Seven EX problems your leadership style is causing

Quiet quitting, presenteeism and burnout look like a people problem. Read as signals instead, they point somewhere less comfortable and a great deal more useful: the conditions you set as a leader. Here are seven of them, and the biology that sits underneath.

Remember those regular Friday WIPs, somewhere past the second year of business? Now, in a tempo, they felt like this: The numbers are fine. This week’s glossy deck is built. Someone is walking the team through the sprint, and everyone is nodding in the right places. Yet the room is the temperature of a room where nothing much is being said.

You’d clocked it for a while. The questions had thinned out with the enthusiasm. But today there’s a tipping point: nobody fights you on anything now. The one person who used to push back meets your eye for a second, then finds something interesting on her laptop. You’d put it down to a hard quarter. A tired team. The time of year.

Horror films have a shorthand for this. A particular cold that tells the audience something is wrong long before any character says so. M. Night Shyamalan built a whole film on it in 1999, and you already know the one, because everybody does. The boy. The breath that fogs when the dead are near. And the child psychologist, decent and patient, trying so hard to help. He spends the whole film working out what is wrong with everyone around him. I will not say the line. I will only point out that he is the last person in the building to understand the temperature of the room. You don’t need a sixth sense to work it out.

The smoke and the fire

Most leadership advice keeps you firmly in the first half of that film. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 puts global engagement at 20%, its lowest since 2020. That leaves the clear majority of the workforce doing precisely what we have learned to call quiet quitting. So the reflex is to reach for the kit. Run a survey. Book a workshop. Add a wellbeing perk. Wait for morale to tick back up. But quiet quitting, presenteeism and burnout are not the disease. They are the smoke. And the fire, more often than any of us cares to admit, is sitting in the corner office reading the engagement survey.

The room did get colder around 2020, and for a lot of people it never quite warmed back up. Bessel van der Kolk called his book The Body Keeps the Score. That is exactly what a body does with a threat it was never allowed to finish. The pandemic taught a great many nervous systems, well below conscious thought, that the ground can shift without warning. Most workplaces carried on as though that lifted the day the doors reopened. It did not. It now lives in the gap between how safe your team looks and how safe it feels.

None of this is an invitation to flagellate yourself. It is an invitation to the rewatch. The second viewing, the one where you finally catch your own part in it, is the only one that hands you any leverage at all.

What is quiet quitting?

Quiet quitting is when an employee keeps their job but withdraws their discretionary effort. They do what the role strictly requires and nothing more. The label arrived in 2022, but the behaviour is old, and it is not laziness. It is a nervous system that no longer feels safe enough to invest beyond the minimum. Stephen Porges, who developed polyvagal theory, would call it a shift into a protective state. The body has decided the environment is not worth the risk of full engagement. So quiet quitting is best read not as a motivation problem but as a safety signal, and safety is something leaders set.

So if the symptom is downstream, where does it start? Here are seven clues, the seven employee experience problems your leadership style is more likely to be causing than catching. Read them the way you would on a second viewing, already knowing how the film ends.

1. Quiet quitting, because you reward compliance and call it commitment

This is the first clue, and the easiest to miss, because it looks so much like a virtue. You probably did not set out to reward it. But notice what gets praised in your team. Is it the person who delivers exactly what was asked, on time, without friction? Or the person who delivers something better than what was asked and made a mess on the way?

If it is the former, you are training compliance. And compliance is the ceiling of quiet quitting, not the cure for it. Deb Dana, who translated Porges for clinical work, describes how we co-regulate off the people around us. Your team is reading your nervous system all day long. When your regulation depends on things going smoothly, they learn to keep things smooth. In practice, that means giving you the minimum that keeps the peace. That is the quiet quit, and you asked for it without knowing.

2. Presenteeism, because rest reads as risk in your culture

Presenteeism is the more expensive cousin of absenteeism, and the harder one to catch. The bodies are at the desks. The attention left weeks ago.

