They're Fine. They're Falling.

Your people are hitting their deadlines. Their engagement scores are fine. And they are breaking. Quiet cracking isn't a burnout spike or a disengagement trend — it's a design flaw your organization is running on schedule.

This episode goes after the structural cause: a clarity gap that HR strategy rarely names and wellness spend never fixes. If you've ever had a high performer tell you they feel overwhelmed, and neither of you could name exactly why, this episode names the mechanism.

What You'll Learn

• Why quiet cracking is a clarity problem with a workload symptom — and why that distinction changes the entire response
• The three traps leaders fall into — workload reduction, wellness spend, and ignoring accumulated role load — that treat the symptom while the design stays intact
• Why ambiguity exhausts people faster than volume, and what happens when AI scales the fog instead of clearing it
• What your organization is actually signaling about winning when you recognize the most available person instead of the highest-impact one
• Four design plays to fix it at the source: outcome definition, priority hierarchy, role load audit, and resetting the performance signal

Key Quotes

"Volume has visible edges. A fog has no edges. You can work inside a fog indefinitely without getting any closer to done."

"The organization can't tell their people what winning looks like — and it has communicated something really clearly: winning looks like never stopping."

"Every email answered after hours is a signal. Every meeting attended without agenda contributes to the appearance of engagement."

Sources for Statistics Cited

• 54% of employees report experiencing quiet cracking — TalentLMS Quiet Cracking Workplace Survey
• $438 billion in global productivity loss from disengagement — Fortune / Gallup, 2025

Transcript

Your people are showing up and they are hitting all of their deadlines. Their engagement scores are fine, they're producing, but they're also cracking. And we're going to talk today about what quiet cracking reveals, because that's a design flaw that your organization is running on schedule.

Hey there, senior leader, and welcome to the Talent Sherpa Podcast, where senior leaders come to rethink how human capital really works. I'm your host, Jackson Lynch. Today we're going to get into quiet cracking — that's the term that's showing up everywhere right now — and more specifically, what your organization is actually producing when it happens. And here's the pattern interrupt: people are cracking because they don't know what they're supposed to be doing. They don't know what winning looks like, or how to prioritize when three things are all labeled urgent. I'm sure you've never lived that. The pile on the desk isn't the source — that's a clarity gap. And clarity is a design variable. There's a very specific structural reason your best people are breaking when your metrics are missing it entirely. And once you see it, I don't know if this is good or bad news, but you can't unsee it.

So if you've ever had a high performer tell you that they feel overwhelmed, and neither of you could explain exactly what was making them feel that way, this episode — if we do it right — is going to name the mechanism. And by the end, you're going to have a different question to ask, one that goes to how the work was designed, not how much of it there is.

Before we get into today's episode, I want to give a shout out this week to Andrea from Houston. Thank you so much for being a part of this community. She's already signed up for the next CHRO Ascent Academy, and that's pretty cool. And to everyone else who's tuning in, whether you're joining from London — where my daughter is living — or Nashville, Tennessee — where I'd prefer to be living — I appreciate you being here. All right, let's get into it.

Here's how I think this shows up inside organizations right now. There's a manager who's going to come to you about a high performer who seems off. She's not missing deliverables. She's still responding to everything. She was in eight meetings yesterday, two of which she actually ran. And she told her manager she feels like she's falling behind, even though she can't point to what she's actually falling behind on. That's quiet cracking. Not clinical burnout per se, not disengagement, not someone who's leaving — the person's fully present. They are still performing, and something is coming apart internally.

Is it just her? No. More than half the workforce is experiencing it right now. A 2025 TalentLMS survey put it at 54%. One 2025 analysis put the productivity cost at $438 billion. And those numbers get cited a lot. What doesn't get named as clearly is what's actually producing this inside the organization.

The lazy approach to this is: oh, you need to give them less work. I'm going to argue against that. I don't think that's what the issue is. A few episodes back I did one on why your engagement score is a comfort metric. This episode is going to pick up where that one left off.

Here's what quiet cracking actually reveals that the survey you cite misses entirely: the people who are cracking are not showing up in your data. Their scores are fine. They're still delivering. Most surveys ask how people feel about work and about working there. Quiet cracking is what happens when people feel reasonably fine about the work and are breaking under the design of it.

