Why Loyal High Performers Are the Most Vulnerable in Today's Workplace
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.
A seasoned professional with fifteen years of dedicated service suddenly receives their first-ever negative performance review. No prior feedback. No warning conversation. Just a document, carefully worded, clinically precise, that did not match anything they recognized from their own career.
A colleague, back at her desk within weeks of surgery, is called in for a formal discussion about absenteeism. Her sick note, sent to the wrong email address by the HR system, had technically arrived “late.” She had never missed significant time in a decade.
Another person watches their numbers decline, not because of anything they did, but because the market shifted. They are held personally accountable for forces entirely outside their control.
These are not isolated cases. In my coaching practice, I am seeing this pattern across companies, across industries, and across borders. The people who are sharing something in common: they are among the most loyal, most committed, most high-performing professionals in their organizations.
The growing ethics gap in organizations
Many of the companies involved in these situations present themselves as human-centered organizations. They talk about psychological safety. They publish their values. They win employer of the year awards. Yet something else is happening beneath the surface.
A growing number of high performers are finding themselves on the receiving end of what researchers now call quiet firing. It is a pattern in which employees are not formally dismissed but are gradually pushed toward the exit through administrative pressure, withheld information, shifting goalposts, or manufactured performance concerns.
A 2024 UK survey found that 25 percent of employees had experienced changes to their roles without discussion, and 23 percent said important information had been withheld from them. Yet 90 percent of respondents had never even heard the term “quiet firing.” Many had lived it without having a language for it.
The more troubling dynamic is when this is not about one rogue manager. When it happens across multiple people in the same company, to people at different levels, in different departments, that is when it stops being a people problem and starts looking like a strategy.
Is quiet firing becoming a hidden restructuring strategy?
Here is a hypothesis worth sitting with: some organizations may be using individual performance cases to achieve what would otherwise require a formal collective dismissal process.
Collective redundancies trigger legal obligations, union consultations, and public scrutiny. Individual exits do not.
This would explain the dossiers built months in advance. The administrative errors that conveniently create leverage. The sudden evaluation that breaks a years long pattern of silence. Each element, taken alone, could be a coincidence. Taken together, across multiple people in the same organization, they begin to look like architecture.
This is not a comfortable hypothesis. It implies that some organizations are making a deliberate calculation: legal correctness at the cost of ethical leadership. The employer brand is protected not because people are treated well, but because the process is managed carefully enough that it cannot be easily challenged.
Why loyal high performers are blind to the warning signs
There is a cruel irony at the heart of this pattern. The people most harmed are often the ones who trusted most completely.
According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, global employee engagement has declined for the second consecutive year, dropping to 20 percent, the lowest level since 2020. No region in the world recorded an increase in engagement.
One possible explanation is that employees are adjusting their investment in organizations that no longer appear able or willing to reciprocate the same level of commitment. But highly loyal, high-performing professionals often do the opposite.
When the signals start coming, like the changed tone in meetings, the delayed responses, and the shifted responsibilities, many do not interpret them as warnings. They interpret them as challenges. So they work harder. They take on more. They try to prove what they have never needed to prove before.
This is not a weakness. It is the logical outcome of deep identification. When your sense of self is tied to your organization over years of commitment, your first response to a threat is not protection. It is an effort.
The organization knows this. Whether consciously or not, it benefits from it.
The human cost of silent restructuring
Gallup’s 2025 report estimated that the 2024 drop in global engagement cost the global economy $438 billion in lost productivity. Organizations continue to grow despite these numbers, raising an uncomfortable question about who actually bears the cost.
The answer, in many cases, is the individual. The professional who spends months in disorienting limbo, wondering what they did wrong. The person who restructures their entire approach to work to accommodate a moving target. The high performer who eventually exits, either pushed out or burned out.
The organization moves on. The person has to rebuild. But what happens when the institution you trusted no longer reflects who you thought you were? And what does it take to rebuild a sense of self that is no longer dependent on organizational approval?
These questions are explored in The Silent Struggles of High Performers in Toxic Environments.
Are organizations rewarding loyalty or punishing it?
If you are in HR, in leadership, or in a position where these decisions get made, look at the pattern, not just the individual case.
When multiple high performers start receiving negative reviews in the same cycle, ask who is building the dossier and why.
When administrative procedures are suddenly applied with precision to people who were previously trusted implicitly, ask what changed.
The gap between stated culture and lived culture is no longer an anomaly in many organizations. It has become a default.
The people paying for that gap are the ones who believed most in the culture.
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.
