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

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 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.