execution as virtually all work today gets done in teams and people are members of multiple teams. Public servants today work in more fluid, cross-functional teams and this requires the core capability to build well-functioning teams. This involves building effective teaming cadence with agreed ways of working – and that each person is held accountable for their behaviours.

This theme particularly resonated with participants at The Mandarin conference. Great teams don’t just happen. Our Team Acceleration Programs help build team cohesion quickly. In an era where change moves at the speed of trust, even well-designed initiatives can falter in implementation. This is especially important in hybrid or dispersed environments.

4. Conscious Career Development and Mobility

Public sector careers should offer both breadth and depth. Too often, high performers get “spun through” successive crisis-fix roles without the opportunity to really build a program and embed change or lead strategically.

We see mid-career and emerging senior executives who have had just 15 to 18 months in each of the past four or five roles. When we investigate why this is the case, we often find that a public servant in this situation is seen as good performer who can get in and get a job done and can ‘fix things’ like wayward projects, clunky systems and so on. Once they have made some inroads in one area they are asked to take on another problem area – as there are not enough really good people in that department or agency. This is not helpful to the careers of promising talent and tends to exacerbate the inability to deal with the root cause of a problem.

Really supportive leaders encourage movement to another role when the time is right. Moving between jurisdictions and between sectors can absolutely lift experience and ambitions of curious achievers. We also see now that there is greater recognition of public sector experience in the private sector.

Moving between sectors – government, private, education – is not nearly as prevalent in Australia as other countries and this means we do not get the real benefits of cross-sector insights, seeing different ways of tackling issues, or ideas and experience exchange.

5. Addressing Poor Performance

There is nothing so discouraging to good performers than seeing lack of focus on dealing with poor performers. Whether it is helping lift their capability, resetting expectations for behaviours, or just not holding people accountability for what they are – and are not – doing. We see this again and again. When the poor performers have been given sufficiently opportunity and the issue is properly addressed, it brings a collective sigh of relief for others. People know who the poor performers or slackers are, and this includes the individuals themselves.

As one executive put it: “When that long-underperforming director finally moved on, my whole team lifted.” We call it the “re-energise moment”—the collective relief when fairness is reasserted.

6. Creating Space for Innovation

We know from multiple surveys public servants believe that innovation is not particularly valued. Innovation is often stifled by fear of failure. Yet great talent is drawn to and will thrive in environments where they can experiment, iterate, and improve. Creating space for learning and acknowledging effort is what effective leaders do.

Is Your Agency Vulnerable—or Intentional?

Currently, less than two-thirds of public sector teams feel inspired by their agency to do their best work each day. Change management and internal communications are often areas that require significant improvement.

While SES leaders are well regarded individually, many teams still perceive a lack of cohesion at the top. There is a perception overall that only just over half of the SES groups work well as a team, although this is improving. Building team effectiveness at the senior level is critical for modelling great behaviour and building trust and respect throughout the organisation.

Ask yourself: Which of these six factors above are strengths in your agency? Which need attention? High-performing departments will always lose some talent. But those that retain their best people act intentionally—supporting purpose, investing in leadership, demonstrating desired behaviours, holding themselves and others accountable, and enabling true development.

Let’s build a public service where people don’t just stay—they thrive.

Originally published on The Mandarin on May 7, 2025

Related article: What It Really Takes to Attract the Best Talent to the Public Sector. 

What It Really Takes to Attract the Best Talent to the Public Sector

ANALYSIS | Attraction hinges on meaningful work, strategic timing, career mobility, values alignment, and navigating complex stakeholder landscapes.

Authors: Dr Marianne Broadbent and David Baber. 

Originally published on The Mandarin on May 6, 2025

Public Scrutiny is Necessary—But Often Too Narrow

Public scrutiny of the public sector’s size and role is essential. After all, governments are custodians of public value. But what’s problematic is the frequent over-simplification of the issues at hand. Too often, discussions around public service headcount devolve into ideological debates—missing the operational realities and the broader purpose of government.

The recent focus on reducing public service numbers in Canberra is a case in point. Around 70% of federal public servants are based outside Canberra, embedded in other cities, regional hubs and communities, delivering essential frontline services. This context is often ignored. Reducing numbers without understanding where or why those roles exist can weaken policy delivery, affect community trust, and hollow out institutional memory.

Understanding the Real Drivers of Growth

Raw numbers don’t tell us much.  For example, a major reason parts of the APS have grown in the past 18 months is the need to rebuild lost capabilities or service capacity. Some roles were insourced to reduce heavy reliance on external contractors. In other cases, growth enabled critical delivery functions to return to government hands—especially after periods of structural outsourcing.

Take Services Australia, for example. Workforce investment here wasn’t about creating bureaucracy but about improving responsiveness for those relying on frontline social services. The same goes for certain specialist functions—such as data and digital capabilities—that governments must now build and retain in-house to reduce cyber and delivery risk. It is also about increasing the quality and reducing the cost of service delivery over time.

