Are your people leaders equipped to inspire, engage, and retain your top talent?

In this solo episode of the Happier at Work podcast, Aoife O'Brien delves into the crucial role of people leaders and why so many organisations inadvertently set managers, and their teams up for failure. Drawing from her recent book launch and audience Q&A at Google in Dublin, Aoife unpacks the dangers of promoting high-performing individual contributors without providing them with essential leadership training. Backed by research and personal experience, she sheds light on the staggering hidden costs of untrained managers, from disengaged employees to sky-high attrition rates. She highlights effective strategies for building psychologically safe, high-performing teams within the Thriving Talent Framework and offers actionable insights on the three core skills every manager needs.

In This Episode, You’ll Discover:

• The key driver of both employee turnover and disengagement at work.
• The importance of psychological safety for thriving teams, enabling open dialogue, creativity, and resilience, even amidst change.
• Why untrained managers are prone to inconsistency, micromanagement, and avoiding difficult conversations, behaviours that erode trust and culture.

Related Topics Covered:

Psychological Safety, Feedback at Work, Personal Development

Connect with Aoife O’Brien | Host of Happier at Work®:

• Website
• LinkedIn
• YouTube

Related Episodes You’ll Love:

Episode 297: Creating Space for Talent to Thrive

Episode 113: How to Handle a Bad Boss with Aoife O’Brien

About Happier at Work®

Happier at Work® is the podcast for business leaders who want to create meaningful, human-centric workplaces. Hosted by Aoife O’Brien, the show explores leadership, career clarity, imposter syndrome, workplace culture, and employee engagement — helping you and your team thrive.

If you enjoy podcasts like WorkLife with Adam Grant, The Happiness Lab, or Squiggly Careers, you’ll love Happier at Work®.

Editing by Amanda Fitzgerald.

Website: https://happieratwork.ie LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aoifemobrien/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HappierAtWorkHQ

Mentioned in this episode:

Thriving Talent book - out now

Book

A few weeks ago, I had the launch of my thriving talent book in the Google offices in Dublin. It was a great event. We had networking at the start. We had a fireside chat with one of the senior leaders from Google for about half an hour, 45 minutes, and then we had questions from the audience. And so today's episode is based on one of the questions that I had from the audience. I want to explore it in a little bit more detail on today's episode. This is the Happier at Work podcast. I'm your host, Aoife O'Brien, and,

And today I want to talk all about leaders and how we can better support people leaders to do their jobs effectively. So if I take that question that I had, it was all about how we tend to promote the people who do the day job the best. So we have some fantastic individual contributors and we promote them into positions of leadership because we assume that doing the day job is going to translate into being a people leader, an effective people leader. I've seen this so, so many times. And there are also stats and research done in the UK that says that 80% of people who are promoted into leadership positions never actually receive any leadership training. I was in the lucky position that before I even became a people leader, I received a lot of people leadership training. I never needed it or used it in the organization that I got the training in, but I used it subsequently. But if I think of later in my career, although I had had that training, it had been quite a while since I had it, but I was probably a year into the role that I was doing as a senior leader before I got any sort of support or training to be able to do that role effectively.

I think the thinking was because we were in a small kind of satellite office for maybe for want of a better word, but we were based in Ireland, part of a UK and Ireland team. And the training that we ended up getting was broader European training with our colleagues from all over Europe. So it was kind of like they had to wait to bring everyone together rather than doing individual training in the different offices. So all of that to say that most people who are leading people have never been trained in how to do it. And the question may mostly centered around how do we make sure that this doesn't happen? My answer to that was that we need to speak the language of senior leaders and talk about the impact that managers have. So if you think about your experience at work, it's mostly influenced by the manager that you have. And again, there's research to back this up. So Gallup says that 70% of our experience at work is shaped by, by the manager that we have.

You'll hear the cliches like that people don't leave organizations, they leave managers. Again, I don't know if there's research to back that up necessarily, but anecdotally I think it sounds, it sounds fairly sensible that people would leave managers rather than leaving organizations. And so yeah, I want to kind of expand on that question now. One of the things that I shared on the day when someone leaves an organization and let's assume that a big thing of shaping why people has, why someone has left is maybe related to the leadership and the experience that they've had at work. It can cost an organization between 30% and 200% of that person's salary to replace them. And if you can do some quick maths on that and you know, and use some simple sums, so like say an average salary is 50k or an average salary is 100k. If someone's earning 100k, then to lose them from the organization would cost that organization 200,000. Whatever you're thinking in euros, in pounds, in dollars, that's how much it's going to cost to replace that person.

And if you look at that at scale, so what is your attrition level? It could be 10%, it could be 15% within a team. If you're a leader within a team. If you lose two people, what does that look like? Well, it's double their salary for both of them. And so that's how much it's costing you in terms of downtime, in terms of recruitment costs, in terms of ramp up time, all of those things contribute. And so it's costing organizations money. When we lose people and we're losing people because our leaders are not trained effectively in how to lead people. Well now that's only if they leave the organization. So it can cost between 30 and 200%.

