Are Your Best Employees The Ones Most Likely To Leave?

Forbes

3 days ago

Are Your Best Employees The Ones Most Likely To Leave?
A Leadership IQ study reveals that managers believe only 36% of employees are delivering great work. And an even more dangerous discovery shows these high performers are often less engaged than their underperforming colleagues, creating a dangerous cycle that threatens the entire workforce.
These studies deliver a sobering wake-up call for companies: The small group of employees carrying the heaviest load, solving the toughest problems, and driving organizational success are sometimes the most likely to be looking for the exit.
The Champions Who Carry the Load
In most organizations, the 36% who deliver great work aren't just performing their own jobs exceptionally, they're compensating for the 64% who aren't. They stay late fixing problems created by others, take on extra projects when deadlines loom, and serve as the unofficial mentors and problem-solvers their colleagues depend on.
While adequate performers complete assigned tasks, great performers take that crucial extra step: they help colleagues succeed, volunteer for challenging assignments, and turn problems into learning opportunities for entire teams. But when only one-third of employees operate at this level, those high performers become organizational life support systems. And life support systems, no matter how strong, eventually break down under constant pressure.
The Recognition Paradox
One cause of this is the recognition paradox. High performers report that their exceptional work is often viewed as "expected" rather than celebrated, while low performers receive disproportionate positive attention because managers spend more time coaching struggling employees. This creates a perverse incentive structure where mediocrity gets attention and excellence gets taken for granted. High performers begin to feel invisible despite carrying disproportionate responsibility, a recipe for disengagement and eventual departure.
The Accountability Vacuum
Another critical factor is the absence of accountability for poor performance. When low performers face no consequences for substandard work, high performers become the default solution for every problem. This dynamic creates a "performance subsidization" where high performers unknowingly subsidize low performance by cleaning up messes, covering gaps, and ensuring organizational objectives get met despite widespread mediocrity.
High performers consistently report low confidence that leadership holds people accountable for their performance. They watch colleagues deliver subpar work without consequences while simultaneously handling increased workloads to compensate for others' shortcomings.
The Career Control Crisis
Also alarming is the finding that high performers increasingly feel their career success depends on factors beyond their control. Despite consistently delivering excellent results, they see advancement opportunities going to less qualified candidates, witness poor performers receiving the same raises, and observe organizational decisions that seem to ignore merit entirely. This loss of what psychologists call "internal locus of control" is a powerful predictor of turnover. When high performers conclude that excellence doesn't drive career outcomes, they typically decide that excellence isn't worth the effort or they find organizations where it is.
The Multiplication Effect
The 36% problem becomes exponentially worse when these champions start leaving. High performers don't just take their individual contributions with them, they remove the stabilizing force that enables the other 64% to maintain even adequate performance. Projects they were quietly shepherding suddenly face delays, quality standards they maintained through informal leadership begin to slip, colleagues who relied on their expertise struggle with complex problems, and remaining high performers face even greater workloads and pressure. Organizations can quickly spiral from having 36% great performers to having 20% or fewer, as the burden on remaining champions becomes unsustainable.
Breaking the Cycle
Any number of interventions can reverse this pattern. Organizations need behavioral recognition systems to identify and celebrate the specific behaviors that distinguish high performers. This means creating formal processes to recognize not just what great performers achieve, but how they achieve it, i.e., the extra steps that create exceptional results.
Performance differentiation requires establishing meaningful consequences for both excellent and poor performance. High performers need to see that excellence leads to different outcomes than mediocrity. And this demands honestly auditing what actually happens to your highest and lowest performers in terms of recognition, advancement, compensation, and opportunities.
Another option, career clarity, involves providing transparent pathways that directly reward continued excellence. When advancement seems random or political, high performers lose motivation to maintain exceptional standards. Organizations must show top performers specific examples of how excellence has led to advancement within the company.
And workload management means resisting the temptation to overload high performers simply because they can handle more. This requires either improving the performance of others or redistributing work more strategically, including auditing high performers' actual workloads and identifying which tasks could be redistributed or eliminated.
The Strategic Imperative
These findings reveal a critical challenge: organizations are simultaneously under-utilizing their workforce potential while burning out their most valuable contributors. The 36% who deliver great work aren't statistical outliers, they're organizational lifelines. Losing them doesn't just reduce performance; it can trigger a performance collapse as the remaining workforce loses the informal support system that enabled their performance.
Companies that solve this paradox will gain enormous competitive advantages. They'll not only retain their champions but create conditions where the other 64% can rise to higher performance levels. The question isn't whether organizations can afford to address the engagement gap among high performers, it's whether they can afford not to, especially when their future success depends on the very people who are increasingly questioning whether their excellence is worth the effort.
The 36% champions aren't asking for special treatment. They're asking for organizational systems that value excellence as much as they do.