The Curse of the High Performer: When Winning Feels Like Losing

Years ago, I worked alongside an employee named Lina*. Known for her exceptional results, she was the silent envy of many. She just closed the biggest deal in the history of the company. Yet, her triumph was met with a muted response from her peers. Teammates seemed distant, leaders restrained. No cheers followed, just quiet.

Her success, impressive as it was, left her feeling alone.

Her story is more common than you might think.

Lina is frustrated and confused. Did she not achieve one of the greatest successes in the history of the company? The reactions of her colleagues and leaders make her anxious. She feels powerless. Are they trying to push her out? Will she lose her job? Shouldn't they thank her? Didn't she just succeed? Nothing adds up.

Lina has a background in being a competitive runner. She had to take responsibility early on in her life, at home and in her family. She is familiar with the idea of putting the mission first, the team second and herself last. ?In Lina's world there are no handouts. Everything needs to be earned through hard work.

It has served her well, as she has gotten a lot of admiration for the things she achieved at an early age and she loves the adrenaline rush when she is surpassing the expectations of herself and others.

Lina has sacrificed hobbies, friendships and time with family so that she could give more and push harder at work. Her life happens at work. It gives her meaning and purpose. She is all-in, passionate about what she is doing and feels responsible for the success of the entire organisation.

What she does not understand is how her colleagues spend a lot of the work day watching YouTube videos, delivering substandard work and leaving early, when deadlines have to be met. It seems like they are actively undermining what the company is trying to achieve. She cannot comprehend how people can be so incredibly irresponsible.

What Lina does not know is that her manager increased the pressure on the rest of the team to keep up with her pace. In their 1:1s he keeps comparing their performance to Lina's which leaves them with a deep sense of inadequacy.

They know that they will never be good enough, unless they outperform Lina's achievements. They see her running at an unsustainable pace, working long hours and taking on excessive workloads. Impressed and intimidated by her drive, it seems to them like a game that they can never win.

Some of them were consistent performers who formed the bedrock of the company's success for many years. They feel undervalued or overshadowed. The reason for all their negative feelings is embodied in one person: Lina.

She on the other hand is desperately trying to win her team members respect, acceptance and recognition through her contributions and achievements. Though the more she achieves, the more they resent her.

Within teams, the presence of a high performer is both a blessing and a potential curse. People like Lina set the bar high, sometimes too high for the comfort that others are used to. Eventually, Lina, who feels the breeding resentment towards her, feels increasingly uncomfortable at the work place.

She is being asked to take on more and more of the work from her colleagues who have effectively disengaged. While her manager applauds her for that in private, he has become very cautious not to recognize her publicly, fearing that praising her could upset the rest of the team even more. It feels unfair, and she becomes increasingly disillusioned with what she is doing.

Like many high performers, Lina is not just driven by dreams of success but more often than not, by an intense fear of falling short. She is overwhelmed with the massive workloads of compensating for many of her team members. She stays up working until late each night, works on public holidays, weekends and cancels friends, family events and doctors' appointments.

A few weeks ago, she declined an attractive job offer from a recruiter, because of her sense of commitment to shoulder the teams' burdens. She felt very proud of herself, that she was so loyal, principled and responsible to put her company first.

But overhearing the stories of her colleagues bragging to each other how they partied all weekend long, then pretended to work remotey on Monday, while sunbathing hungover on the beach, started to make her feel angry. Every day felt like a never-ending marathon. Sometimes she stared at the wall in her room for hours until she snapped out of it.

Her sense of responsibility keeps her going, but her life was deterioriating. How much more was she willing to sacrifice, while her health, wellbeing and relationships were going down the drain? Instead of being thankful that she was doing their work, most of her colleagues seem to hate her anyway.

A day later, she reconnected with the recruiter and and accepted the role.

The company was left with a vacuum that would be hard to fill.

The main person to shoulder the workload of most other people team was gone and it would take enormous energy to rebuild that momentum. The team was disengaged, demotivated and had developed habits of doing only the minimum effort to stay below the threshold of being called out for it.

A culture of mediocrity took hold and the managers desperate attempts to pressure the rest of the team to perform again led to more people throwing the towel. The dynamics had led to a lose-lose scenario for everyone involved.

It did not have to be that way.

