Your High Performers Are Lonely

What leaders get wrong about retaining top talent

There’s an Alain de Botton quote I’ve carried with me for a lot of my career:

“Loneliness is the tax we have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind.”

I share this sentiment often, usually with the delightfully talented people I am blessed to call friends, because I find it comforting to those who resonate with it. It’s also wisdom that doesn’t always surface on the mainstream advice circuit. Of the many words that have been spilled over high performers and their assorted traits, very few get dedicated to unpacking what it feels like to be a high performer at work—especially the ways it can feel hard.

I’ve been a high performer for most of my working life. That’s not a self-assessment. When you’re in the top 10% of someone’s talent pool, they tell you. Companies label and communicate these things because high performers are transformative to businesses, and leaders benefit from keeping tabs on them. If you accept the Pareto Principle (despite the fact that it’s not based on any actual mathematical law), 20% of the people in any given organization are generating 80% of the value while also buoying the performance of other employees.

In my experience, once you are labeled as part of that 20%, you are treated, promoted, and even paid differently. True high performers are difficult to find and painful to replace, so smart employers go to great lengths to recruit and retain them. Throughout my career, I’ve been promoted outside of normal timelines, received headcount when others had to fight for it, and been granted exceptions to policies that were nonnegotiable for others. Friends have been put on accelerated growth tracks, given atypical bonuses, and given access to senior leaders very early in their careers.

This type of treatment really does make a difference for high performers. It helps them feel appreciated, recognized, and justified in the outsized effort they’re willing to put into their jobs. And yet, so many companies still struggle to hold onto their top talent, even in one of the worst hiring markets the U.S. has seen in decades.

There are plenty of explanations for why high performers leave. Some of the common theories include: they get bored, they run out of opportunities, or they burn out from shouldering too much of the work. These can all be true, but I’ve never left a job for any of these reasons, and I don’t know anyone else who has either. The best employees I know create opportunities for themselves, embrace responsibility, and take pride in handling high-volume work. The throughline in why they quit jobs has almost nothing to do with scope, compensation, or feeling burdened. They leave because being in the “20%” of anything, definitionally, means having a different experience than the majority of people you interact with. And unless you or your boss actively address it, that feeling of difference will leave you miserably, debilitatingly lonely.

When I say lonely, I don’t mean friendless. High performers get invited to team happy hours too. However, when your perception and experience of work differ materially from those of most of your colleagues, it causes the disorienting, soul-crushing type of loneliness that makes it feel like you are watching the world through one-way glass.

High performers often carry a heavier sense of responsibility. They want to solve higher-stakes problems—and more of them. They get looped in late to fix problems they saw coming from the start and swoop in to raise the quality of eleventh-hour work. These tendencies are critical for achieving sustained high performance. They can also make you feel like you’re the only one who cares.

It doesn’t start with frustration or sadness. For me, the experience of feeling different began as pride. I was called into situations that others couldn’t fix and tasked with projects that others couldn’t be trusted with. There’s tremendous satisfaction in that sensation of being someone who others count on—it makes you feel needed and secure. However, for me, the pride wore thin when the feeling of being needed was drowned out by the realization that it was midnight and I actually wasn’t at happy hour with everyone else. I was at my desk.

In that moment, I was a twelve-year-old goalkeeper standing in the penalty box again: I was gifted, needed, and allowed to wear a special uniform—but all my friends were on the other side of the field.

The thing about this type of loneliness is that, over time, it always ends up costing more than it’s worth.

The loneliness of high performers might be inevitable, but the pain and churn don’t have to be. A lot of high-impact exits could be avoided if more companies understood that being excellent at your job is emotionally taxing in ways that aren’t solved by bonuses or expanded scope. Your high performers don’t need more recognition. They need company.

When I reflect on the times I felt most engaged at work—and the moments my friends found the most joy in theirs—some consistent patterns show up. All of them are simple, and most are admittedly more easily said than done, but they are worth investing in.

1. Surround your top performers with peers.
When you’re a high-performance employee, nothing is more sacred than a peer. Someone who cares, tries, scrutinizes, and delivers the way you do. Even limited exposure to others who hold similar standards, even in different disciplines, makes the day-to-day feel more sustainable. If your team doesn’t have enough talent density to make your top performers feel like they have peers, connect them with other high performers across the company. Give them opportunities to collaborate, even on something small. A side quest with someone who challenges them can be enough to keep a high performer feeling motivated.

2. Don’t sentence them to endless firefighting.
Leaders love to treat their best people like a rapid-response unit—pulled off their own work and dropped into whatever fire needs putting out next. While that strategy might help stop the bleeding in the short term, it’s also the fastest way to make your high performers feel alone. When you spend most of your time cleaning up mistakes you saw coming, dragging demoralized project teams up the last leg of the hill, and patching systems that were poorly built to begin with, it’s hard not to feel like the only person who cares. It also keeps your best all-around players on defense instead of offense. If you want to keep them engaged, let your high performers spend their time on what’s most important—not just what’s most disastrous.

3. Offer coaching instead of management.
Most high performers don’t need to be told how to do their jobs, but they do need someone to help them navigate how the work feels. Who you allow to manage your highest performers matters a lot. There aren’t enough formatting options in the world to convey how much it matters. High performers can easily get stifled under managers who feel threatened by them or who need to control their employees to feel like a leader. And while bad managers are a talent repellent in general, they are poison to your high performers.

If you do one thing on this list, be wildly intentional about who your high performers are being managed by. Whenever possible, pair them with managers who are also high performers and have the ability to coach and relate to them. Nothing (!) churns top talent faster than being managed by someone who tries to keep them small.

4. Acknowledge the loneliness out loud.
One of the most impactful things a past manager did for me was to name what I was feeling without asking me to explain it. “You’re always going to feel lonely waiting for people to catch up to a place you already arrived,” she told me once. That kind of recognition doesn’t fix the feeling, but it makes it easier to keep going. For me, hearing “you’re going to have to learn to accept this feeling, and that’s okay” mattered infinitely more than any “you did a good job” ever could.

Taken together, these principles create the conditions that make high performance sustainable. And while leaders have a lot to gain by taking responsibility for creating those conditions, high performers have a role in protecting themselves, too.

If you think this essay is about you, you have a task too. Ask for what you need. Ask for peers who push you and managers who see you clearly. Ask for space to build and time away from burning projects. Ask for help in finding a mentor who can help you grow and someone skilled enough to give you meaningful feedback. The bonuses and special treatment are luxuries, but these things are not. They’re foundational to finding a durable sense of belonging at work.

More responsibility won’t fix loneliness. Neither will more money or finding bigger problems to solve. You can pursue these performance rewards all you want, but they ultimately feed a system that already asks too much of the people holding it up. If you want to keep performing at the highest level, you have to build a structure around you that makes it possible to keep going. Even the best systems (yes, probably yours) need more than one pillar to stand.

Thanks, always, for reading. Talk soon.