Tuesday Leadership — September 29, 2026
Organizations talk constantly about retaining high performers.
They create recognition programs.
Leadership-development programs.
Succession plans.
Bonuses.
Career paths.
Stretch assignments.
Retention discussions.
Yet many organizations simultaneously create a condition that quietly pushes their strongest people toward exhaustion:
They make high performers compensate for performance problems leadership has not addressed.
Someone misses a deadline.
Give the work to Maria.
A customer account is struggling.
Put David on it.
A project is behind.
Ask Jennifer to help.
A manager cannot solve the problem.
Bring in the strongest operator.
A presentation is not ready for the board.
The reliable person works the weekend.
Again.
At first, this may feel like recognition.
“You’re the person we can depend on.”
Over time, however, the message can become very different:
Because you perform well, you will carry more of the organization’s unresolved problems.
That is not a sustainable high-performance culture.
It is a hidden tax on high performance.
Why This Matters Now
Gartner has identified what it calls “regrettable retention” as a significant productivity concern for 2026. Its talent-strategy research says organizations need to address productivity losses associated with low performance rather than simply assuming employee retention is always positive. Gartner reported that roughly one-quarter of the workforce in its research was at least 20% less productive than average and argued that many organizations remain remarkably tolerant of low performance. Source
At the same time, Gallup’s 2026 research identifies creating accountability as the lowest-rated of seven leadership competencies it examined. Only 46% of leaders rated themselves exceptional or outstanding at holding everyone responsible for exceptional performance, while just 30% of managers gave their own leaders that assessment. Source
Another Gallup finding helps explain why accountability becomes difficult: only 22% of U.S. individual contributors strongly agreed they had a clear definition of exceptional performance for their role in an August 2025 survey. Source
And the issue reaches the people organizations most want to keep. Gartner reported in 2025 that nearly one in five employees demonstrated high performance combined with low intent to stay, highlighting the productivity and bench-strength risk associated with losing strong performers. Source
SHRM recently framed the workload problem directly: when productivity slips, top performers are often the people who take on additional work and fill the gaps, potentially increasing burnout and retention risk. Source
Taken together, these findings point to an uncomfortable leadership question:
What happens to your strongest people when leadership tolerates performance gaps elsewhere?
The Problem: High Performance Often Attracts More Work
High performers create confidence.
They meet commitments.
They solve difficult problems.
They require less supervision.
They understand the customer.
They know how the organization works.
They anticipate risk.
When leaders face pressure, turning toward those people feels logical.
And sometimes it is.
The problem begins when extraordinary contribution stops being an exception and becomes the operating model.
Consider what happens.
An employee consistently delivers 110%.
Another consistently delivers 75%.
Instead of resolving the performance difference, management redistributes critical work toward the stronger employee.
The immediate problem disappears.
The customer receives the answer.
The project reaches the milestone.
The presentation gets completed.
The production problem gets solved.
Leadership concludes that the team succeeded.
But something else happened underneath the result.
The organization used high performance to hide low performance.
That is very different from developing high performers.
What Executives Usually See
The CEO sees:
The team delivered.
The COO sees:
The problem was solved.
The customer sees:
Someone responded.
The manager sees:
The deadline was met.
Finance sees:
No immediate financial consequence.
But the high performer may see:
Another problem became mine because somebody else did not deliver.
That difference in perspective matters.
Leadership sees the outcome.
The employee experiences the system that produced it.
If this happens occasionally, it may simply be teamwork.
If it happens repeatedly, it becomes an organizational signal.
What High Performers Learn From What Leaders Tolerate
Culture is not defined only by what leaders say.
It is also defined by what people observe.
Employees notice:
Who delivers.
Who does not.
Who receives difficult assignments.
Who gets rescued.
Who gets promoted.
Who receives coaching.
Who receives consequences.
Who continually gets another chance.
And who continually gets another assignment.
This creates a powerful informal performance system.
Imagine two employees.
One consistently prepares, delivers and solves problems.
The other routinely misses expectations.
Leadership does not intervene decisively.
Instead, the organization gives critical work to the stronger employee because the business cannot afford another miss.
What lesson might the strongest employee eventually draw?
Not necessarily:
Hard work creates opportunity.
Possibly:
Hard work creates more work.
That is a dangerous cultural equation.
