Why Your A-Players Are Pulling Back (and How to Stop It Before It Spreads)

That team member who always showed up to work a few minutes early because they were so excited to be there. Or that person who always raised their hand to volunteer, whether it was to take on a new project or help someone get something done. Or how about the person that always you knew with 100% certainty would always get their work done on time, never had to check in. Those people that we relied on so, so well, those high performers, right now they are under threat.

And that is from this phenomenon called quiet cracking. And this is something that is facing industries far and wide, companies big and small, is when our high performers have slowly reached their max. Between change fatigue and all of the uncertainty and threats around AI and automation and how hard it is to find another job right now. High performers are facing this more than anyone else. And they don’t always let you know it. So this is why on today’s episode, I’m going to talk all about how to spot quiet cracking and what to do about it.

Because we are not in a moment where we want to lose our high performers, the ones that are helping to carry our team and help get done all of the goals that we have for our team. I’m Leah Garvin, and this is The New Manager Playbook, where I am on a mission to make managing your team the easiest part of your job. And part of what makes it easier is knowing you have those clutch A players that are always there.

And okay, it’s not always, it’s not forever. We always know that there can be change. But when you have those members of your team that you have really built up, and they seem committed, and they are there in it for the long haul, and then something starts to shift. And you’re like, oh no, what do I do? So I really want to help you get ahead of this. Because there is all the data out there. 42% or 44% I believe of turnover is preventable.

Gallup has found that high performers have said, well, if my manager just asked me, I would have maybe said there was something I wanted to fix. So it’s not just a turnover issue though. Right now with quiet cracking, because it is hard to find a job out there, because of layoffs and do more with less and restructuring and a lot of uncertainty, a lot of times people are staying in jobs where they’re still feeling pretty burned out.

And that’s why you want to do something about it, because you won’t always get the signal from someone that they’re fried by them leaving. Of course, we don’t want to wait till that point. And that’s why I mentioned the voluntary turnover and why we always want to proactively check in with our teams. But I want to talk about quiet cracking and its effects first, because it actually starts to create cracks, to use the same metaphor, in the whole culture of your team.

Because think about it, if this is something that our high performers are facing more than anybody else, because they were the ones where you can really see that shift. They were stepping up, they were volunteering, they were taking on more, they were going above and beyond. And now they started to take a step back, that’s sending a signal to everyone, especially people that were not going above and beyond, that we can take the foot off the gas a little bit.

And well, you probably wanted those other folks to keep the foot on, maybe press a little harder. So the challenge with quiet cracking is it’s the high performers changing how they’re showing up. And we first and foremost need to be aware of this, because like I said, our team members don’t always come to us when they’re feeling frustrated, when they’re feeling burned out. They don’t always tell us. In fact, a lot of times people that are used to being the go-to and like to really be reliable and want to pull the weight, they feel like, I just got to keep muscling through.

They’re not going to come forward many times and say, hey, listen, I can’t take this much on. They don’t want to rock the boat. So they quietly step back a little bit. Now I want to differentiate between quiet quitting and quiet cracking, because they’re very, very different. Quiet quitting was that phenomenon that was talked about, I think a couple of years ago now, three or four years ago, around people feeling taken advantage of by their job or spread too thin.

And instead of quitting, they chose to do the bare minimum. And they’re like, screw it. Like, I’m not going to leave because I don’t want to deal with looking for their job, but I’m just going to do the bare minimum until they fire me or get rid of me or someone says something. So quiet quitting is a conscious choice to slack. Quiet cracking is when your high performers are fried, they’re burned out, they’re spread too thin.

And so they’re not actually able to step up in the same way as they were. It’s not a choice. It’s a response to the change fatigue, to the strategy shifts, to just like, it’s hard to bring that enthusiasm when there’s been so many things going on. It’s hard to bring that same energy when you are taking on the job of two or three other people because your team isn’t able to hire back fills. So it’s this energy depletion and people are staying in their jobs because there are not a lot of openings or because there is uncertainty.

