Why do high performers disengage from careers that seem successful on paper? In this article, Laura Simms unpacks how competence, conditioning and misdiagnosed burnout can hide poor fit, and argues that better support starts when organisations help people question the path they are on and redefine work around meaning sustainably.
The professionals most likely to feel disconnected from work are often the last ones anyone suspects. They perform well. They get promoted. They earn the salary that was supposed to make the sacrifices worth it. From the outside, the career looks exactly the way it was supposed to look, which is what makes it so disorienting when they find themselves staring at the ceiling at 3am wondering how they ended up here.
If you work in learning and development, the question of why high performers disengage is probably not abstract to you. Understanding what is actually driving it, and what tends to get misdiagnosed along the way, changes the kind of support worth offering.
The problem with competence as a career strategy
The advice most high achievers received early in their careers was some version of; find what you are good at and build on it. It is reasonable advice on its face, and for years, it produces results. The problem is that competence and fit are not the same thing, and they can diverge very significantly over time.
One client described it as being “highly valued and appreciated for work I don’t love doing.”
A person can be excellent at work they find emotionally empty. One client described it as being “highly valued and appreciated for work I don’t love doing.” The praise keeps coming. The promotions keep coming. And slowly, without anyone noticing, the person inside the performance has started to disappear.
I have spoken with over a thousand professionals navigating career change, and this is one of the most consistent patterns I encounter. The people who wait longest to address their disconnection are often the ones whose performance has given everyone else, including themselves, very little reason to ask questions.
They reach for the work that feels appropriately hard, because we’ve been taught that effort is what makes something count
Inherent gifts compound this. When something comes naturally to someone, they (ironically) tend to discount it. Instead, they reach for the work that feels appropriately hard, because we’ve been taught that effort is what makes something count. That’s exactly the conditioning that steers capable people away from the work that would actually fit them and toward work that produces results, but costs more than it returns.
What the disconnection actually looks like
Emotional disconnection from work rarely arrives with a dramatic announcement. It tends to show up first in the body: disrupted sleep, a low-grade dread before certain meetings, a flatness that the person dismisses as stress or overwork. By the time someone names it as a career problem, it has usually been building for years.
When people finally name it, what they describe is a split. There is the person at work, performing competence on cue, and then there is the actual person, who has checked out and is operating, as one client put it, at “60% of me.” The other 40% is in reserve because the work never asks for it.
Knowing yourself and knowing what to do are two different problems
There is also a self-knowledge paradox at work. The professionals who have done the most work on themselves, years of therapy, personality assessments, coaching, reading, and journalling, often still have no clear direction. They have enormous self-knowledge and no map for what to do with it. Knowing yourself and knowing what to do are two different problems. The disconnection lives in the gap between them.
Why the usual fixes don’t land
When a high achiever reports disengagement or a drop in their characteristic drive, the instinct is often to address the surrounding conditions first. New project, better manager, more flexibility, a promotion. These are reasonable responses to a scheduling or environment problem. The issue is that for someone who is in the wrong career, they treat the symptom without touching what is actually wrong.
I think of this as the “new curtains” problem. The person takes a lateral move to something that looks better on paper, changes the title, changes the organisation, occasionally changes the industry, and finds themselves feeling identical from the inside within six months. The walls are the same. The curtains are different.
There is also a misdiagnosis I see repeatedly in how burnout gets framed. Burnout has become almost a default explanation for high performers who are struggling, and it is not wrong exactly, but it conflates two different problems. Some people are burned out in a role that’s right, but conditions that are too intense. Others are burned out from years of trying to fit into a role that was never right for them, and rest will not resolve that. The distinction matters significantly for what kind of support is actually useful.
What the research and the real world both suggest
The evidence on employee disengagement has been consistent for long enough that it is no longer surprising. What is less often examined is the specific mechanism driving disengagement in high performers. It is rarely about pay, at least not primarily. The terms of the trade have shifted, and most people have not stopped to notice.
Rising costs of living have eaten the margin that the compensation was supposed to provide. Always-on expectations mean people are giving far more than their salary accounts for, constant mental availability that never shows up in the comp number. The golden handcuffs that once felt like security have started to feel more like an obligation, and for a person who is also questioning whether the work itself fits them, the combination produces a particular kind of exhaustion.
Primary earners carry an additional layer. Financial responsibility is real, and it is also, for many people, a very convenient reason not to examine the path too closely. “People depend on me” does double duty: it is a genuine constraint, and it is also a way of deferring a question that feels risky to ask.
What actually helps
The professionals who move through this most effectively are the ones who stop trying to find a better version of the career they already have and start asking a different question entirely: what kind of life am I actually trying to build, and what would work need to look like to support that?
That sounds simple. It’s not. It requires setting aside the career capital someone has accumulated, at least temporarily, and looking honestly at what they actually want their time to feel like, what kind of contribution has meaning for them, and what they need their work to return to them rather than just extract from them. Most people have never done that inventory in any structured way, because there are very few places where it happens.
This creates an opportunity that goes beyond learning programmes. The people in your organisations who are quietly questioning are still showing up, still delivering, still performing. The disengagement is internal, running underneath the competence, and it tends to get louder the longer it goes unaddressed.
Creating conditions where that conversation can happen, where a high achiever can say out loud that the career they built no longer fits without it being treated as a performance problem, is an incredibly meaningful form of support. So is helping people build fluency around their actual capabilities rather than just their job titles, so that when the market shifts or their life circumstances change, they have something more durable than a role to anchor themselves to.
The goal here is not to torch a career that works. It is to point the same drive, the same capability, the same ambition, at work that returns meaning, money, and joy instead of quietly draining them. The disconnection these people feel is not ingratitude. It is not weakness. It is accurate information about fit that has been building long enough to get loud, and it deserves a better response than a new project and a pay review.
Laura Simms is Founder of Your Career Homecoming