The Business Impact Is Larger Than Burnout
This issue is often framed primarily as employee well-being.
That matters.
But CEOs, COOs and CFOs should also understand the operating consequences.
Repeatedly transferring unfinished or difficult work toward high performers can create several hidden costs.
1. Your strongest capacity becomes consumed by recovery work
High performers should ideally spend significant time on growth, innovation, customers, improvement, strategic initiatives, developing others, and solving future problems.
Instead, they may spend increasing amounts of time fixing today’s avoidable problems.
That is an opportunity cost.
2. Low performance becomes artificially inexpensive
If someone consistently underperforms but another employee quietly closes the gap, leadership may never see the true cost.
The organization effectively subsidizes underperformance with someone else’s capacity.
The financial statements rarely identify that subsidy directly.
But it exists.
3. The organization becomes dependent on a few people
Certain employees become indispensable.
They know everything.
They solve everything.
They approve everything.
They rescue everything.
Management may interpret that as evidence of extraordinary talent.
Sometimes it is.
But it can also indicate organizational fragility.
If one person’s absence threatens execution, the company has created a key-person dependency.
4. Improvement becomes less urgent
Why repair a broken process when Sarah always fixes it?
Why develop the struggling manager when Carlos handles the escalations?
Why correct unclear responsibilities when Jennifer keeps coordinating everyone informally?
Exceptional people can unintentionally protect weak systems from necessary change.
5. Retention risk becomes concentrated where it hurts most
The people leadership depends on most may also be absorbing the largest workload and the greatest number of organizational frustrations.
Gartner’s research on high-performing “flight risks” underscores the strategic consequence: losing strong performers weakens productivity and bench strength. Source
The irony is obvious.
The organization can become so dependent on its best people that it creates the conditions that make those people reconsider staying.
Root Cause #1: Leaders Confuse Support With Avoidance
Managing low performance is uncomfortable.
There may be legitimate reasons someone is struggling.
The person may lack training, clarity, resources, experience, feedback, the right role, effective supervision, or reasonable objectives.
Leadership should diagnose those causes before reaching conclusions.
But compassionate leadership does not mean indefinite avoidance.
There is an important difference between:
Helping someone improve
and
protecting someone indefinitely from the consequences of not improving.
Harvard Business Review’s 2026 discussion of “performance-first management” reflects the broader shift toward restoring stronger attention to business performance while preserving thoughtful people management. Source
This should not mean creating a punitive environment.
It means recognizing that:
Supporting people and requiring performance are not opposing ideas.
Strong leadership requires both.
Root Cause #2: The Standard Is Not Actually Clear
Managers sometimes say:
“Everyone knows what good looks like.”
That assumption deserves examination.
Gallup found that only 22% of U.S. individual contributors strongly agreed that exceptional performance was clearly defined for their role. Source
If employees do not understand the standard, accountability becomes subjective.
One manager accepts one level of performance.
Another expects something different.
One function addresses missed commitments immediately.
Another allows them to continue.
Performance therefore becomes dependent on which leader someone reports to.
That creates inconsistency.
Before addressing underperformance, leaders should be able to answer:
What result is expected?
By when?
At what quality?
Measured how?
With what resources?
What does exceptional performance look like?
What does acceptable performance look like?
What clearly falls below the standard?
Without clarity, “accountability” can easily become opinion.
Root Cause #3: Managers Solve the Problem Instead of Managing the Performance
This happens frequently with high-performing managers.
A problem appears.
They know how to solve it.
So they solve it.
It is faster.
Safer.
More comfortable.
And often necessary in the moment.
But if the pattern continues, something dangerous happens:
The manager becomes the performance-management system.
Instead of developing the employee, clarifying the expectation or addressing the gap, the manager personally absorbs the work.
That produces short-term execution.
It also preserves the underlying problem.
This pattern can repeat upward.
The director rescues the manager.
The VP rescues the director.
The COO rescues the VP.
Eventually senior leadership is solving problems that should have been resolved several organizational levels earlier.
Root Cause #4: Leaders Wait Too Long
Performance problems rarely improve because leadership delays the conversation.
Yet managers frequently postpone difficult feedback.
They wait for the annual review.
They hope the employee recognizes the problem independently.
They redistribute work.
They quietly reduce responsibilities.