So, what truly matters? Numbers are one thing—but what matters more is capability, deployment, accountability and purpose alignment. This was and is the theme of The Mandarin conferences across 2025 – Building a Better Public Service.

Talent Attraction Requires Systems-level Understanding

A better public service is largely contingent on attracting and well utilising great talent. There’s no single silver bullet to attracting talent. It’s a systemic web of factors, intersecting decisions and actions, consolidated over time. At Future Leadership, we’ve supported hundreds of public sector appointments and worked across jurisdictions, advising departments and agencies on executive search, interim roles, and leadership development.

What we consistently find is that public sector roles appeal to individuals at specific career inflection points. Senior leaders from the private sector often tell us they want something “more meaningful” or “less transactional.” They’re looking to shift their legacy lens—asking not just, “What did I build?” but “What did I change?”

Others seek to broaden their impact, learn how government really works, or bring their external experience to bear on wicked problems like climate adaptation, economic policy, or public infrastructure.

Five Tangible Factors that Drive Public Sector Attraction

Based on our experience and overlaying survey data (e.g., the most recent APS State of the Service Report and the NSW People Matter Employee Survey), the drivers of attraction remain consistent:

1. Purpose and Contribution:
   There’s deep pride among public servants about their work. Public Sector leaders across federal and state surveys report higher than expected levels of satisfaction. Purpose is a strong magnet—especially for those with lived experience of the impact of public policy.
2. Career Runway and Development:
   The ability to move across functions, portfolios, and even jurisdictions is attractive. For example, one of our early career Future Leadership researchers joined the Attorney General’s Department with the ultimate goal of joining DFAT. She is now based in Paris in what she regards as her ‘dream job’.
3. Employment Security:
   Particularly in uncertain economic times, security becomes more than a benefit—it becomes a factor strategic decision-making. In the public sector employment security is immeasurably higher than in the private sector (with the possible exception of Secretaries . . .) While public sector remuneration may lag at the top end, overall career earnings, when adjusted for risk, are likely to even out over time.
4. Flexibility and Hybrid Work:
   In public sector roles there is generally a higher level of expectation and acceptance of both hybrid and flexible arrangements for employees. In recent cases this has been built into awards.
5. Generational Networks:
   Many public servants grew up in households where government service was the norm. The sector is seen highly respected and integral to civic life.

Specific Factors that Appeal to those Outside the Public Sector

Attracting private sector executives, managers and professionals is a practised art, in that the challenges are to attract the right people to the right roles, for the right reasons, and at the right time in life and careers. Timing is important and differs by level and opportunity. For example, a mid-career professional might be attracted to join say the Departments of the Environment or Agriculture for a different career experience.

At a senior level or where there might be salary differentials it is often about timing – is now the right time to use my experience differently? Do my circumstances mean that I can and should take this opportunity now? What will three years in the public sector mean for my CV and experience base? What might this particular role or experience lead to – inside or outside the public sector?

We work through these questions carefully with potential candidates as our best scenario is that the placed candidate has a great experience in the role and that they have made the decision at the right time. On a number of occasions, a potential candidate approached has indicated ‘no the timing is not quite right now’; but then we have gone back to them three or four years later and it is then more timely and they have proceeded as a candidate.

A critical factor throughout the process is an assessment values and demeanour fit. What we mean by that is – as with any role – is that our clients are often seeking candidates where there will be mutual resonance between them and the organisation, but a little bit of positive tension is fine.

We can categorically state that of the hundreds of individuals we have helped bring into the public sector from other sectors, universally they tell us three things: first, it was the right decision for them; second, that their experience of the public sector is that there are far more demands in relation to the complexity and ambiguity of the environment than they imagined; and third, that they are finding the role enormously stimulating and rewarding. And sometimes, yes they are learning to deal with different decision-making styles and the layers of stakeholders with whom they need to deal.

Recently a senior state public servant and head of an agency who is on their third public sector role after 18 years in the private sector indicated to us that ‘I now know that what is critical in any public sector role is to identify the 10 to 20 people I really need know, to know about and to influence’. They also noted that developing and sustaining relationships is even more important in the public sector when compared to the private sector.

Future Capability Matters

At Future Leadership, we look for alignment of context, capability and capacity—not just qualifications and skillsets. We’ve found that when someone is brought in at the right point in their career—and when their value and motivations are understood and matched—they perform better and stay longer.

As one agency head conveyed to us a week or two ago: ‘we want them to be a good fit, but not too good a fit as we need them to push us a little, but to do it in the right way’.

That kind of resonance—based on purpose, capability, and timing—is what builds a resilient, future-ready public service.

But once an employee has joined the public sector, what keeps them there?

Originally published on The Mandarin on May 6, 2025

Related article –  Retaining Great Talent in the Public Sector: What Makes People Stay