High-performer burnout: the hidden cost of always delivering.

When your 70% becomes everyone's baseline

Tolulope Oke has built a career that most people would call a success. She studied at Cambridge, worked at Accenture and Amazon, led inclusion work across construction, retail, tech and higher education, and now runs her own firm, The Inclusive Experience. When I asked her how she balances grace and pressure, she laughed and said she doesn't balance them well.

Then she explained the trap, and I've heard versions of it from almost every high performer I've worked with.

My 70% is probably more than someone else's 100%. But the problem you then get is that when people get used to your 70%, they then actually require more from you, because they normalise it.

She saw it clearly at Amazon. She delivered impressive work, and the benchmark moved. People got used to good, so they wanted great. They got used to great, so they wanted perfection. Once you reach perfection there's nothing left to give. Amazing becomes ordinary, and to look amazing again you have to be even better. You end up on a hamster wheel of "show me more."

The cost nobody sees

I pushed her on what that actually cost, because it's easy to hear "good to great to greatest" and think it sounds like ambition. Her answer was blunt.

At points in time the cost was self-abandonment.

In the last six to nine months of one role she was barely eating proper meals. Biscuits and crisps at her desk, coffee and tea just to stay afloat. She put on weight, her sleep suffered, her skin suffered. She caught sight of herself one day and thought, who's that? Her mental health took the hit too, and she became disillusioned with the work she cared most about.

She also made a point leaders need to hear. You think you're hiding it. You're not. It shows in your energy. You're in a meeting, not contributing, camera off, because you're tired.

Tolulope talks about this partly through her own experience as a Black woman being held to a higher standard and compared with people doing far less. That context matters, and it's a big part of why the pressure built the way it did for her. But the mechanism, where excellence quietly becomes the baseline, shows up in high performers everywhere.

Make the cost of your output visible

The thing that changed for Tolulope was that she stopped hiding the price of her work. In her next role she explained what it took to produce it: the late nights, the missed breaks. People didn't see that part because she didn't want to look like she wasn't a team player.

This is the cost of the greatness that you're seeing. You need to understand that.

She also told her managers plainly that not everything could be great. Flagship projects would get great. Second and third-tier projects would get good. Without that conversation, she said, you reach your performance review and your gold standard gets rated silver, because everyone has got used to it.

That's a lesson for the high performer and for the people who manage them. If you lead someone like Tolulope, ask yourself whether you've quietly made their extraordinary output the minimum. If you are that person, you need to say out loud what your work costs and which work deserves your best.

Don't be so grateful for crumbs that you miss the bread

Tolulope has a phrase for the other side of this. When you come from a background where nobody you knew had worked at a firm like Accenture, getting in feels like being chosen. You're grateful. Then you notice that not everyone is having the same experience. Some get better projects, more exposure, more money, and they act as if they're entitled to be there.

Don't be so grateful for crumbs that you don't get your bread.

Gratitude kept her giving everything to roles that underpaid her. Once, she asked for a 10k pay rise and was told no, because it would put her on the same salary as her manager. She left, and the market paid her far more. After that she stopped leaving money on the table. Pay, she pointed out, decides your pension, whether you can buy a home and what you can give your children. Treating it as a vanity issue is expensive.

What to do if you recognise yourself

• Notice the warning signs early: meals skipped, sleep and health slipping, coffee doing the work rest should do, and detachment in meetings.
• Ask whether the bar has moved. Is the standard you're holding yourself to the job, or just your last best performance?
• Tier your work. Decide which projects get your best and which only need to be good, and agree it with your manager.
• Make the effort visible. Tell people what the results took, before it shows up as exhaustion.
• Check that you're being rewarded for it. Excellence that isn't recognised or paid for is a cost you're absorbing on someone else's behalf.

And if you lead high performers, don't wait for them to raise it. They usually won't. Ask what their last big win cost them, and listen to the answer.

In my experience the people who burn out first are rarely the weak ones. They're the strong ones nobody thought to check on.