Every company has that person who used to feel like a cheat code.

They carried three projects at once. Cleaned up other teams’ messes. Hit the date even when the plan was a fantasy. You bragged about them in exec meetings.

Now they’re a “problem.”

They push back in planning. They refuse last minute asks. They sound sharper in meetings. HR hears words like “rigid,” “negative,” “hard to manage.”

So leaders whisper the same question.

“What happened to them?”

Here’s the harder question.

What if nothing “went wrong” with them at all. What if they’re just the first person who stopped pretending your operating model makes sense.

When Your Best People Start Saying The Quiet Part Out Loud

Most executives misread high performer behavior.

When a top engineer or PM or sales leader starts arguing more, they reach for an easy story. Ego. Burnout. Entitlement. “They used to be great, but success went to their head.”

It feels neat. It keeps the problem inside one person. It lets everyone else stay comfortable.

It is also usually wrong.

Look at what’s really happening around that “difficult” person.

They are still the one leadership calls when something important is at risk. Their name is on every hairy initiative. They absorb the late decisions, the scope creep, the surprise executive requests that show up three days before launch. They are the human shock absorber for system failure.

Christina Maslach’s research on burnout describes a specific pattern here. People do not just get tired. They move from exhaustion into cynicism and a sense of reduced impact when workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values stop lining up with the story they were sold. Her work spells out how that mismatch shows up in behavior long before people quit.

You see that shift every day, you just call it something else.

They stop smiling through unrealistic plans. They question magical timelines. They ask “What will we stop if we add this” instead of nodding and taking it all on. Their emails get shorter. Jokes fade. “Sure, no problem” turns into “That conflicts with three other priorities.”

That is not attitude. That is honesty.

When a high performer becomes “difficult,” they are usually the first person who is no longer willing to subsidize bad math with their personal life.

Which leads to the next painful truth.

Excellence Turns Ugly When The System Needs Heroes To Survive

Most companies do not run on strategy. They run on a handful of people who quietly hold everything together.

Workplace’s language data across organizations shows the same pattern every time. The same names keep showing up on every critical project, every exception, every last minute save. Those people are the first to show burnout fingerprints in their communication. Messages shrink. Tone cools. Hedge phrases like “should be fine” appear more often. Late night traffic becomes normal instead of rare.

On paper it looks like commitment. In reality it is dependence on the few people willing to pay an invisible cost.

Here is where it gets nasty.

Leaders reward the heroics. The person who pulled off the impossible quarter gets the shoutout. The manager who said “no” to protect their team’s capacity gets silence.

That reward system teaches one lesson. The company values output more than truth.

So your best people enter a warped bargain. They care deeply about the work and the mission. They also see how sloppy commitments, fuzzy ownership, and chronic urgency are chewing through them and their teams.

Robert Vallerand’s research on work passion draws a hard line here. Harmonious passion lets people love their work and still walk away. Obsessive passion fuses work with identity and drives people to keep going even when the cost is too high. That obsessive kind is tightly linked to conflict at home, workaholism, and burnout in high achievers. His studies spell it out in detail.

Now put that into your world.

Your high performer is not just doing a job. They are defending a standard they tie to who they are.

So when they watch leaders cling to impossible plans, dodge tradeoffs, or hide behind the mission to excuse chaos, they do not shrug.

They take it personally.

That is the moment excellence starts to look ugly on the surface.

Not because the person turned bad. Because they finally stopped hiding how broken the system feels.

How To Tell If You Have A Toxic Star Or An Early Warning Signal

This is where CPOs and CEOs earn their paycheck.

You absolutely have some high performers who are just toxic. They bully. They hoard information. They win at the expense of everyone around them. Keeping them because they “deliver” is cowardice.

But that is not most of your so called difficult stars.

Most are early warning signals that your operating model is running on fumes.

Here is how to tell which one you are dealing with.

1. Look at when the friction started

If someone was collaborative for years and only turned sharp after a run of late decisions, reorgs, or stacked priorities, you are not looking at a random personality shift. You are looking at a rational response to accumulated nonsense.

2. Listen to what they are actually angry about

Toxic stars complain about status and special treatment.