Layer in what most organizations have done the last couple of years: return-to-office mandates, AI adoption requirements, restructures that reduced headcount without reducing scope, "more with less," new productivity tracking, new reporting layers. It goes on and on. And each one of those added to existing roles. Almost none of them redesigned those roles. Almost none of them made it clear what winning looks like now that the job has changed. The load increased, and the ambiguity increased right alongside it.

And that — when you're getting into solving things — is a completely different problem. Because people can move through high volume when they know what they're building towards. What exhausts people is working constantly without a clear sense of whether the effort is going to the right place, without a signal of when they're done enough, and without a picture of what they're going to be held accountable to at the end of the quarter.

And look, your best people are auditing your culture every single week. And those same audits aren't going to come up with favorable results. That fog is in fact the design. And most organizations have no idea that they've built it.

I think three things keep this pattern in place. The first trap is treating quiet cracking as a workload problem — because it kind of presents like one. Leaders will see overwhelmed people and respond with protection policies: protect Fridays, no meetings, no messages after hours, encouragement to take your PTO. Let's be real — those things have real value in isolation, and they're all good. But the source of the problem stays intact. You're treating the symptom. Someone who doesn't know what they're accountable for in terms of outcomes doesn't get less exhausted by working fewer hours. The ambiguity follows them out the door. The cognitive load of trying to figure out what the work is supposed to be doesn't stop when the laptop goes flat down.

And one thing that trips up a lot of leaders here is wellness spend. This is, granted, a larger company challenge — but EAP programs, mental health platforms, additional paid leave — we tend to spend a lot of money solving these symptoms. Candidly, more than at any point in recent history. And the cracking is still accelerating. That says something. The investment's real. The intentions are real. The problem is that wellness spend locates the problem in the person. The system stays intact. The employee is now better resourced to be more resilient about experiencing it. And the person who is cracking, surrounded by all that support, feels even more alone in it. Because if the organization is doing all this and they're still struggling, what does that say about them? Maybe it's just me. I felt that way before.

And I think what most leaders miss is the third factor: accumulated role load. Think about what you have added to a role in the past 12 months: new tools to learn, new meetings, expanded scope — which we sometimes dress up as career development — new reporting requirements. And now think about what came off. In most organizations, the honest answer is nothing. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Roles have expanded without redesign and without a clear answer to what matters most now. And in most cases, they probably started as a bunch of activities. So if you don't redesign around outcomes, those activities are just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. The result is a role that is larger in every direction without a clear center of gravity. That is a clarity problem with a workload symptom.

So what do you do? Here's what I think the shift might be. Quiet cracking is what happens when people can't tell whether they're doing the right thing. Volume and ambiguity are two separate problems. And the one that produces cracking is ambiguity. Volume has visible edges. You can see how much there is. You can work through it. And there is a point where it hopefully ends — even if it's retirement. Like a fog — where's the edge of a fog? There are no edges. You can work inside a fog indefinitely without getting any closer to done. That's the experience that quiet cracking produces: working hard constantly, without any sense that the effort is going somewhere important.

And now AI comes along, and what happens when it sees fog? It scales the fog. So if you have quiet cracking when there is less fog and less speed — you see where this is headed?

Think about what your organization actually signals when it defines performance. The real signal. The one people read and respond to. It shows up in practice. That's why you've got to audit your last hundred decisions. Ask: who gets recognized? Is it the person that produces a high-impact output and stops, or is it the person who is in every meeting, available all weekend, first to respond to every message? If the answer is the second person, the system has defined winning as perpetual availability. And by the way, perpetual availability has "perpetual" in the name. There is no endpoint. There is no done. There is only more.

So people inside that system aren't just doing the work — they are also performing their availability. Every email answered after hours is a signal. Every meeting attended without agenda contributes to the appearance of engagement. And that performance of being present and responsive is load-bearing — invisible, load-bearing — that never shows up in any workplace analysis until the person gives up and leaves. The reason it doesn't show up is it doesn't have a due date. That's the insight I think this produces.

The organization that can't tell their people what winning looks like has communicated something really clearly. It has told them winning looks like never stopping. And the people who believe that and build their working lives around it are the ones who are cracking.

The fix is a design decision. So there are four plays I would run here. And each one of them goes to the design.