Ask yourself an honest question. In your team, what happens to the person who logs off at a reasonable hour, takes their leave, and protects their weekend? Are they marked down, without anyone ever saying it aloud, as less committed? Because if the route to your approval runs through visible exhaustion, you will get visible exhaustion. You will not get good work. A tired brain cannot do the integrative thinking Roger Martin describes. That is the holding of two opposing ideas long enough to find a better third one. It can only do the obvious thing, slower.

3. Burnout, because you are modelling a machine with no off switch

Here is the uncomfortable bit. Burnout in your team is frequently a delayed echo of your own.

Sympathetic activation, the body’s mobilising state, is brilliant for a sprint and corrosive across a marathon. Keeping your head over the longer haul is the real work of sustained leadership. So when a leader runs permanently mobilised, never visibly recovering, never naming the cost, the team absorbs the standard. They cannot see your private collapse on a Sunday. They can only see the Monday version of you who appears to need nothing. So they try to need nothing too, until the body sends the invoice.

4. Absenteeism, because the environment reads as a threat

When people start calling in sick more often, the instinct is to tighten the policy. Resist it.

Absenteeism is one of the bluntest things a body can do. It is the nervous system voting with its feet, removing itself from an environment it has classified as unsafe. The classification is not always conscious and it is rarely about the work itself. It is about whether the person feels they can be in the room as they actually are. Tighten the policy and you treat the smoke alarm by removing the battery. The fire keeps burning, and now you cannot hear it.

5. Disengagement, because you speak first and fill every silence

Watch your own meetings. Who talks first? Who fills the pause when nobody answers? If the answer is usually you, you have found a cause of disengagement that no survey will name for you.

Timothy Clark’s first stage of psychological safety is inclusion safety, the basic sense that you belong and your presence matters. A leader who speaks first and fills every gap means well. But the lesson the room takes is that its voice is not needed. Disengagement is the rational response. Why bring your thinking to a meeting that runs perfectly well without it? The silence you read as agreement is often just people who have learned there is no point.

6. Declining morale, because you rupture and never repair

Every working relationship ruptures. You snap in a stand-up. You forget a promise. Maybe you take a little too much credit. None of that is the problem. Attachment researchers from Bowlby to Dan Siegel are clear that rupture is normal and survivable. What determines the health of the bond is repair.

Morale does not erode because leaders are imperfect. It erodes because leaders rupture and then sail on as if nothing happened, leaving a trail of small, unrepaired tears behind them. The repair is not complicated. It is the short, specific, ego-free sentence the next morning: that landed badly, that was on me, here is what I should have done. Leaders skip it because it stings the ego for ten seconds. Those ten seconds are the cheapest morale investment you will ever make.

7. The innovation drought, because you reward agreement over challenge

This is the one that scaling founders feel last and pay for most. At some point the bold ideas dry up. Nobody brings you the uncomfortable truth about the product, the hire, the strategy. You assume you have simply recruited a more agreeable team. You have not. In fact, you have trained them.

Clark’s fourth and final stage is challenger safety: the freedom to question the status quo without being punished for it. It is the stage most leaders suffocate without ever meaning to, because a challenge to the plan reads, in the moment, as a challenge to them. Amy Edmondson’s research at Harvard is unambiguous on this. Teams without challenger safety underperform and, more dangerously, hide their mistakes until those mistakes get expensive. The innovation drought is not a talent shortage. It is a safety shortage, and you are its weather system. This is exactly the climate that good innovation work is designed to thaw.

The pattern under all seven

Read those seven clues back to back and a single thread runs through them. Every one is a downstream signal of an upstream condition, and that condition is biological before it is cultural. Gabor Maté, in The Myth of Normal, argues that we are remarkably skilled at normalising the conditions that make people unwell. The abnormal becomes the water everyone swims in, and nobody thinks to question it. A team that has stopped asking, stopped volunteering and stopped pushing back has not calmed down. It has adapted to something. And adaptation is not the same as health. Nor does it stay inside the building. The disengaged team is the one your customers meet, which is why even a carefully mapped customer journey falls flat when the people delivering it have checked out.