And maybe you don’t want to go through that right now and be a new person in the company when there’s layoffs going on. And there’s, you know, for a job that you find there’s 200 other applicants and it just feels too risky. So folks are staying in jobs after they’ve reached this point of starting to feel like they’re cracking. Now it’s not enough just to have someone stay because if their work productivity is going down and they’re starting to sort of bring this sense of malaise to the team, that’s where it starts to have this ripple effect.

And I think one of the biggest challenges is, right, is your high performers often have a huge impact, not just on work output, but on the culture on the team. They brought the energy, they brought the enthusiasm, they were strong collaborators, they made you want to be there. And when that’s not showing up, other people that really relied on that, they’re lacking that too. So it has a really big impact and it starts to really deflate the energy on the team holistically.

It also, like I said, it shows lower performers or folks that weren’t really stepping up that like, hey, all relative, we’ve all like taken, we’re all taking on less work and it could send the wrong signal around, hey, this person A, they were going above and beyond, they were operating at 120%. So them going back to 100 or even 90, that’s pretty good. But someone that was around 80% sees that and they’re like, okay, I guess I can slow down.

Now they’re not delivering at all of what they need to be doing. So it starts to send the wrong messages. And it also, you know, it can bring you down as the leader. I said it, your A players, your high performers, they keep you excited because they show you, wow, like this is, this is what’s possible in this team. They refuel you. It is, it truly is a flywheel, right? You’re really investing your team and when they’re investing the energy back, that creates a real excitement to be at work.

And so you might notice it starts to make you feel burned out as a leader. And you feel like, I don’t want to come to work anymore. No one’s even wants to be here. And this is the thing that a lot of my clients are coming with. My, my corporate clients that I do workshops and trainings and coaching with, as well as business owners and founders saying, I’m looking around and I don’t feel like my team members are excited.

And it makes me ask myself why I’m doing this and why I’m here and what I can do. And if you’re feeling that as a leader, you are not alone. I’m hearing this more and more. And, and the quiet cracking phenomenon, I think it’s not just something we want to deal with because of our teams, but it actually starts to make us question, do I even want to run this business anymore? Do I even want to be a manager anymore?

Do I even want to do this? When we’re around a bunch of people that are not excited and they barely look like they look like they could barely be dragged out of bed to go to work. Like it sucks. How are you supposed to be the only one bringing enthusiasm? So if you’re feeling that again, that’s why we want to get ahead of this because it starts to burn you out just as quickly. So what do we do about it?

Well, I’ve got to say it. It’s the fundamentals. We go back to our foundational manager skills. And that’s why, you know, when, whenever there’s a challenge, I know, and I say, well, we go back to the basics. It’s because it’s in these moments where everyone’s spread too thin, where you’re starting to feel like, Oh my God, my high performers, they’re at risk. What do I do? And you’re stressed out and you’re running on that. We actually lose the fundamentals.

It’s the first thing that goes, we reschedule or we cancel our one-on-ones. We don’t have career conversations because there’s so much uncertainty. We don’t really talk to our team about the strategy because we don’t want to answer questions that we don’t want to answer, right? Like the fundamentals go out the window. We’ve got to double down on those. That’s what the new manager playbook was all about is like getting really dialed in on the foundations, on the fundamentals, because those are the things that keep your team performing and make your job easier.

It’s the truth. Because if you don’t have your one-on-ones with your team members, you have no ability to be getting ahead of this because you are just basically observing what you can see in passing or you’re asking your team over, Hey, how are you doing? I’m good. Whatever. And you are relying on the 7% of communication that is the words missing the 93 other percent. We cannot cancel our one-on-ones. We cannot avoid having career conversations because we don’t know the future of the business or the team.

The career conversations are actually where we figure out what this person’s excited about so that we can pair those responsibilities to that or delegate better. We’ve got to recognize wins. Hey, we might be launching this product in two years and there’s all this competitive stuff going on. We’re not even sure. So we’ve got to recognize wins along the way, celebrate incremental milestones. And one of the best ways to celebrate wins is through my snippets tool. Now I’ve shared this before, but if you have not gotten this, you are missing out because this is a tool that I developed back when I was working at Google on, well, how do we make sure we have a clear sense of what people are working on, where they’re stuck, and most importantly, how to recognize wins when wins may feel few and far between, because that’s what fuels people.