Play one — and I bet you can guess this — define the outcome, not the activity. For any role where you are seeing signs of cracking, take a step back and start with one diagnostic question: what does this person need to produce to be considered excellent in the role? In Topgrading, there are five to seven of them. If they were to deliver these outcomes and only these outcomes — five to seven of them — they would be considered an A player in the role. Specifically, find the outputs. Not the calendar, not the tasks, not the activity. If you can't answer that in five to seven sentences, you have found the design flaw. A role without an outcome definition runs on ambiguity. It's guessing. The person carries not just the work, but the ongoing cognitive weight of trying to figure out what the work's supposed to be. Naming the outcome removes that weight. It gives the work a shape it did not previously have.

Play number two: make the priority hierarchy explicit. Identify the two or three things that this role absolutely must get right — the things that actually move the outcomes. Put them in writing. Make them visible. Reward them, recognize them, communicate against them. That's a clarity intervention, and it operates at a different level than goal setting. When everything is a priority, the person is managing a list rather than executing from it. The deepest exhaustion in organizational life comes from constant uncertainty about whether the hard work is going to the right place. People don't worry about hard work — most people come to work wanting to do good work. The frustrating thing is guessing wrong. So naming what matters most removes that uncertainty without ever having to reduce the work itself. And that's progress.

Play three: audit the role for accumulated load. Before you add anything new to a role, audit what's already there. List everything added in the last 12 months: new tools, new meetings, new accountability structures, expanded scope. Then ask what came off the list. And if the answer is "they're using AI more" — double-check your homework on that one, because that may not actually have taken anything off, especially if you haven't told them what to do with the time. If the honest answer is nothing — that's okay. That's the diagnosis. Roles that grow in every direction without redesign become less coherent over time. A less coherent role produces less clarity about what winning looks like. So the fix is to make explicit choices and trade-offs about what drops. Every expansion needs a corresponding subtraction or a clear reprioritization. Every change that adds without removing is building clarity debt into the system.

And play number four: change what you signal about winning. Look at your organization and think about what they actually reward in practice. Specifically, what happens in the room and in real-time recognition. Who got called out in the last staff meeting? Who is getting the recognition at the all-hands? If the signal consistently goes to the person who's most visible and most available, that signal is defining performance for everybody watching. You've got to fix that before you change the words.

The fix is to make outcome delivery the consistent, visible signal in the regular flow of work — not only at review time. "We're recognizing Sally for this activity that led to this outcome." That's important. And if you can link it to what the organization's strategy is, even better. When you recognize someone for a high-impact output, you're telling the organization what counts. And if you let that go unrecognized and instead praise someone who's always available at nine in the evening — you are telling the organization what counts. Both signals are real. The question is which one you are sending on purpose.

Now, I realize I may have just asked you to redesign role definitions, build a priority framework, audit accumulated load, and restructure how performance gets signaled. Yeah, that was the four plays. It's either a clean Thursday morning or a complete restructure of how the work is organized. It's probably somewhere in the middle — but it's important, and that's fine.

If there's one thing I want you to carry out of this episode, it's this: quiet cracking is being produced by your design. And the diagnostic question that opens everything up is a simple one. Ask your people: do they know what winning looks like in their role? And see what the specific answer is. If it matches, you're good. If not, you know where to start.

I want to thank you for spending time with me today. I really do appreciate you being a part of this community of senior leaders who want to rethink how human capital really works. And if you're thinking about how you apply this in your own situation, let me point you to a couple of resources.

Propulsion AI is workforce intelligence for private equity. Their AI teammates surface workforce risk before close, and then help leadership teams drive execution after. They can translate strategy into individual accountability, coach managers to define roles by outcomes, and give every employee a clear line of sight to what actually matters — all through artificial intelligence. So if anything we talked about today resonates, it's worth giving Scott a call. You can learn more at getpropulsion.ai.

And if you're a CHRO heading into the seat for the first time — or if you're close to it, or you just got in it, maybe you've even got a brand new CEO — that's exactly why I built everything you can find at mytalentsherpa.com. The Substack, the podcast links, the CHRO Chronicles, the CHRO Ascent Academy, the Mandate Protocol — which, by the way, is really, really helpful. Check it all out at mytalentsherpa.com.

And that's it for today. Until next time, please keep raising the bar, keep designing for clarity on purpose, and keep on climbing.