Aoife O’Brien spent 20 years inside corporate organizations. Some of those years were good. Others left her sitting at her desk watching managers walk into meetings she’d been told she’d be part of, or getting pulled into a room by a colleague who announced, without warning, “I’m your boss now.”
Those moments didn’t just sting. They broke something. Her confidence cratered for years afterward, even in roles that had nothing to do with the ones that damaged her. She blamed herself. She questioned whether she was good enough. And eventually, she left to figure out why so many workplaces fail the people inside them.
That search led her to a Master’s in Organizational Behavior, to over 200 conversations with business leaders on her podcast, Happier at Work, and now to a book called Thriving Talent: How Great Leaders Drive Performance, Engagement, and Retention. I recently sat down with Aoife for a conversation that kept circling back to one uncomfortable question: if companies have been pouring resources into engagement for over a decade, why hasn’t the number moved?
The Measurement Problem
Gallup’s global data puts employee engagement at 21%. That number has barely shifted despite years of surveys, initiatives, and wellness programs. Aoife’s argument is that most organizations treat engagement as the thing to fix rather than as a symptom of something deeper.
“We’re trying to oftentimes put a bandaid on something that really requires surgery,” she told me. “We haven’t necessarily looked at what the underlying factors are that drive those numbers.”
She draws on Zach Mercurio’s distinction between leading and lagging indicators. Engagement is a lagging indicator. So is happiness. The leading indicators are harder to measure but more useful: whether people feel their work matters, whether they’re clear about the impact they’re supposed to have, and whether their daily experience matches what the organization says it values.
Most companies run an annual engagement survey, get a score, and then scramble to improve it. The scramble itself becomes the strategy. But if you don’t know what’s actually causing disengagement in your specific organization, you’re guessing. And expensive guessing dressed up as strategy is still guessing.
The Busyness Trap
One of the quieter problems Aoife identifies is how thoroughly we’ve confused activity with impact. She points to Adam Grant’s research showing that busyness often signals inefficiency rather than productivity. Most of us know this intellectually. We still wear busyness like a badge.
Aoife is honest about falling into this herself. “Responding to emails, attending meetings, doing busy work, like just doing the administration around work, rather than actually sitting down and doing proper deep work. That makes us feel busy.” You get to the end of the day exhausted, having switched between dozens of tasks, and realize you haven’t moved a single meaningful project forward.
The problem compounds when leaders aren’t clear about priorities. If your manager hasn’t told you what the number one priority is, you fill the vacuum with whatever feels productive. Email feels productive. Meetings feel productive. Checking things off a list feels productive. None of it necessarily is.
This is where AI enters the picture, and not in the way most people expect. Aoife references Tara McMullen’s Eggbeater Effect: technology designed to save time just raises expectations and creates more work. The eggbeater didn’t give anyone leisure time. It meant people were expected to make more elaborate desserts.
AI is doing the same thing. We use it to produce more, faster. Then we have more to review, more to refine, more to manage. The time saved gets immediately reinvested into more output.
“We think we can do more, we give it more, but we have to have some sort of human judgment and thinking around what it is that the AI produces. We’re getting it to produce more and more stuff, which actually gives us more stuff to do.”
The real opportunity with AI isn’t doing more. It’s being more deliberate about what’s worth doing at all.
Why Interventions Miss
Aoife spent 20 years in market research before shifting into organizational work, and her analytical instincts shine through when she discusses workplace interventions. The pattern she sees is disturbingly consistent: organizations decide they need a wellbeing program or leadership development initiative because it’s popular, because a peer company did it, or because a leader mandated it. They implement without diagnosing. Then they have no way to measure whether it worked because they never defined what problem they were solving.
“If we’re saying we have an engagement issue, okay, but what’s driving that engagement issue? What’s driving disengagement in our workforce specifically, rather than more generally?” she said. The specificity matters. What’s broken at your company may have nothing to do with what’s broken at the company whose intervention you’re copying.
