The people who never let you down are the ones I worry about, and it took me most of twenty-five years to understand why.
Every organisation has them. The one who catches the error nobody else saw. The one whose work you no longer check. The one you give the hard thing to, because you know it will come back done.
We call it excellence and we reward it, and both of those are correct. What we almost never do is ask where it comes from.
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The tell
High standards feel like pride when you meet them.
Survival feels like relief.
Relief that nothing went wrong. Relief that nobody found you out. If your best performer describes a finished piece of work as a relief rather than a satisfaction, you aren’t looking at standards. You’re looking at a nervous system that learned early that being flawless was how you stayed safe, and then found a career that pays for it.
I ran on that for a very long time. It built something extraordinary and it wasn’t free.
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Why this is your problem, not theirs
The person running on relief won’t tell you they’re struggling, because struggling is the thing they’ve organised their whole self against admitting. They will absorb more. They will stay later. They will look, right up until the week they don’t, like your most reliable asset.
So the burnout in your best people isn’t a wellbeing issue that HR handles in October. It’s a retention issue and a succession issue, and it lands on the leader.
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This week
One question, in your next one to one with your strongest performer. Not how are you going. Ask: when you finish something well, is it satisfying or is it a relief?
Then say nothing for ten seconds. Most of what people need to tell you lives on the other side of the silence you usually fill.
With Love, Pauline
This first appeared in The Conscious Leader, my weekly LinkedIn newsletter. Subscribe on LinkedIn.