This is the part the engagement-survey industry keeps missing. You cannot incentivise your way out of a safety problem. No perk gets you past a nervous system that has decided the room is not safe. You can only change the conditions, and the conditions start with how you lead.

The good news on the rewatch

Which brings us back to the film. You have spent the quarter, perhaps the year, replacing smoke alarms. A new survey, a new perk, a new offsite, and still that drop in temperature whenever you walk in. You are not the patient diagnostician in this story, working out what is wrong with everyone else. A good deal of the time, you are the fire. The room has been telling you so in every clue you filed under something else. Here is the one mercy the film withholds from its protagonist, and the only genuinely good news in the whole business. He works it out at the very end, with nothing left to do about it. You get to work it out now, while there is still a story left to change.

That is the entire premise of the OPEN Method. It is a polyvagal-informed system for leaders who would rather work on the fire than keep replacing smoke alarms. If you have recognised your team, or yourself, anywhere in these seven, that is not a verdict. It is a starting point, and a far more hopeful one than another survey.

If you would like a thinking partner for that work rather than another vendor with a workshop, that is what I do. Have a look at the OPEN Method, or get in touch, and we will start with what you are seeing in the room and trace it back to its source.

Frequently asked questions

Is quiet quitting the employee’s fault or the leader’s?

Both play a part, but the leverage sits with the leader. Quiet quitting is a withdrawal of discretionary effort, and discretionary effort is given in response to conditions. An employee can choose to disengage, but the conditions that make disengagement the rational choice are largely set above them. If you want to change the behaviour, change the conditions first.

What is the difference between quiet quitting and presenteeism?

Quiet quitting is doing the minimum the role requires and no more. Presenteeism is being physically present but mentally checked out, often while unwell or exhausted. Quiet quitting is a boundary; presenteeism is a depletion. Both are signs that the environment is not safe or sustainable enough to earn full engagement.

How do I know if my leadership style is causing burnout?

Look at what you model rather than what you say. If you never visibly rest, never name the cost of the pace, and treat exhaustion in others as proof of commitment, you are setting a standard the team will match until their bodies refuse. The clearest test is whether your people feel able to recover openly, or whether they hide it.

Can engagement surveys fix disengagement?

A survey can help you see disengagement, but it cannot fix it, and used badly it can deepen it. If people answer honestly and nothing visibly changes, the survey itself becomes evidence that speaking up is pointless. Surveys measure smoke. The fire is fixed by changing how the team is led day to day.

What are the four stages of psychological safety?

Timothy Clark’s model runs in sequence: inclusion safety (you belong), learner safety (you can ask and make mistakes), contributor safety (you can add value in your own way), and challenger safety (you can question the status quo without punishment). Most teams stall at the first or second stage, which is why the bold ideas never arrive.

Is this just about being a nicer manager?

No. Niceness is not the point and can even get in the way, because conflict-avoidant leaders rupture safety in their own way. This is about regulation, repair and the deliberate construction of conditions where a nervous system will invest. Some of that work is warm. Some of it is firm. All of it is intentional.

Where does the OPEN Method fit in?

The OPEN Method is the upstream system for the symptoms in this article. Rather than treating quiet quitting, burnout or disengagement one at a time, it works on the leadership conditions that produce all of them, grounded in polyvagal theory and the four stages of psychological safety. It is built for leaders at a tipping point who want a thinking partner, not a workshop.

About the author

Liz Pinfold-Reed is an insight-first strategist and executive coach, and the founder of Good CX in Auckland. She is polyvagal-informed and Play Zone certified, chairs the CX Summit, and works with founders and senior leaders at the tipping points of scaling, repositioning and succession. Her practice sits where rigour meets warmth: proven frameworks from polyvagal theory, psychological safety and attachment research, applied to the real conditions of leading people.