Early warning signals complain about systems. They focus on ownership, conflicting priorities, decision churn, scope creep, and the way exceptions are handled. Their frustration is operational even if their tone is heated.

3. Check their hit rate

Pull three things they pushed back on in the last year. How many of those later blew up in exactly the way they predicted.

If their objections keep matching your postmortems, you are not dealing with negativity. You are dealing with accuracy.

4. Ask their team, not just their peers

If direct reports feel protected, clear, and supported, that is a different story than if they feel small and unsafe. Use skip levels. Use your own Workplace data. See if their team’s language shows rising fear or rising clarity.

You are not looking for perfection. You are looking for intent and direction.

5. Watch what happens when they leave the room

If people breathe a sigh of relief, you might have a true culture problem.

If people lower their voice and say “They’re intense, but they’re right,” you just found your canary in the coal mine.

Once you know you are looking at an early warning signal, not a selfish star, the next move is obvious and uncomfortable.

Stop Smoothing The Edges And Fix The Math

Most executive teams respond to a difficult high performer in one of two ways.

They coach them on tone and “collaboration.”

Or they quietly move them out.

Both options protect short term comfort. Both options raise long term execution risk.

Here is the better play if you are serious about building a company that can actually execute at the level your strategy demands.

1. Put their workload and exceptions in one view

Sit down with that person and your people leader. List every major initiative they own. Add the ad hoc work. The favors. The special projects. The emergencies they caught.

When you see that on a single page, you are no longer talking about personality. You are looking at arithmetic.

2. Treat their complaints as operating data, not drama

For each point they raise, ask “If this is true, what does it predict for our next big launch or quarter.”

Then cross check with your live signals. Workplace already shows where decision reopens, hedge language, and after hours work are spiking. If their story lines up with the data, believe the story.

3. Change the rules that made the behavior necessary

If they keep refusing last minute work, install a no surprise rule around deadlines for the whole org.

If they are the only one asking what will stop when something new starts, make that question mandatory in every planning meeting.

If they are angry about exception overload, define what counts as a real exception and who is allowed to grant one.

Do not just tell them to calm down. Remove the patterns that justified their reaction in the first place.

4. Rewrite what you reward

Start publicly praising the leaders who protect realistic plans, kill low value work, and shield their teams from random chaos.

Make sustainable execution a visible promotion factor. Call out the manager who hands work back when the math does not fit. The engineer who says “next sprint” instead of “I’ll cram it in” and holds the line.

You build what you celebrate. Right now, most companies are celebrating self sacrifice and then acting surprised when their best people eventually snap.

5. Decide with courage, not convenience

At some point you face a simple decision.

Either you align around the standards your best people are fighting for, or you admit you want a softer culture with lower friction and lower truth.

If the high performer is pushing for the bar you actually believe in, back them. Fix the system. Support them in sharpening their delivery, without diluting the substance.

If they are fighting against a direction you are committed to, tell the truth. This is where we are going. This is how we will run. Help them find a place where their style and standards fit.

What you cannot do is pretend you value excellence while quietly exiling the people who keep holding you to it.

The Real Execution Risk Hides Behind Quiet Compliance

The biggest danger in your company is not one loud, frustrated high performer.

It is a room full of smart people who stopped arguing because they decided the truth was not worth the cost.

Your most “difficult” high performers are usually the last ones to give up on you. They are the ones who still believe the company can match its own story. They are the ones who feel the values gap first and refuse to normalize it.

If you are a CPO, your job is not to sand those people down until they are pleasant. Your job is to translate what they are saying into a diagnosis of execution risk and put a plan in front of your CEO.

If you are a CEO, your job is not to demand more resilience from the same names. Your job is to build an operating system that does not require silent heroes to hold it together.

When you treat difficult high performers as data instead of drama, you get something rare.

You get the truth early, when it is still cheap to act on.

The companies that win over the next decade will not be the ones with the nicest meetings. They will be the ones that can stand in the heat of honest resistance, upgrade the system, and turn that friction into the sharpest execution edge in their category.

Listen to the people you are most tempted to label as difficult.

They might be the only ones still doing you the favor of telling the truth.