Why Your Best Employees Are Giving Up (And How to Reignite Their Fight)

The Silent Killer of High Performance (Tips from a science-backed motivational speaker)

I was recently in a meeting with a typically high-performing leadership team when the CEO said something that stopped me cold: “Our best people have just… stopped trying. They show up, they do the work, but they’ve lost that fire. It’s like they’ve given up on making things better.”

Sound familiar?

As a stress physiologist and motivational speaker, I see this pattern everywhere – and it’s increasingly common.

• High-performers who once drove innovation are now going through the motions.
• Teams that used to solve impossible problems now shrug when presented with challenges.
• Employees who once stayed late because they cared now leave at exactly 5 PM.

They haven’t become lazy. They’ve developed something much more dangerous: learned helplessness.

The Psychology Behind Giving Up

Learned helplessness was first discovered in fascinating (and somewhat disturbing) experiments with dogs in the 1960s. Researchers placed dogs in chambers where they received random electric shocks they couldn’t control. Later, when these same dogs were moved to chambers where they could easily escape the shocks by jumping over a low barrier, they didn’t even try. They just laid down and accepted the pain.

The dogs had learned that their actions didn’t matter, so they stopped taking action altogether.

Now, before you think I’m comparing your employees to laboratory animals, consider this: the human version happens in conference rooms every day. When people repeatedly experience situations where their efforts don’t lead to meaningful change, their brains start to generalize that helplessness to other areas where they actually could make a difference.

How Organizations Accidentally Create Helplessness

I’ve seen brilliant, motivated employees develop learned helplessness through “the death of a thousand meetings.” It starts innocently enough. Leadership asks for feedback, employees provide thoughtful input, and then… nothing changes. Or worse, the opposite of their recommendations gets implemented.

This happens a few times, and suddenly employees stop contributing in meetings. Why waste energy when nobody listens anyway? The irony is that organizations often interpret this silence as agreement or lack of engagement, when it’s actually the opposite—it’s learned hopelessness.

Other common helplessness triggers include failed change initiatives that employees invested in heavily, repeated reorganizations that undo previous progress, systems that reward politics over performance, and bureaucratic processes that prevent good ideas from becoming reality.

The Hidden Cost of Organizational Helplessness

When your best people give up internally while still showing up physically, the damage is massive but often invisible. Innovation stops happening because people stop suggesting improvements. Problem-solving becomes reactive instead of proactive because employees stop anticipating issues. Customer service suffers because workers stop going above and beyond. Worst of all, the helplessness spreads to new employees who quickly learn “that’s just how things work here.”

Why Traditional Motivation Approaches Fail

Most leaders try to combat disengagement with motivation speeches, recognition programs, or team-building activities. These approaches fail because they don’t address the root cause: employees don’t believe their actions matter.

You can’t motivate someone out of learned helplessness any more than you could motivate those dogs to jump over the barrier. The issue isn’t lack of motivation—it’s lack of agency. People need to experience that their efforts can create meaningful change before they’ll start trying again.

How to Restore Learned Hopefulness

The antidote to learned helplessness isn’t motivation—it’s what I call “hope potentiation” or “learned hopefulness.” This requires a three-step approach that rebuilds employees’ belief that their actions matter.

Step 1: Acknowledge the Reality

Start by recognizing that learned helplessness makes complete sense given your employees’ experiences. Instead of dismissing disengagement as “bad attitude,” acknowledge it as a rational response to repeated powerlessness.

I tell leadership teams: “Your people aren’t broken or lazy. They’re protecting themselves from the pain of caring about things they can’t control.” When you validate this response instead of fighting it, you create space for something new to emerge.

Step 2: Start Ridiculously Small

You can’t ask someone who’s given up on big changes to suddenly tackle major initiatives. Instead, help employees identify one tiny thing within their control and act on it. This might be as simple as letting someone redesign their workspace, choose which vendor to use for office supplies, or decide how their team runs weekly check-ins.

The key is ensuring these small actions actually happen and that employees see the results of their choices. Success here isn’t about the magnitude of change—it’s about rebuilding the connection between effort and outcome.

Step 3: Create Micro-Wins That Actually Matter

This is where many organizations get it wrong—they try to rebuild confidence with meaningless busy work instead of work that genuinely matters. Real agency restoration happens when employees see their efforts create change they care about.

Maybe it’s finally fixing that broken process that’s annoyed everyone for months, implementing a simple suggestion that improves daily workflow, or giving someone real decision-making authority over something that affects their work quality. The wins need to be small enough to achieve quickly but meaningful enough that people notice the difference.

Rebuilding Agency in Your Organization

Restoring learned hopefulness requires leaders to make a fundamental shift: from trying to motivate people to take action, to creating conditions where people experience that their actions matter.

Start by conducting what I call an “agency audit.” Where do employees feel powerless? What processes consistently ignore their input? Which systems make their work harder instead of easier? Then pick one small area where you can give people real control and decision-making authority.

The key is following through completely. If you ask for employee input, implement something from that feedback—even if it’s not perfect. If you give someone authority over a process, let them actually exercise that authority without micromanaging. If you promise change, deliver visible results within a reasonable timeframe.

The Ripple Effect of Restored Agency

When employees rediscover that their efforts can create change, something remarkable happens. The energy that was being suppressed doesn’t just return—it amplifies. People who’d given up on improvement start seeing possibilities everywhere. Teams that had become passive start actively solving problems. Innovation returns because people believe their ideas might actually get implemented.

Most importantly, the culture shifts from learned helplessness to learned hopefulness. New employees enter an environment where taking initiative is normal, where suggesting improvements is valued, and where people believe their work makes a difference.

Ready to transform learned helplessness into learned hopefulness in your organization? Learn more about my motivational keynotes that address these attitudes and offer actionable solutions to restore employee agency and reignite performance.