You know that look.

You tell a top performer, "You crushed this" and you see it. The tiny flinch. The half smile. The eyes that say, "What are you about to put on my plate?"

You meant it as encouragement. They heard it as a warning.

This is not about hurt feelings. It is about pattern recognition. Your people have learned that compliments usually show up right before one thing.

More load.

If you care about psychological safety, this is your blind spot. You think praise builds safety. In reality, the way most organizations use praise quietly drains it.

When Praise Starts To Feel Like A Threat

Employees are not confused. They are observant.

They notice that the person who gets called "rockstar" ends up owning every fire drill. They notice that the reliable one gets every broken project dumped in their lap. They notice that public recognition is often the pregame speech for private overload.

Over time, the pattern is brutally clear.

Compliment. New ask. Bigger scope. Same pay. Less sleep.

Researchers have seen the downstream effect of this pattern in a hundred different ways. Extra role behavior that looks heroic on paper often shows up in real life as role overload, job stress, and work family conflict for the very people leaders lean on the hardest. That is exactly what Michael Bolino and William Turnley found in their work on citizenship behavior and overload, where going "above and beyond" often carried a personal cost in stress and conflict for high contributors (Bolino & Turnley, 2005).

Your people have made the connection. Recognition usually means more unpaid, unprotected effort. So they start doing what any rational human would do.

They duck.

They dial down their visibility. They stop volunteering. They speak up less in rooms where good ideas tend to come with lifetime ownership.

On your engagement survey, it reads as lower voice, lower participation, lower "discretionary effort." In real life, it is self defense.

And it is eating away at the one thing you keep telling the board you care about.

How This Quietly Destroys Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is not a vibe. It is not everyone feeling comfortable all the time. Amy Edmondson defined it as the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.

Safe to speak up. Safe to dissent. Safe to put your name on the hard problems without worrying that doing the right thing will wreck your life.

Now picture how it feels when every time someone takes a risk and succeeds, the reward is more work and more pressure with no real support. The signal is loud.

Competence is dangerous.

If being good at something guarantees more unbounded responsibility, then the smartest survival strategy is to stay just visible enough to keep your job and just invisible enough to avoid becoming the default mule.

That is how you lose contributor and challenger safety, the upper levels of psychological safety that actually drive innovation and speed. People might feel included. They might share small ideas. But when it comes to the messy, high stakes work, they keep their hands down.

Leadership research backs this up. When employees believe that speaking up or being too visible will lead to more burden or negative outcomes, they stop doing it, even when leaders insist their "door is open." Ethan Burris and James Detert showed that employee voice tracks closely to whether people expect their input to help or hurt them, not to how many town halls you run (Detert & Burris, 2007).

Here is the punchline.

When compliments are consistently followed by heavier load, they become a threat signal inside your culture. That is the opposite of psychological safety. It is a culture where the safest move is to stay small.

And the people who feel this most are the ones you can least afford to lose.

The Compliment To Overload Loop That Breaks Your Best People

Every company has a small group of people everyone trusts.

They are the ones who always pick up the slack. The ones who fix the broken handoffs. The ones whose names show up in every "shoutout" thread and every last minute project channel.

They are also the people who burn out first.

You have already seen the pattern in your own data. Late night messages from the same three people. Shorter replies from the person who used to be a source of energy. A sharp edge in the tone of someone who has always been calm and constructive. Workplace and similar tools pick up exactly these kinds of micro shifts in tone, timing, and participation as early smoke signals of burnout and falling psychological safety, long before it shows up in attrition reports.

On the surface, these people look engaged. They are still delivering. They are still the ones you highlight in all hands meetings. Underneath, the deal has changed.

Recognition no longer feels like appreciation. It feels like the moment the trap springs shut and they get tagged for the next impossible push. So of course they flinch when you praise them. They are not ungrateful. They are tired of paying the hidden price of being "trusted."

Here is the part most executives miss.

This is not a personality problem. It is not that you hired "people pleasers" who cannot say no. It is a system problem that you built.

You trained the culture to treat praise as recruitment for unpaid work. You rewarded the heroes who said yes to everything. You looked the other way when their workload quietly doubled while weaker performers stayed protected.

