What Leaders Do That Demotivates Talented Team Members
Before thinking about how to motivate your team members, it is wise to first consider the ways you might be demotivating them.
Interestingly, while what motivates people is highly personal and can be very different from person to person, what demotivates them is generally consistent, especially for top performers.
Let’s review what leaders often find out the hard way.
Beyond the obvious demotivators such as low-impact tasks, busywork, projects without a clear purpose, and a lack of skill development and challenge, talented team members abhor anything that slows them down.
They find indecision from above particularly insufferable.
When their leader revisits decisions already made, talks about the need to decide in endless meetings, or simply can’t choose, top talent will throw their hands in the air in exasperation. This is a fast track to demotivation.
About the only issue that drives top talent even crazier is leaders who pretend to include them but don’t.
When they find their proposals ignored, their suggestions quickly dismissed, their ideas credited to someone else, or their input solicited with no intention of the leader listening, they disengage.
Leaders who get in the way and rob them of autonomy also demotivate top talent. The best team members prefer to control how they do their work.
Leaders who check in too often, direct specific work, or require approvals or rigid procedures strip team members of control.
High performers view autonomy as a sign of trust and respect. Without it, they see no reason to excel.
Top talent takes particular umbrage when underperformers are treated the same as strong performers. When leaders ask the team and the best performers to offset the poor work of weaker colleagues, top talent becomes incensed.
Coddling low performers signals unfairness to them and proves the leader has inconsistent standards. They seldom recover from this unfair practice.
Once demotivated, high performers pivot from being a powerful engine of action to becoming a drag on performance and culture.
A sharp drop in productivity, lower engagement, a defensive attitude, cynical comments, and less discretionary effort are all signs that a talented team member has become demotivated.
At times, it is not always easy to spot. Because they are good enough to hide their dissatisfaction through minimal effort, demotivated talent often remains technically competent and productive to avoid performance flags.
But once deflated, they stay in a narrow lane, stop pushing ideas and improvements, and set more rigid boundaries around their role and time.
No leader on the planet wants to produce that scenario. Remember, leaders don’t crush the spirit of team members overnight. They do it one discouraging behavior at a time.
This piece resonates deeply because I have lived through the exact scenario described here.
It is incredibly stressful to be a high performer in an environment where indecision and 'pretend' inclusion are the norms. For me, it wasn’t one single event that did it; it was the slow erosion of my enthusiasm. The weight of having to offset underperformers—while being denied the autonomy to actually fix the underlying issues—is genuinely demoralizing.
As you noted, high performers don't just 'stop working'—we pivot. We set rigid boundaries, stop offering the 'discretionary effort' that makes a company great, and eventually, we realize that our energy is better spent elsewhere. I ultimately had to leave my last role for this exact reason.
The lesson for leaders is clear: you don’t lose your best people because they can’t do the work; you lose them because you’ve made the work feel like a constant uphill battle against the very person meant to lead them.
I just gotta say that what I’ve seen is this: when you have genuine relationship with someone, they’re intrinsically motivated to do the work alongside you. You’d do anything for a friend, even if it’s a grind.