Someone wise said that once. I think it’s closer to true than most leaders would ever admit.
Perform well, and you get noticed. Get noticed, and you get piled on — more projects, more responsibility, more weight. It usually comes framed as trust, or opportunity, or recognition. It’s rarely checked against what the person actually wants more of.
That pattern is showing up in real data right now. High performers are burning out at record rates, carrying more than ever, with less recognition to show for it. Low performers, in the same buildings, are quietly coasting — fewer demands, less scrutiny, nobody pushing them anywhere. Read that the obvious way and you’d assume one group is being challenged and the other isn’t. I don’t think that’s it.
Neither group is actually being challenged. One’s being buried. The other’s being ignored.
A challenge and a burden can look identical from the outside — same extra hours, same new title, same “you’ve earned this.” The difference is whether the person underneath already wanted what it’s supposedly building toward.
I’ve coached a wide range of people over the years — competitive athletes, recreational ones, and employees, peers, team leads, project managers, and senior managers navigating their own careers. The pattern repeats almost exactly, regardless of which room I’m in. Put a competitive athlete through a brutal, high-pressure drill, and they thrive, because it serves a goal they already claimed as their own. Put a recreational athlete through the identical drill, and you get anxiety and burnout instead — not weakness, just a goal that was never theirs to begin with.
I’ve watched the corporate version just as often. A capable manager gets handed a second team to run because she did well with the first one—nobody asked if leading more people was what she wanted next, or whether she’d rather have gone deeper on the work itself. A senior manager gets pulled into every high-visibility fire because he’s reliable, and reliability quietly becomes a life sentence to more fires, never to the kind of strategic work he actually wanted a shot at.
Same mechanism, different rooms. More responsibility is a genuine challenge for the person who wanted exactly that stretch. It’s pure weight for the person who didn’t, no matter how strong their last quarter looked on paper.
Most leaders skip the one step that would tell them which they’re actually handing out: asking. Not deciding on someone’s behalf what growth should look like, based on what worked for someone else or what the org chart happens to need filled. Asking, specifically, what would actually challenge and fulfill them, then building the next stretch around that answer instead of around convenience.
It’s a dialogue. Most organizations run it as a decision instead—quietly, without ever noticing the difference —right up until their best people start quitting under the weight of being trusted with everything except a real conversation about what they wanted next.
The reward for great work shouldn’t be more work. It should be someone asking what you’d actually want to be challenged by — and then giving you that, instead of just more of the same thing you already proved you could carry.