But what about the people who stay in that organization? So they're staying, but they're not really as engaged in the work that they're doing. They're staying, but they're not really giving their best. They're not really that engaged, they're not really that interested in the role. And this can lead to them having poor performance. So they're not performing the way they should be. So it's not just the cost of losing people, it's also the cost of people who stay in the organization but are not reaching that full potential that they know they have. They're not reaching that potential to be able to perform at their best, and that's costing organizations too. It's much, much harder to put a cost on that because it's kind of an invisible cost.

We don't see what people are capable of doing and the gap between what they're currently doing and what they could be doing. So that's an invisible thing. You can also relate these things. So looking at revenues and looking at engagement scores and finding correlations, they're not necessarily causations, but you can find correlations between these things. So if you want to tie this back to why we should train leaders more effectively, we can talk about things like retention as a cost saving exercise. So we can look at the differential between say a 15% attrition rate and a 14% or a 15% and a 10% and see how much money we could potentially save the organization if we work on retaining the people that we really want to retain. You can also think about it from a performance perspective. So of the ones who stay, if we have them performing at their best, if we can improve their performance because their managers have been trained and their managers are leading them really well, what impact does that have on the bottom line? How much more revenue can we get from the managers being trained well? So yes, it's an investment upfront in leading, manage in training leaders how to lead well.

But the downstream of that is that we can save money in retention costs and we can make more money because performance has improved of the people that we are leading. If I can bring this back to the Thriving Talent Framework, leaders are in a really strong position to create psychological safety in the team. Psychological safety is the foundation of the Thriving Talent Framework because it's so fundamental, we have to get it right. And the vast majority of teams do not have psychological safety. Psychological safety is feeling safe to speak up without fear of consequences. So speaking up about workload, speaking up about new ideas, speaking up, sharing what's going on, on calling out poor behaviors, all of that, but it doesn't exist by default. We have to create those conditions where people do feel safe and it's not something you can just switch on. It takes time to build that up, you know, over months, over years, to create that psychological safety with any changes.

If there's a new leader, if there's someone new who's joined the team, it's going to disrupt the flow of psychological safety as well. So we need to be aware of those things. And the leader is best placed to create psychological safety within their own team. Leaders are also Best placed to create a positive culture. So to reinforce the values of the organization, to call out behaviors that are not in line with the values and to recognize people's strengths and deploy people doing things where their strengths are best served. So putting people on projects where they will really excel and get to use their strengths and feel really energized on a day to day basis. When managers are not trained what they tend to do, the default behaviors are avoiding those difficult conversations that they really need to have. And I know I've done this myself when I've not been trained.

So you're just avoiding those hard conversations because it feels hard. It feels like you're in over your head. You don't want to get hijacked by emotions, you don't want to cause upset for another person. So you just avoid those kinds of conversations completely. Another thing that untrained managers can do is micromanage. So they're providing lots and lots of management and telling people what to do, but not necessarily giving them the support that they need to get the job done. So they're micromanaging all of the details of whatever the project is or the task, whatever that might be. They can also create a lot of inconsistency within the team.

So maybe they treat people differently, maybe they show up in with different behaviors all the time. But. But consistency is one of the really core parts of creating psychological safety. We need to show up in a consistent way. If we think about training managers and three fundamental things that they really need to excel at, I would say number one is setting really clear expectations. So we can think about expectations from the perspective of the what and also the how. So what is expected in this role and how are you expected to achieve it? So the behaviors associated with it. When I think about the what or the task associated, I think about the time and the quality.

So is there a deadline associated around how long should I spend on this task and then the quality? Can you share previous examples or is it kind of a free for all? Is this. We're expecting someone to use their zone of genius to be able to figure this out. So thinking about setting those really clear expectations up front, front and then holding people to account for not meeting those expectations. So you've set clear expectations, you need to hold them to account for not meeting them, or you need to recognize them for doing a job really, really well. This ties in with the idea of feedback, which is the second area I want to talk about in relation to managers. So how to deliver effective feedback. And again, that can be on the what, it can be on the how. How do you have those conversations? And don't forget to give people feedback when they're doing a good job, because I think we often associate feedback with when someone is underperforming and telling them how to improve.

But actually, if we think about feedback from a positive perspective and telling people and reinforcing the positive behaviors that they're showing and the positive work that they're doing and the contribution that they're having in the team, that will help to reinforce those behaviors. And then the last one is about recognizing strengths. So being able to see strengths in people and therefore being able to deploy them, being able to use those strengths and achieve results through other people because you've seen the strengths that they have, whether it's project management, whether it's analytical skills, relationship building, whatever that looks like, but being able to recognize those strengths and verbalize to that person. Because oftentimes we don't see strengths that we have in ourselves. So that is it for today's episode. Next week I have another interview based episode. If you ever want to reach out to me, let me know any questions that you have for me about the podcast or any suggestions that you have for future episodes, then I'm always open to hearing it. You can reach me on podcast@happieratwork.ie.