The Silent Struggles of High Performers in Toxic Environments
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
Ellen Van Driessche is an Online Executive & Leadership Coach helping leaders, high-performers and entrepreneurs cultivate personal and professional leadership excellence. She combines psychology, business insight, and systemic thinking to help them lead authentically and create sustainable success.
The professionals I work with in coaching are not fragile people. They are accomplished leaders with strong track records, hard-earned credibility, and years of consistent performance.
One day, a senior professional receives her first-ever negative performance review after fifteen years of service. There was no prior feedback, no warning signs, and no conversation, just a document that suddenly redefines how the organization sees her.
What follows is not anger but self-doubt. She replays conversations, questions her judgment, and works harder to close a gap she cannot clearly see.
This is where the line between performance management and a toxic working environment becomes relevant, not because of a single incident, but because of the pattern: ambiguity replacing clarity, silence replacing feedback, and evaluation replacing dialogue.
For highly committed professionals, work is rarely just work. Their identity, self worth, and professional reputation have become intertwined. When the organization’s perception changes overnight, what is threatened is not merely a role. It is a person’s sense of self.
The hidden psychological impact of toxic working environments
Psychologist Robert Kegan spent decades studying how adults grow, not in skill or knowledge, but in the fundamental structure of how they make meaning. One of his central insights is that many adults, including many high performing professionals, operate from what he calls the Socialized Mind, a stage of development in which our sense of who we are is deeply embedded in the relationships, institutions, and roles that hold us.
This is not immaturity. At this stage, people are capable of extraordinary commitment, nuanced collaboration, and sustained loyalty. They are often exactly what organizations say they want.
However, there is a vulnerability built into this stage: when the container withdraws, the self goes with it.
When an organization slowly and deliberately distances itself from someone operating at this level of development, it is not just removing a job. It is destabilizing the scaffolding around which that person’s identity was built. The disbelief they experience, “This cannot be happening here, not to me, not after everything I have given,” is often the first sign of something deeper than a career disruption.
The pattern is not random. It follows recognizable organizational dynamics and systemic pressures that shape how high performers are evaluated, managed, and eventually phased out. Understanding those mechanisms is essential to making sense of what follows, both at the organizational level and in its personal consequences.
You can read more in “Why Loyal High Performers Are the Most Vulnerable in Today’s Workplace.”
The emotional journey from loyalty to exit
From what I observe in coaching, the experience tends to move through recognizable phases, although rarely in a clean sequence.
1. Disbelief
The signals do not compute. These are good people. This is a good company. There must be a misunderstanding. The professional tries to solve a communication problem that is not actually a communication problem.
2. Increased effort
Because the first assumption is that something went wrong with their performance, the response is to perform better. They work more hours, take more initiative, and document more evidence of their own value. This phase can last for months, and it is exhausting because the goalposts keep moving.
3. Dawning recognition
Something is not adding up. The feedback remains vague or contradictory. The process feels procedural rather than genuine. A pattern becomes visible that no amount of effort will resolve.
4. Collapse
Not everyone reaches this stage before an exit, but many do. The collapse is not just emotional; it is structural. The questions become, “If this is what my loyalty was worth, what do I actually know about myself? What have I been building toward?”
5. The long rebuild
This is where coaching becomes most important and meaningful because the rebuild, when done well, is not a restoration of what was. It is a transformation.
What employee engagement data reveal about personal development
According to Gallup, global employee engagement has declined since 2023 and now sits at its lowest level since 2020. The standard interpretation is that organizations are failing their people. That is true, but there is another interpretation worth holding alongside it.
Some of what registers as declining engagement may actually be a developmental signal. A growing number of professionals are moving toward what Kegan calls the Self-Authoring Mind, a stage in which identity is no longer primarily held by external institutions but is constructed from within.
At this stage, people do not love their work less, but they are less willing to identify too closely with a single organization. They set clearer boundaries. They ask different questions about meaning, loyalty, and reciprocity. They hold their professional commitments with a lighter grip.
The psychological recovery process after quiet firing
For professionals navigating this experience, the most important reframe is this: what happened to you is information about the organization, not a verdict on your value.
This sounds simple, but it is not. When your identity has been intertwined with an institution for years, the institution’s judgment of you and your judgment of yourself become difficult to separate. Disentangling them is the central work.
Name what was real. Your contributions were real. The relationships you built were real. The work you did mattered. None of that is erased by the way it ended.
Grieve the institution, not just the job. What is lost is not only income or status. It is also a sense of belonging and a narrative about who you were and where you were going. That deserves to be grieved properly.
Question the merger. Somewhere along the way, “I work for this company” became “I am this company.” Tracing when that happened and why is not about blame. It is about understanding the developmental pattern so that it does not simply repeat with a different employer.
Build authorship. This is the deepest work: moving from a self defined by institutional belonging to a self that can choose its commitments from the inside out. This is Kegan’s Self-Authoring Mind. A person who has rebuilt after this kind of rupture is rarely the same and is rarely as vulnerable to the same dynamic again.
Recognizing yourself in this pattern
I work with senior professionals and high performers who find themselves in exactly this kind of dynamic: externally successful, internally unsettled, and trying to make sense of a shift they did not initiate.
During a complimentary clarity call, we map your current situation, identify emerging misalignment, and define concrete options to help you reposition without losing momentum or performance. Book a complimentary clarity call.
Read more from Ellen Van Driessche
Ellen Van Driessche, Executive and Leadership Coach
Ellen Van Driessche is an Online Executive & Leadership Coach and has more than 20 years of experience in corporate HR and Occupational Psychology. She offers strong expertise in leadership development, human behaviour, and complex organisational systems. She supports high-performing professionals who seem successful on the outside but internally feel stressed, disconnected, or uncertain about their next step. She combines a European depth of insight with results-driven strategies, giving you the best of both worlds, clarity & performance, resilience & results.
