Your Best Employees May Be Performing Well, but Are They Still Thriving?
Yaryna Carpenter is a PCC ICF Executive, Leadership and Team Coach working with leaders and teams in high-trust, reputation-sensitive environments. She helps clients strengthen clarity, communication, cultural intelligence, and better judgment as they grow and scale globally.
Every organisation has people it can depend on. They deliver results, meet deadlines and rarely need reminding of their responsibilities. Their performance reviews are positive, their managers trust them, and their careers appear to be progressing exactly as they should.
Yet some of these professionals are quietly questioning the very success they have worked so hard to achieve. They may still enjoy the recognition, financial security and professional reputation that come with their achievements. What has changed is something less visible: their enthusiasm, their sense of direction, or the feeling that their work still reflects who they are and what matters to them. The difficulty is that organisations rarely notice this kind of disconnection while performance remains strong.
Having spent more than twenty years in adult business education, leadership development and, more recently, professional coaching, I have become increasingly interested in what happens between the visible signs of career success and a person's internal experience of that success.
We spend considerable time evaluating people's capabilities, setting targets and identifying development needs. Far less attention is given to whether the professional lives people have built still provide the meaning and fulfilment they once hoped to find.
For leaders, this may be one of the most overlooked dimensions of sustainable performance.
When success and fulfilment stop travelling together
Research published in Psychological Reports in January 2026 offers an interesting perspective on the relationship between professional self-realisation and psychological wellbeing.
Ukrainian psychologist Vsevolod Zelenin examined 163 Ukrainian IT professionals living in Ukraine and abroad, exploring psychological indicators in the context of the profound disruption caused by Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022.
The study considered factors including life purpose, self-esteem, adaptability and readiness for change. Before the invasion, 73% of participants demonstrated a high level of life purpose, while 70% showed a high readiness for change. Among professionals who remained in Ukraine, the proportion reporting high positive self-esteem subsequently fell from 65% to 39%.
The circumstances of war and displacement are exceptional and cannot be compared directly with ordinary workplace pressures. Nevertheless, the findings illustrate how significantly people's psychological experience can change when the world around them changes.
The research also examines the potential contribution of coaching to professional self-realisation, although its findings should not be interpreted as conclusive evidence of coaching's causal effects. What particularly interests me is the broader question of how people maintain a sense of professional identity, purpose and agency when their circumstances or priorities evolve.
In business, we tend to assume that professional development moves in one direction: greater competence, increased responsibility, higher earnings and, eventually, more senior positions. Human development is rarely so straightforward. A person can become more successful by external standards while feeling increasingly disconnected from the career they have created. That is a conversation organisations are not particularly well equipped to have.
The invisible dissatisfaction of high achievers
Consider a professional who has spent twenty years building a successful career. They have invested in education, developed expertise, accepted increasingly demanding responsibilities and achieved the level of financial security they once dreamed of. From the outside, everything suggests that their efforts have paid off.
Yet the work no longer excites them. The promotion they spent years pursuing brings surprisingly little satisfaction. Their professional identity has become so closely connected to their achievements that questioning their career feels almost like questioning themselves.
This is not necessarily burnout, nor does it automatically indicate a mental health problem. Sometimes it is simply the recognition that the goals which once provided direction no longer feel meaningful.
In coaching conversations, I have noticed how difficult this can be for successful professionals to acknowledge. They often arrive with a clear understanding of what they should be doing. They know how to set objectives, manage priorities and deliver results. What they find harder to articulate is what they genuinely want.
There can be a considerable difference between achieving the next career milestone and feeling that the milestone is worth pursuing. This distinction becomes especially important in organisations where ambition is associated almost exclusively with upward mobility.
We assume that a high-performing specialist should become a manager, that a successful manager should pursue a directorship, and that an accomplished executive should continually seek a larger role. But what happens when the person no longer wants the next step? We rarely consider that a desire for greater autonomy, deeper expertise, more creative work or a different balance of responsibilities might represent professional growth rather than a lack of ambition.
When organisations fail to recognise this, they risk developing people towards careers those individuals no longer wish to have.
Why another leadership programme may not be the answer
Much of my professional career has been connected with business education and organisational learning. I have seen the extraordinary value of well-designed development programmes, particularly when they respond to genuine business needs. I have also learned that not every performance challenge is a knowledge or skills problem.
A manager who hesitates to make decisions may not need another course in decision-making. They may understand the process perfectly well but lack confidence in their judgement.
A senior professional who seems reluctant to take on new responsibilities may not require motivational training. They may be questioning whether the proposed career direction is right for them.
An employee who appears disengaged may not need a more ambitious set of targets. They may need an opportunity to reconsider what meaningful contribution looks like at this stage of their career.
This is where coaching offers something different from conventional training. Rather than beginning with the assumption that a particular skill needs improving, coaching gives people space to examine their thinking, recognise patterns and explore the relationship between their choices, values and ambitions.
In my experience, the most productive conversations often begin with a relatively practical concern and gradually reveal a more fundamental question. Someone wants to become more confident in meetings but discovers that their difficulty is connected to a fear of challenging authority. Another wants to become more productive but realises they have been accepting responsibilities that no longer align with their priorities.