They compensate around the individual.
Then months later, the situation becomes serious.
Recent HBR research on feedback emphasizes that effective feedback requires leaders to understand how people receive and respond to difficult performance information so that attention stays focused on improving the work rather than simply defending oneself. Source
The implication is not that difficult conversations should be avoided.
It is that they should be handled skillfully.
The earlier the performance conversation happens, the more options leadership usually has.
The Leadership Standard: Diagnose Before You Judge
Not every performance gap is a motivation problem.
A useful leader diagnoses the situation first.
Knows what is expected
Perhaps the goal is unclear.
Knows how to do it
Perhaps capability is missing.
Has the necessary resources
Perhaps the system makes success unnecessarily difficult.
Has enough capacity
Perhaps workload makes the standard unrealistic.
Receives useful feedback
Perhaps the employee does not know performance is below expectations.
Is in the right role
Perhaps the person’s strengths do not match the work.
Is willing to meet the requirement
This is the point where accountability becomes different from development.
If expectations are clear, capability exists, resources are available, feedback has been provided and sufficient opportunity for improvement has been given, leadership eventually has to confront the remaining performance gap.
Otherwise someone else usually absorbs it.
And that someone is often the person who already performs well.
The High-Performer Tax
A useful diagnostic concept for executives is what we might call the:
High-Performer Tax
It is the additional workload, responsibility, emotional burden and recovery activity assigned to strong employees because unresolved performance gaps exist elsewhere.
It can appear as:
Extra customers.
Extra projects.
Extra direct reports.
Emergency assignments.
Informal mentoring.
Weekend work.
Quality corrections.
Presentation repairs.
Escalation management.
Customer recovery.
Training weaker peers.
Repeated problem solving.
None of those activities is inherently negative.
Many are legitimate development opportunities.
The distinction is whether they are:
Investment
or
Compensation for organizational weakness.
A stretch assignment that develops a future executive is an investment.
Repeatedly asking the same executive to rescue poorly managed projects is compensation.
Leaders need to know the difference.
Seven Questions for the Executive Team
1. Who receives the work when somebody else misses?
Names will appear quickly.
Pay attention to how often the same names appear.
2. Which people would create the greatest operational disruption if they stopped rescuing problems tomorrow?
Those employees may represent hidden organizational dependencies.
3. Where are we calling something a “development opportunity” that is actually workload transfer?
Not every additional responsibility develops someone.
4. Which performance problems have existed for more than six months?
Why?
Lack of clarity?
Capability?
Management avoidance?
Role design?
Or unwillingness to act?
5. Do employees know what exceptional performance actually means?
Do not assume.
Ask them.
6. Are our managers equipped to have difficult performance conversations?
Performance management requires more than forms and ratings.
Managers need judgment, coaching capability and the confidence to address problems early.
7. If our strongest employees stopped compensating for weaknesses elsewhere tomorrow, what would break?
This may be the most revealing question.
Whatever breaks is probably where leadership should look first.
What CEOs Should Watch
CEOs should pay attention to organizational dependency.
Who gets invited whenever something important goes wrong?
Who is always added to the critical initiative?
Who knows how everything works?
Who repeatedly receives the “special assignment”?
Those employees may indeed be future enterprise leaders.
But they may also be signaling weaknesses in capability, process, succession, accountability and organizational design.
The CEO’s objective should not be simply to retain these people.
It should be to make sure the enterprise is not abusing their reliability.
What COOs Should Watch
For a COO, the high-performer tax often appears operationally.
Look for recurring patterns:
The same plant leader fixing every major issue.
The same supply-chain leader resolving every shortage.
The same project manager recovering every delayed project.
The same engineer solving every quality problem.
The same customer-service leader handling every escalation.
Ask:
Why does this person repeatedly need to intervene?
The answer may reveal a structural issue that deserves more attention than the individual incident.
What CFOs Should Watch
Underperformance creates costs that may be distributed throughout the P&L rather than appearing as a single line.
Think about:
Overtime.
Rework.
Turnover.
Recruiting.
Premium freight.
Missed deadlines.
Management time.
Customer concessions.
Delayed projects.
Lost productivity.
Training.
Errors.
Opportunity cost.
If stronger employees constantly compensate for weaker execution, reported headcount cost may significantly understate the real economic impact.
