Why your best performers are the most vulnerable
Rich Rowley
Co-owner of Neurofusion
Imagine two employees, both performing at the very highest level. We’ll call them Alex and Beatrice. Alex spends 10 hours a day solving chaotic, emergent problems, the kind that require constant invention. Beatrice spends 10 hours a day refining complex, but repeatable, procedures. Both are “High Performers.” Yet, after eighteen months, Alex is energised, and Beatrice is gone.
This is the puzzle your HR metrics cannot solve. Your performance reviews show strength. Your safety surveys show comfort. But beneath the surface, a quiet, internal catastrophe is unfolding:
The common wisdom is that people burn out from too much work. The invisible truth is that they burn out from the wrong kind of work.
The capability trap
We praise capability, but we rarely measure sustainability. If a person is smart enough, they can force themselves to do almost anything. But the cost is immense.
Think of the brain as a specialised engine. Some engines are built for sustained, high-torque execution, thriving on clear inputs and predictable systems, the Ordered domain of complexity science. Other engines are built for constant re-calibration, requiring ambiguity and novel stimulus, the Unordered domain (Sweller, 1988).
When you put an Unordered engine into a job that demands predictable, procedural optimisation, it performs its task flawlessly. But it does so by running an internal diagnostic and compensation loop eight hours a day (Edwards et al., 1998). It is paying a hidden tax to maintain that performance.
The invisible ledger: introducing the masking delta
This is the finding we kept seeing in neurodiversity research: the most successful people, those who can adapt, often incur the steepest penalties. Their success is a costly act of constant internal translation (Pearson & Rose, 2021).
We call this cost the Masking Delta: the energetic expenditure required to bridge the gap between your natural cognitive style and the demands of the environment.
- A small Delta means your work fits your brain. It feels like flow.
- A large Delta means you are fighting your own wiring daily. It feels like effort, even when the output looks easy.
Your metrics confuse capability (can they hit the target?) with sustainability (can they keep hitting the target?). The Masking Delta is the truer measure of long-term flight risk.
The state of silent exhaustion
When you map this cognitive alignment against the safety a person feels, a lethal quadrant appears: Silent exhaustion.
HIGH PERFORMANCE + HIGH SAFETY + LOW COGNITIVE ALIGNMENT
This is the state that kills retention because it registers no external red flags. They feel safe enough to stay (High Safety), and they are too good at their job to show weakness (High Performance). But they are being internally consumed.
They cannot tell you, “My brain doesn’t suit this role.” Instead, they use the only language available: “I need new challenges,” or “I need a better fit.” The performance drop only occurs after the decision to leave has already been made. You consistently confuse capable with sustainable. This outcome supports theories on job-person fit, where high performance can mask internal psychological distress until burnout occurs (Deci & Ryan, 2000).
What you are actually missing
To grasp this, you must separate the work from the person by using complexity science models like the Cynefin Framework (Snowden & Boone, 2007). Work is either Ordered (where answers exist) or Unordered (where answers must be discovered).
The evidence is in the career arcs you dismiss as simple turnover:
- The strategist doing process: They are intelligent enough to execute Ordered tasks flawlessly. But their cognitive profile is starved for Unordered ambiguity. They quit for something “more challenging” because they need to actually think
- The executor promoted to strategy: Delivers on every strategic task while feeling like an impostor the entire time. They quit for “better fit” because they desperately need defined systems back to breathe.
- The problem-solver managing stable systems: Excellent at optimisation, but dying of boredom. Nothing uses how they actually think. They quit because there’s no cognitive complexity left to engage with.
These are not failures of skill. They are failures of organisational design to account for how a person’s mind works.
The neurodiversity amplifier
This internal struggle is amplified for neurodivergent talent, whose higher baseline regulatory cost means the Masking Delta depletes them faster (Rourke & Conway, 2020) though the phenomenon is universal.
- ADHD brains often thrive in emergent work, but the cost of paying attention to rigid processes drains them faster, because their baseline regulatory cost is already
- Autistic brains often excel in systematic, structured work, but organisational ambiguity exhausts them faster because decoding implicit social expectations costs more
They are often your highest performers in the right role. Put them in cognitively misaligned environments, and their higher Masking Delta ensures they will collapse before you ever see the external signs.
What changes when you measure this
- Find your silent exhaustion cohort: Identify high performers who seem quietly depleted in a way that doesn’t track to their actual workload.
- Ask the energy question: Stop asking “How’s your workload?” Start asking, “What energises you versus what drains you?” Listen for the misalignment between the role’s function and the individual’s natural drive.
- Stop treating roles as universal: A “senior manager” title is meaningless without defining its core cognitive Does the role demand Strategic Ambiguity Tolerance or Structured Execution Capability? Both matter.
- Track the invisible: Incorporate cognitive alignment metrics. Patterns in the Masking Delta can make flight risk predictable, saving your top talent before the paradox claims
The solution isn’t to train people to be more resilient. The solution is to design a work environment where a brilliant mind doesn’t have to fight itself to be successful. Sustainable performance is not an output of effort; it is an output of alignment.
Understanding your own cognitive profile
Before you can spot this misalignment in your organisation, it helps to understand your own cognitive architecture.
Work Fit is a free 10-minute assessment that gives you personal insight into these frameworks in action. It reveals your cognitive profile, what energises you versus what drains you, and where potential misalignment might exist between your natural preferences and your current work.
The starting point for understanding how cognitive diversity affects performance at scale is at workfit.studio
The actual point
Cognitive misalignment costs you people. It costs you the organisational energy you need to navigate complexity.
Normal HR metrics can’t see it. Someone can feel safe, hit every target, and still be burning out internally. Then they’re gone.
The fix isn’t resilience training or better perks. It’s designing work where people can operate without constantly fighting their own cognitive architecture.
Sustainable performance isn’t an output of effort. It’s an output of alignment.
References
- Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.
- Edwards, J. R., Caplan, R. D., & Van Harrison, R. (1998). Person-environment fit theory: Conceptual foundations, empirical evidence, and directions for future research. In C. L. Cooper (Ed.), Theories of organizational stress (pp. 28-67). Oxford University Press.
- Pearson, A., & Rose, K. (2021). A conceptual analysis of autistic masking: Understanding the narrative of stigma and the illusion of choice. Autism in Adulthood, 3(1), 52-60.
- Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007). A leader’s framework for decision making. Harvard Business Review, 85(11), 68–76.
- Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285.
- Weber, Clara & Krieger, Beate & Häne, Eunji & Yarker, Jo & McDowall, Almuth. (2022). Physical workplace adjustments to support neurodivergent workers: A systematic review. Applied Psychology. 73. 910-962. 10.1111/apps.12431.
About the author
Rich Rowley co-runs Neurofusion with Bex Waugh. It’s a consultancy working on cognitive diversity and inclusive organisational design and learning. The Cognitive Differentiation Inventory and Contextualised Performance Matrix are built from cognitive psychology and complexity science research.
