Why High Performers Leave Before You Know They’re Gone

According to Gallup, 51% of U.S. employees were either actively looking for a new job or watching for opportunities in the fourth quarter of 2025 — one of the highest shares Gallup has recorded since it started tracking this measure in 2015. Resignation rates, meanwhile, sit near decade lows. The gap between those two numbers is the real problem: Employees are deciding to leave long before they ever act on it.

I have spent close to two decades coaching leaders through exactly this gap between what a team says and what it actually feels. The pattern starts months before the resignation letter, in a meeting where someone stops raising a hand.

Retention too often gets treated as an HR function, something handled through a once-a-year survey or an after-the-fact exit interview. In practice, it’s a leadership discipline, built on paying attention long before someone updates a résumé. Here’s how to build it:

1. Notice when volunteering stops

High performers rarely announce their exit. Marti Willett, president of Digital Marketing Recruiters, a specialized recruitment firm focused on digital marketing talent, told me the earliest signals are almost always behavioral, not measurable. “High performers often start showing subtle signs like becoming less proactive, contributing less in meetings or doing only what’s required rather than going above and beyond,” she said. “Leaders can miss these signals because the employee is still meeting expectations on paper, and high performers are often good at maintaining results even after their engagement has declined.”

The fix is a standing habit. Before a one-on-one, note whether the person has volunteered for anything beyond their core role in the past month. A pattern of silence, sustained across two or three cycles, is worth a direct conversation before it becomes a resignation.

2. Stop trusting the turnover number

Most leaders track retention the way they track fire alarms: They wait for it to go off. But turnover is a lagging indicator. Gallup found that 42% of employees who voluntarily left a job said their manager or employer could have done something to prevent it, and 45% said no one had a proactive conversation with them about their satisfaction or their future in the three months before they left.

A quiet turnover number can just as easily mean no one has asked the right question. Replace the annual “are you satisfied?” survey question with a quarterly one: “What would make you consider leaving?” The second question surfaces the drift the first one is built to miss.

3. Build a way to see it coming

Some larger organizations have moved past surveys and check-ins entirely. In 2019, an AI built on IBM’s Watson platform was found to be roughly 95% accurate at predicting which employees were planning to leave. The company said the system, part of a patented “predictive attrition program,” saved IBM close to $300 million in retention costs by giving managers a reason to intervene before someone had already decided to go, according to reporting by CNBC.

Most founders don’t have that kind of data infrastructure, and they don’t need it. What is buildable is a small early-warning habit. Track who has stopped requesting stretch projects, who has gone quiet in meetings they used to lead and who has stopped asking about the next year of their role. Three data points, tracked consistently, do much of the job a multimillion-dollar model was built to do at a much larger company.

4. Ask what moving forward looks like

The most common retention mistake is a false sense of security. Willett told me that leaders equate low turnover with high engagement: “A common misstep is assuming that because employees aren’t leaving, they’re satisfied and engaged. Leaders often focus on turnover rates instead of looking at quieter signals like declining motivation, reduced initiative or employees who are staying but actively exploring other opportunities.”

Early in my career, before I had a formal title, I worked alongside two HR leaders, and together we ran what we called sensing sessions: informal, recurring conversations built around two questions: What’s working, and what isn’t? We didn’t have an agenda or scorecard — just a standing invitation to say the quiet part early. The habit scales down to a team of five as easily as it scales up to 500. Ask each person, on a fixed schedule, what growth looks like for them right now, and change something visible based on the answer.

Most of the leaders I’ve worked with want a system, a dashboard, a survey cadence or a score. What actually works is smaller than that. The best retention strategy, most often, is noticing the silence before it becomes permanent.