Performance management is therefore not merely an HR process. It is an operating and financial discipline.
What Leaders Can Do
Define performance more clearly
Employees should understand both expected results and behavioral standards.
Differentiate temporary difficulty from chronic underperformance
Everyone can struggle.
One difficult quarter should not define a career.
But recurring performance gaps require different intervention.
Address problems earlier
Do not wait until frustration has accumulated for months.
Protect high performers from becoming permanent rescuers
Challenge them.
Develop them.
Give them larger responsibilities.
But do not make them the default solution for every unresolved organizational weakness.
Track recovery work
Ask managers periodically:
How much of our strongest people’s time is spent fixing work that should have been completed correctly elsewhere?
You may be surprised by the answer.
Create credible improvement plans
Gartner recommends clearer, more prescriptive improvement mechanisms with defined development goals and timelines for employees whose productivity remains below expectations. Source
Improvement should have:
A clear performance gap.
A defined expectation.
Specific actions.
Support.
Milestones.
A timeline.
Feedback.
And a decision point.
Indefinite ambiguity helps nobody.
The ENLOSA Perspective
At EGBS — ENLOSA: Global Business Solutions, leadership development should never mean simply asking high performers to carry more.
The objective is to build an organization where expectations are clear, managers coach effectively, performance conversations happen early, high performers receive genuine development opportunities, struggling employees receive appropriate support, accountability remains consistent, and leaders address systemic weaknesses instead of repeatedly assigning stronger people to compensate for them.
That combination requires something many organizations struggle to maintain:
Compassion + Accountability
Compassion without accountability can allow performance problems to continue.
Accountability without compassion can create fear and destroy trust.
Heroic leadership requires both.
Strong leaders care about the individual.
And they protect the performance standards of the organization.
Those responsibilities are not contradictory.
They reinforce each other.
Is This Happening in Your Organization?
Ask yourself:
- Are the same employees always rescuing important projects?
- Do your strongest managers receive additional responsibility every time another manager struggles?
- Are high performers regularly working longer hours than everyone around them?
- Do you have performance problems everyone discusses privately but leadership rarely addresses directly?
- Are employees unclear about what exceptional performance means?
- Do managers avoid difficult conversations until annual reviews?
- Would several important processes fail if one or two key people left tomorrow?
If several answers are yes, your organization may not have a retention problem yet.
You may have a leadership-system problem that will eventually become a retention problem.
The starting point is not another recognition program.
It is understanding where performance expectations, leadership capability, accountability and workload have become disconnected.
Explore ENLOSA Leadership Development
ENLOSA: Global Business Solutions
Strategy. Leadership. Execution.
enlosa@enlosa.com | +1 (877) 246-1109
References
- Gartner — Four Talent Management Trends for 2026. Gartner identifies regrettable retention and low productivity as major talent-management concerns and recommends clearer performance-improvement mechanisms. Source
- Gartner — Future of Talent Strategy. Guidance on productivity, internal mobility and development-driven performance management. Source
- Gallup — How Can Leaders Build Accountability and High Performance at Work? Research identifying accountability as leaders’ lowest-rated competency and examining expectations, coaching and performance. Source
- Gallup — Strengths-Based Accountability Practices. Gallup reports that only 22% of individual contributors strongly agree they have a clear definition of exceptional performance for their role. Source
- Gartner — Avoiding Regrettable Attrition. Research on high-performing employees with low intent to stay and the productivity and bench-strength implications of losing them. Source
- Harvard Business Review — The Case for Performance-First Management. A 2026 examination of the changing balance between people-centered management and stronger performance expectations. Source
- Harvard Business Review — Great Leaders Know Which Emotions Their Feedback Will Trigger. Research on delivering negative performance feedback in ways that keep attention focused on improvement. Source
- SHRM — Protect Your High Performers. SHRM highlights the risk of strong employees absorbing additional workload when productivity falls elsewhere. Source
#TuesdayLeadership, #Leadership, #HighPerformance, #HighPerformers, #Accountability, #PerformanceManagement, #LeadershipDevelopment, #TalentManagement, #EmployeeRetention, #ExecutiveLeadership, #CEO, #COO, #CFO, #OrganizationalDevelopment, #Culture, #HeroicLeadership, #EGBS
Leave a Reply