Six months ago, I got a panicked call from a CFO I’ve worked with for years. Her best finance manager, who’d carried the team through two consecutive audit cycles, had just resigned. No warning. No competing offer. Just done.

“I don’t understand,” she told me. “I was coaching her constantly. Weekly check-ins. Stretch assignments. Leadership development. I was investing more time in her than anyone else on the team.”

That was exactly the problem.

She’d been coaching someone who didn’t need more development. She needed someone to take things off her plate. The coaching, however well-intentioned, strategically sound, and possibly textbook-perfect (since I am the one who trained her), had become one more demand in a system that was already at capacity.

The Pattern You’re Not Seeing

Here’s what most leadership books won’t tell you: coaching isn’t always the answer. Sometimes it’s the accelerant on a fire you don’t realize is burning.

I’ve watched this pattern repeat across industries. Your highest performer starts showing microscopic cracks. Nothing dramatic. They’re still delivering. Still hitting deadlines. Still raising their hand for the hard problems. So you do what every management framework tells you to do: you lean in with coaching. Development conversations. Growth opportunities. Leadership visibility.

And three months later, they’re gone.

What you missed: high performers burn out differently than everyone else. They don’t disengage. They don’t start missing deadlines. They don’t complain. They simply maintain excellence until they collapse, or simply quit.

The coaching you deployed with the best intentions? It sent a message you never meant to send: “You’re capable of even more. Here’s what’s next.”

When what they desperately needed to hear was: “You’ve been carrying this team. I’m going to redistribute the load.”

What Burnout Actually Looks Like in Top Performers

Forget the stereotypes about burned-out employees being disengaged or checked out. In high performers, burnout masquerades as continued excellence. Here’s what it actually looks like:

They stop asking questions. That curious person who used to challenge assumptions and poke holes in strategies? They’re now just executing. Not because they’ve lost their edge, but because questioning requires energy they don’t have.

They respond instantly but superficially. Emails come back in minutes, but the insight that used to be there has flattened. They’re managing inbox volume, not engaging with substance.

They say yes to everything. This sounds like engagement, but it’s actually a symptom. They’ve lost the capacity to prioritize or advocate for their own limits. Everything feels equally urgent because their threat detection system is stuck in the “on” position.

They stop talking about the future. No more “what if we tried…” or “I’ve been thinking about…” They’re in pure survival mode, managing today with nothing left over for tomorrow.

When Coaching Becomes Harm

I worked with a tech company last year where the VP of Product was running a coaching program for his high-potential talent. Biweekly sessions. Personalized development plans. Executive visibility projects. By every metric, it was a world-class program.

Except their regretted attrition in that cohort was running at 40%.

When I interviewed the employees who’d left, the pattern was clear. They didn’t leave because they weren’t developing. They left because development had become another performance expectation stacked on top of an already overwhelming workload.

One former employee put it perfectly: “Every coaching session ended with homework. Another book to read. Another skill to develop. Another project to lead. I didn’t need to grow. I needed to sleep.”

The Alternative Path

The best managers I’ve observed have developed a sixth sense for when coaching helps versus when it harms. They watch for a specific inflection point: when investment shifts from energizing to extracting.

Here’s what they do differently:

They coach to subtraction, not addition. Instead of “What else could you take on to grow?” they ask “What should I take off your plate so you can do your best work?” The development happens through depth, not breadth.

They create recovery windows. After someone delivers an exceptional result, they don’t immediately assign the next big thing. They build in deliberate slack. Not as reward, but as system maintenance.

They distinguish between development hunger and performance pressure. When a high performer asks for a stretch assignment, these managers pause and ask: “Is this something you’re genuinely excited about, or is this you feeling like you need to prove something?” The answer determines their response.

One director I work with has a simple rule: after any team member works above their sustainable threshold for more than six weeks, they get assigned to a “maintenance sprint”: in simple words, important work, but nothing net-new. The goal is to let their nervous system recalibrate.

His team’s engagement scores are fifteen points higher than the company average. His attrition is nearly zero.

What to Do Instead

If you’re coaching someone who’s showing the subtle signs of burnout, here’s what actually helps:

Name what you’re seeing. “You’ve been running at an unsustainable pace for three months. I value you too much to burn you out. We’re going to recalibrate.” Give them permission to step back.

Remove before you add. Before assigning any development opportunity, remove an equivalent load. If you can’t, the answer is no, even if the opportunity is compelling.

Check your own assumptions. Are you coaching this person because they need development, or because their competence makes them an easy target for your next big initiative?

The hardest part of this approach is that it requires you to make different decisions about where work lands. When you protect your top performer’s capacity, someone else has to carry what they would have. That’s uncomfortable. It’s also leadership.

The Uncomfortable Reality

Sometimes the most powerful coaching intervention is to stop coaching entirely. To look at someone who’s been performing at 110% and say: “I’m not going to develop you right now. I’m going to protect you.”

That takes more courage than any development conversation you’ll ever have.