Her new manager understood who Lina was, the moment she entered the door. He had worked with highly competent and driven individuals like her for a long time and understood that, if not managed intentionally, then her drive and achievements could create chaos in the team.

As expected, Lina outperformed expectations in her first weeks on the job, but this manager did not create a regime of comparisons between her and the rest of the team. Instead he coached her to run workshops for the other team members sharing her best practices, and lessons she learned over her career. Her new team members loved her for that and looked up to her as someone to learn from.

Her manager took care that Lina's knowledge was shared with the entire team with the intention of creating more Linas in the mid- and longterm through a knowledge sharing culture. Lina thrived on her mentor role and was excited that her drive was inspiring others, rather than intimidating them.

He also knew that Lina did not need to be pushed to work hard or do a great job. Because she was successful in the past, the anticipation of continued success created an overwhelming burden of expectation in which she felt that she had to consistently outdo her past achievements.

Of course it would be easy to be excited whenever Lina enthusiastically raised her hands to tackle the next big project before even finish her current one. But understanding high performers, he also understood that she had a tendency of overcommitting, overworking and burning herself out in the process.

With Lina, one of his main jobs was helping her to set clear boundaries by defining work hours, encouraging breaks, and respecting her time off. He understood that her being burned out would negatively affect herself, the quality of her work and the dynamics in the team.

She would never proactively ask for help, as in her world that was a sign of weakness, fearing it could tarnish her reputation for competence. What she needed was reassurance that she was valued, that she was trusted, and that her voice was heard.

Her new manager told her that mistakes would be forgiven, as long as she did proper due diligence and acted with the best intentions, available resources and information. That was so much better than her former manager who either told her to "just not be stressed" which was impossible for her, or who berated her for days when she made a mistake.

Her manager checked up on her regularly to keep tight feedback loops. In her new job, she felt safe to take risks and this made her think even more creatively about how to move the company forward and solve the challenges that they were facing.

Her manager also noticed that the benchmark that Lina brought to the team exposed that some team members would not be able to catch up. By now, Lina had a good understanding of her own impact on the team and took some of them under her wing as mentees. He also saw his thoughts about some other team members confirmed, who were committed employees, but in mismatched roles.

Instead of relying on Lina alone to drive the success of the company, he held every person accountable who did not pull their weight and insisted that they would as well. Before losing them and their expertise, he worked with the leadership of other departments to help them place some of them in roles that were more aligned with their true strengths and where they thrived.

Lina rose through the ranks of the company and became a leader herself, bringing other people up and helping them perform at the highest levels. In the process she found more compassion for herself and increasingly dropped the psychological baggage of constant fear, anxiety, and turmoil that used to be her secret weapon to drive her to success.

She was terrified that taking a more balanced approach would kill her drive and will to succeed, but the opposite was true. By finding more meaning outside of her job, she decoupled her sense of worth from her work, and regained reservoirs of energy and creativity that she did not know she had. She took a more strategical approach to her work, instead of running through a treadmill of desperate busyness to prove herself, as she did in the past. It boosted her career and she became a well-respected leader in her company and industry.

Management is about understanding each individual team members motivators and stressors. High performers are wired differently than the regular employee. They thrive on challenges and set their standards high. For them, work is more than a job; it is a testament to their capability.

Not all high performers create negative dynamics in teams, and not all teams react negatively to high performers. But inadequate leadership that pits employees against each other and uses the high performer as a hammer against the rest of the team will almost always lead to negative dynamics.

High performers must be more than a convenient dumping ground for work, as a result of failing to manage other team members appropriately. Realistically, not everybody in a team will be a high performer, because the term "high" is always relative to somebody else who is not performing "high". In fact, management is the craft of making ordinary people do extraordinary things.

The quest to find the best high performers on the planet, put them together as a team and hope for the best, is a lazy approach. Managers have a responsibility to build, maintain and manage team dynamics towards positive outcomes. Sometimes, this is achieved by 2 strong performers who lead the charge and another 4 employees in the rear, each playing to their particular strengths.

An organisation should never be dependent on individuals. Overreliance on high performers can kill the ability to scale. Sustainable growth and success require a broad base of talent, processes, structure and good management, not just a few overburdened individuals. It takes the efforts of entire teams to win and well-managed high performers play an important role in them.

* Lina is fictional. Her challenges represent the common issues that many high performers I coached and worked with were facing.