Once that loop is in place, every compliment you give them reinforces the same story.

You are valuable here as long as you keep carrying more than everyone else.

If you are the Chief People Officer, this is the moment you stop telling yourself you have a "recognition strategy" and start admitting you have a load problem wrapped in nice language.

The good news is that the fix is not another appreciation campaign.

Decouple Appreciation From Extraction

The fastest way to start repairing psychological safety around praise is simple.

Stop attaching asks to compliments.

Right now, you probably follow a script that feels respectful. You open with appreciation. Then you slide into the new project or the expanded scope. It sounds nice. It feels human. It is also exactly how you taught people that praise is the appetizer before the real meal of more work.

Change the script.

When you want to appreciate someone, just do that. Full stop. No follow on ask. No "since you are so good at this" speech. Let appreciation stand on its own so people can start to believe that not every compliment comes with a catch.

When you need to renegotiate scope or give someone a new responsibility, treat it like a business conversation, not a surprise bonus. Be explicit about the tradeoffs. Name what is coming off their plate to make space. If you cannot name anything, that is your signal that you are about to overload them.

This matters more than you think. When people see that recognition is no longer the gateway to unbounded load, their nervous system starts to relax around visibility. It becomes safer to be seen as competent, because competence no longer means "more pain for you."

Of course, changing how you talk is not enough. You also have to change what is true under the surface.

Make Load Visible, Then Fix The Pattern

You cannot fix what you do not see. Most executives have no realistic picture of who is actually carrying the work.

They see the big projects. They do not see the tiny emergencies, the emotional cleanup, the follow through that never shows up in a roadmap. That hidden work is exactly where your compliment to overload loop lives.

Start with one simple move.

1. Put All The Work In One Place

Across a team or function, list every significant initiative, not just the ones with pretty slide titles. Add the recurring fires, the "quick" executive requests, the mentoring, the onboarding, the cross functional committees. Put a name next to each one.

When you see the full spread, you will notice something. The same few names appear over and over.

Those are the people who flinch when you praise them. Because they know what is coming next.

2. Create A Hard Tradeoff Rule

For every new project given to a person or team, kill or pause something of equal weight. Make that rule explicit at the executive level.

If you cannot point to what is coming off the list, you are not allowed to put anything new on it.

This one move tells people a different story. It says "We value your time as much as your output." It tells your highest performers that being good at their job will not automatically turn them into a permanent dumping ground.

3. Use Language Data As An Early Alarm

If you have tools like Workplace, this is where they stop being an HR toy and start becoming a leadership instrument.

Look for patterns where the people who show up most often in recognition also show signs of strain. Rising after hours messages. Shorter, colder replies. Drops in how often they challenge decisions or ask clarifying questions.

Those are your canaries. They tell you where the compliment to overload pattern is still alive. They tell you where psychological safety is eroding around the people you depend on most.

When you see that pattern, you do not send them a gratitude note. You fix their load.

Redefine What You Celebrate

The final shift is cultural. You have to update what your organization treats as heroic.

Right now, most companies celebrate the person who "goes above and beyond" no matter the cost. The late night savior. The person who takes on the extra project without a peep. Every time you highlight that behavior, you teach everyone that saying yes to overload is how you win here.

If you want psychological safety, that cannot be the story anymore.

Start celebrating people who set smart boundaries. The engineer who says "I can take this on if we move that deadline." The manager who protects their team from surprise scope creep. The leader who hands work back when the plate is full instead of quietly absorbing it.

That is not softness. That is sustainable performance.

When you publicly recognize those choices, you are doing two things at once. You are protecting your best people from silent burnout. You are also sending a clear signal to everyone watching.

It is safe to tell the truth about capacity here. It is safe to be visible without getting buried.

That is what psychological safety looks like in practice. Not another listening session. Not another gratitude campaign. A culture where the story your actions tell matches the words on your slides.

Here is the real test.

If your people visibly relax when you compliment them, because they trust that no extra weight is hiding in the fine print, then you have started to fix it.

If they still flinch, you do not have a recognition problem. You have a broken deal.

Fix the deal. The safety will follow.