Watch the one who looks like they are flying

Ask a room of managers who they are worried about and they will describe the same person. Quieter than usual. Missing deadlines. Slumped at the desk, camera off on calls. That person may well need support, and the signs at least give you a chance of noticing.

Clinicians watch someone else entirely. We watch the one who looks like they are flying.

The pattern is so consistent that in practice it functions as a tell. The numbers are climbing. The email replies arrive at midnight, then at one in the morning, and they are still sharp and still cheerful. The gym membership has quietly lapsed. The five-a-side, the sea swims, the book club, all gone, each one dropped with a perfectly reasonable excuse about a busy quarter. What remains is work, done brilliantly, and a light that never switches off.

From the outside this is your best employee having their best year. From a clinical chair it looks like someone burning the furniture to heat the house.

Why the strongest burn hardest

Burnout does not select for weakness. If anything it selects for conscientiousness. The people most at risk are the perfectionists and the copers, the ones whose identity is built on delivering and who would sooner work a fourth weekend in a row than say a thing is beyond them. Because asking for help feels like failure, they push through long past the point where a less driven colleague would have flagged it. And when they finally go down, they go down hardest and stay down longest, because by then the depletion is total. Sleep, concentration, mood, health, all of it spent.

The organisation rarely sees any of this coming, because every visible indicator was pointing up until the week it happened. Then comes the long absence, or the resignation from someone everybody assumed was unshakeable. Gallup put a figure on that outcome in 2019, estimating the cost of replacing an employee at between half and twice their annual salary, and called the estimate conservative. For the people who tend to burn out, your most senior and most capable, the true cost sits at the painful end of that range and beyond it, in the knowledge and steadiness that walk out the door with them.

Catching it while it is still a conversation

Here is the frustrating part. Caught early, this is one of the most workable situations in all of workplace wellbeing. A boundary rebuilt here, a workload honestly renegotiated there, permission granted to be less than superhero for a quarter. Small corrections, made in time, and the person never becomes a case at all.

The difficulty is that early is precisely when they will never put their hand up. They do not ring helplines. They do not book the counselling benefit. Any door that must be walked through voluntarily filters them out, because walking through it would mean admitting something they are working very hard to outrun.

This is why our programme gives every member of staff a monthly, confidential session with the same clinician, as a matter of routine rather than referral. When the hour is simply part of the month, there is nothing to admit by attending. And a psychotherapist who has sat with someone regularly notices what a dashboard of output never will. The hobbies going quiet. The sleep shortening. The brightness that has started to sound rehearsed. The session is private, and names never leave the room, but the person gets what they most need, which is someone keeping a hand on the pulse before there is an emergency to respond to.

Somewhere in your organisation there is probably someone having a remarkable year for the wrong reasons. The kindest thing you can build for them is a place where that can be noticed while it is still a conversation.