What CHROs Miss When Their Highest Performers Are Burning Out
This year, for the first time in over a decade, I didn’t make a vision board.
Not because I stopped believing in vision, but because I was in a season where simply moving forward required more energy than usual.
From the outside, it likely looked the same.
I showed up.
I delivered.
I kept things moving.
And like many high performers, I did what needed to be done.
I was called “resilient.”
But that word and how we use it inside organizations deserves a closer look.
Because right now, resilience is being mistaken for capacity at exactly the moment when the workforce is most strained.
According to McKinsey and Lean In’s Women in the Workplace report, burnout remains persistently high, with women significantly more likely than men to report feeling exhausted and under pressure. Senior women, in particular, are leaving organizations at the highest rates we’ve seen, often citing unsustainable workloads and lack of support.
At the same time, Deloitte research shows that nearly 70% of executives are considering leaving their roles for positions that better support their well-being.
This is not a resilience gap.
It is a system design problem.
The Leadership Blind Spot
In my work advising executive teams, I see a consistent and costly pattern:
Resilience is often most visible in the people who need support the most.
The individuals we rely on most heavily are often:
- Delivering consistently under pressure
- Stepping in where systems or leadership fall short
- Maintaining performance in high-demand environments
They don’t drop balls.
They absorb them.
And because they continue to perform, leaders assume they are fine.
They are not the ones raising flags.
They are not the ones missing deadlines.
They are not the ones asking for help.
So they are often overlooked.
Who This Impacts Most
This dynamic exists across organizations, but it is particularly pronounced for women, and especially women of color.
Not because they are less capable, but because they are often navigating:
- Higher performance expectations
- Greater visibility and scrutiny
- Fewer margins for error
- Additional emotional and cultural labor
The Women in the Workplace data reinforces this reality: women leaders are more likely to take on “invisible work” such as mentoring, DEI efforts, and team support, all of which are critical to organizational success but rarely recognized or rewarded.
The result is a pattern I see repeatedly:
High performance masking high strain.
And over time, that strain becomes unsustainable.
Why Traditional Burnout Signals Fail
Most organizations are trained to respond to burnout when it becomes visible:
- Performance declines
- Engagement drops
- Behavior changes
But by the time these signals appear, the damage is already done.
Gallup research shows that employees experiencing burnout are significantly more likely to be actively disengaged, seeking new roles, or already in the process of leaving.
The more important leadership capability is this:
Identifying burnout before performance drops.
That requires a different lens.
The Cost of Misreading Resilience
When organizations misinterpret resilience as capacity, several things happen:
- High performers are over-leveraged
- Support is unevenly distributed
- Burnout becomes concentrated in your most critical talent
- Retention risk increases, often quietly and suddenly
Mercer’s global talent trends research continues to show that perceived fairness, workload sustainability, and well-being are now among the top drivers of retention.
In other words:
The people you most want to keep are often the ones most at risk of leaving.
What Effective Leaders Do Differently
Leaders who manage this well shift from reactive support to intentional design.
They do three things differently:
1. They separate performance from capacity
High output does not mean someone has more to give.
2. They expand who receives support
Support is not reserved for visible struggle. It is built into how work is distributed and managed.
3. They actively look for invisible strain
They ask different questions.
They check in beyond deliverables.
They create space for honesty without consequence.
A Shift Worth Noticing
There is a meaningful shift underway.
More leaders are beginning to:
- Talk openly about burnout
- Acknowledge uneven load distribution
- Support one another more intentionally
These conversations are happening more frequently in executive teams and leadership forums.
It is not yet systemic.
But it is progress.
A Question for Leadership Teams
As you assess your organization, consider:
Who appears to be handling everything, and what might you be missing?
Because the individuals holding the most are often the ones closest to breaking point.
A More Sustainable Standard
The goal is not to celebrate how much people can carry.
The goal is to design organizations where they don’t have to carry it alone.
Resilience, on its own, is not a strategy.
Support is.
Nice Post ! I didn’t know about those gaps in leadership