This is a discipline problem, not a knowledge problem. The tools exist to diagnose organizational issues with precision. Most companies skip that step because diagnosis is slower and less satisfying than action. Launching a new program feels like progress. Understanding why you need one doesn’t.
The Thriving Talent Framework
Aoife’s framework is built like a temple. Psychological safety sits at the foundation. Three pillars rise from it: workplace culture, drivers, and capabilities. Leadership serves as the capstone.
The placement of psychological safety at the base rather than leadership at the top is deliberate. Without safety, none of the other elements function. People won’t share ideas, push back on bad decisions, or admit mistakes if they believe there will be consequences for speaking up.
She references a test from Robert Glazer: ask your team to do something outrageous and see if they push back or quietly comply. Silence is the danger signal most leaders miss because silence is invisible. People not speaking doesn’t look like anything. It’s easy to mistake a quiet room for an aligned one.
Aoife had Amy Edmondson on her own podcast and raised a distinction worth repeating: psychological safety is not comfort. You can feel deeply uncomfortable saying something and still be safe. Safety means that nothing bad will happen to you for speaking up. The discomfort is part of the deal. Edmondson’s other point is that the default in most organizations is an absence of psychological safety. If you haven’t actively built it, assume you don’t have it.
The culture pillar focuses on the gap between stated values and lived experience. Aoife worked in an organization that listed “simple” as a core value. Sending an email to local clients required approval from two people in a different time zone. The process took two weeks. The hypocrisy wasn’t malicious. It rarely is. But employees experience the reality, not the intention.
On drivers, Aoife argues that money is necessary but insufficient. Dan Ariely’s research shows that large performance bonuses actually decrease performance on cognitive tasks. What matters more are intrinsic motivators: autonomy, relatedness, competence, and the individual needs that vary from person to person. One employee thrives on public recognition. Another wants stability and predictability. A leader who treats motivation as one-size-fits-all will miss both.
The capabilities pillar extends beyond individual strengths to include how teams combine complementary abilities and how organizations remove blockers. Meetings, email overload, lack of collaboration tools, and the constant context-switching that fragments deep work all erode capability regardless of how talented individual people are.
Leadership as Capstone, Not Foundation
Putting leadership at the top of the framework rather than the bottom makes a point that most leadership books avoid. Leaders matter enormously. Research suggests managers shape roughly 70% of an employee’s experience at work. And yet around 80% of managers, at least in UK research Aoife cites, never receive formal training in how to lead people.
But the framework argues that leadership effectiveness depends on everything beneath it. A brilliant leader operating in a culture without psychological safety, with unclear drivers and capability-killing processes, will still fail. The system has to support the leader as much as the leader shapes the system.
Aoife’s advice for where to start is practical: stop being the bottleneck. Empower your team to make decisions without micromanaging. Delegate the work you’re holding onto because you were good at it before you got promoted. Your job now is to achieve results through other people, and that means getting out of the way enough for them to actually work.
She draws on Liz Wiseman’s multiplier concept here. The question isn’t whether you’re a good leader. It’s whether the people around you are getting better because of how you lead. Diminishers hold on. Multipliers let go.
There’s a version of leadership advice that sounds inspiring but gives you nothing to do on Monday morning. Aoife’s framework avoids that by grounding every element in a specific, diagnosable condition. You can assess whether psychological safety exists. You can determine whether your stated culture matches your lived culture. You can ask people what drives them and find out whether their capabilities are being used or wasted.
The organizations that actually move their engagement numbers won’t do it by running another survey and launching another initiative. They’ll do it by getting honest about what’s broken, specific about why, and disciplined about fixing the right things in the right order. That’s less exciting than a new program rollout. It’s also the only approach that works.
Brandon Laws is the host of Transform Your Workplace, a podcast where he explores the intersection of leadership, culture, and the evolving world of work. He is based in Portland, Oregon, and works with Xenium HR, where he helps bring practical, people-first thinking to small and mid-sized businesses.