The value of coaching lies partly in helping people recognise these connections for themselves. The outcome is not simply greater self-awareness. That awareness can become the foundation for more deliberate decisions and meaningful action.
Of course, coaching is not a universal solution. It cannot compensate for unreasonable workloads, poor management or a dysfunctional organisational culture. Nor should it be confused with psychological treatment when specialist support is needed.
Its contribution is more specific: helping individuals examine their circumstances, clarify what matters and identify what they can realistically influence.
What are leaders failing to ask to employees?
One of the challenges of modern leadership is that managers are expected to understand their people while simultaneously delivering demanding commercial objectives.
Performance conversations naturally focus on measurable outcomes. Targets are reviewed, achievements recognised and development plans agreed. These discussions are necessary, but they rarely provide a complete picture.
Imagine a manager asking a successful employee how they feel about their work rather than immediately discussing their next promotion. The answer might be unexpected.
Perhaps the employee enjoys solving complex problems but dislikes managing people. Perhaps they would prefer greater independence instead of a larger team. Perhaps they are curious about another part of the business but have never felt comfortable expressing that interest.
None of these discoveries requires the organisation to abandon its objectives. They simply provide a more accurate understanding of the person expected to deliver them.
I believe curiosity is one of the most underrated leadership capabilities. Not the superficial curiosity of asking employees whether everything is fine, but a genuine willingness to question assumptions about what motivates them.
What gave someone satisfaction five years ago may no longer be relevant. Recognition that once felt rewarding may become less important than flexibility or professional autonomy. An ambitious employee may discover that contributing to a meaningful project matters more than acquiring a prestigious title. These changes are not necessarily signs of declining motivation. They may reflect a growing understanding of personal values and priorities.
Leaders who make space for such conversations can make better-informed decisions about development, career progression and responsibility. They may also discover that some of their assumptions about employee engagement have been wrong.
The danger of measuring everything except meaning
Business leaders need measurable results. Financial performance, productivity, customer satisfaction and employee retention are essential indicators of organisational health. The difficulty arises when those indicators become the only definition of success.
A company may achieve its quarterly objectives while employees experience increasing frustration. A department may meet its performance targets while losing the enthusiasm and creativity that made it successful in the first place.
These patterns are not always immediately visible, particularly when employees have developed strong habits of professional responsibility. People can continue producing good work long after their sense of connection to it has weakened.
I am not suggesting that organisations should attempt to measure every aspect of personal fulfilment. Nor should managers become responsible for ensuring that employees find complete meaning in their professional lives. Work is only one part of human experience.
But organisations influence that experience through the roles they create, the behaviours they reward and the opportunities they offer. A culture that recognises only promotions and financial results communicates a particular understanding of success. A culture that also values learning, contribution, autonomy and collaboration offers employees a broader range of possibilities.
This becomes increasingly relevant as artificial intelligence changes the nature of professional work. Technical knowledge remains important, but many professionals are already reconsidering how their expertise creates value in an environment where established tasks can be automated or transformed.
For some, this creates exciting opportunities. For others, it challenges a professional identity developed over many years.
Preparing people for such changes requires more than teaching them to use new technology. It also means helping them recognise transferable strengths, explore unfamiliar possibilities and remain open to redefining their contribution.
The organisations that navigate these transitions effectively will need leaders who understand both business transformation and the human experience of change.
Perhaps we need a different definition of growth
When I reflect on my own professional journey, from teaching and business education to leadership development, mentoring and coaching, I recognise that growth has not always meant moving further along a predetermined career path. At different stages, it has involved learning new skills, accepting unfamiliar responsibilities, changing direction and reconsidering what meaningful work looks like.
I suspect many experienced professionals would recognise something similar in their own careers. There are periods when achievement and advancement provide tremendous motivation. There are others when the more important task is to pause, reassess and decide what deserves our energy next.
Successful organisations need ambitious, capable people who take responsibility for results. Nothing about professional self-realisation diminishes the importance of accountability or performance. But if we want people to contribute sustainably, we need to acknowledge that their relationship with success may change over time.
The next important leadership conversation may therefore have little to do with targets, competencies or promotion opportunities. It might begin with a manager genuinely wanting to understand whether a valued employee still finds satisfaction in the work they do.
Not everyone will welcome that question, and not every answer will lead to a simple solution. But the willingness to ask signals something important: that the organisation sees the person beyond their performance record.
The employee who delivers exceptional results may not be looking for another challenge, a larger salary or a more impressive title. They may be looking for a reason to feel excited about Monday morning again. Unless somebody asks, their manager may never know.
Read more from Yaryna Carpenter
Yaryna Carpenter, PCC ICF Executive, Leadership & Team Coach
Yaryna Carpenter is a PCC ICF Executive, Leadership and Team Coach working with leaders and teams in high-trust, reputation-sensitive environments. She helps clients strengthen clarity, communication, cultural intelligence, and better judgment as they grow and scale globally. With over 20 years of international experience, Yaryna brings a structured, human-centred approach to leadership, team performance, and cross-cultural growth.