And if you head to leahgarvin.com slash snippets, you can get this template where you send it out to your team every Friday. You ask them, Hey, what were the top three accomplishments of the week? You know, where are you feeling stuck? What are the priorities for next week? So that you can celebrate with them. And this tool has been game-changing for my clients, for anybody that I’ve shared it with, because they have a vehicle to always be ahead of seeing what the wins are to keeping people prioritized and to seeing where they’re feeling stuck.

So it’s honestly like the tool to prevent this quiet cracking as well. So check it out because not having a sense of where things are at, this prevents you from getting ahead of this. leahgarvin.com slash snippets. You are going to want to implement this right away. It’s super lightweight. It takes people like under five minutes to fill out and it’s game-changing because the biggest piece, I said it, it’s we, we start with our foundational one-on-ones. We have career conversations.

We recognize work. One of the number one reasons people start to feel burned out, look for other jobs is the lack of recognition. We feel like I don’t, doesn’t even feel like I matter here. Well, when you’re busy and you’re spread thin, you may not really be able to come up for air to even look around. You may not be having the conversations with your teams around what the wins are. So you need to give them a vehicle to be able to report that proactively.

A lot of folks struggle with the good work gets noticed kind of trap. They don’t want to be showing off. They don’t want to be advertising it. So giving them the snippets where they have a regular process of sharing that it’s honestly transformational. And then it allows you to get ahead of the quiet cracking because you can, you know, one of the biggest combat, you know, things that combat that malaise and that burnout is feeling like, well, the work I’m doing matters.

The work I’m doing is important. It’s making an impact. This is a resilience builder. And when you think about it, if that, if quiet cracking is the lack of enthusiasm, the sort of like early signs of burnout, this, this kind of degradation of feeling excited and like wanting to be there and really wanting to go above and beyond, well, we need to build resilience on the other side, right? That’s the, that’s the cure for this. And so resilience is about for our teams is built through, you know, potentially getting a little bit of buffer and time and space in our work.

But if that can’t be given, if we can’t give them that space, if we cannot slow down or take on less work, we have to feel recognized. We have to feel like it matters. And it’s like amounting to something bigger. And that’s where recognition comes in. So quiet cracking, as I said, it may not. And it’s actually right now they’re showing it’s not causing people to leave. It’s the fact that people are staying and feeling like this.

That’s why it’s such a big impact on productivity and output and on the culture in your team. Because when people stay that are in a funk and are feeling like, ugh, I don’t know if I can do this. That is the sentiment that you’re going to get from everybody. So you want to get ahead of it. You’re going to be talking to your team members, understanding what their goals are. And I have episodes on one-on-ones on career conversations and recognition because there are so many things that you can be doing.

And in the new manager playbook book, I talk all about those things as well. There’s so many things you can be doing day to day that take two minutes that will be game changing for turning this around. And again, if you haven’t tried snippets, this is going to help you with all three of those. So I urge you to try it. Leigharver.com slash snippets. It’s a tool that just makes this easier because it doesn’t have to feel hard to know like, what, like, how am I going to get my head around this?

How am I address it? It might take a little time, a little bit of, you know, trial and error, but knowing where to start doesn’t have to be a mystery. Where do you start? You have someone share with you, you know, what, what they’ve accomplished, where they’re feeling stuck. You have the one-on-one. Those are the actions to take. So it’s not a, well, I know there’s this problem. I don’t know what to do about it. You now know what to do about it.

So take the steps, get ahead of it. Don’t wait for a team member to come to you feeling frustrated. Ask them. And if they say everything’s fine, ask them again. If they say everything’s fine, ask them a few weeks later. We can get ahead of this because we do not want to lose our high performers to this phenomenon. Quiet cracking is something we can fix. We can get ahead of it, but we’ve got to take action.

See you next time.