PERFORM - Why high performers are the last people to ask for help

Part 2 of a 5-part series on mental fitness and sustainable performance: Perform.

The people who most need support are often the ones least likely to ask for it. Not because they are unaware something is wrong, but because everything about how they have succeeded so far tells them not to say so.
High performers build their reputation on capability. They are the ones who solve the problem, hit the deadline, stay calm when everyone else is not. That reputation becomes a kind of trap. Asking for help starts to feel like evidence against the very identity that got them there.

According to Mental Health Research Canada's 2025 research, only one in three employees who experienced a mental health challenge that affected their work actually disclosed it. The most cited reason was fear of career consequences, or being seen as less capable. For high performers specifically, that fear carries weight, because capability is the entire currency they have built their reputation.

The paradox of competence

Leaders tend to read confidence and struggle as opposites. If someone is coping, they must be fine. If someone is struggling, it will show.

High performers recognise this and manage the gap between what they are experiencing and what they are seen to be experiencing. Psychologists call this impression management, the ongoing work of presenting a version of yourself that matches what a situation seems to require. For a high performer, that usually means presenting competence, even when competence is costing them more than anyone around them realises.

The result is a kind of quiet self silencing. Not a decision to hide something dramatic, but a steady, almost automatic choice to say "I'm fine" rather than "I'm not".

Why leaders miss it

Leaders are not failing to notice because they do not care. They are failing to notice because the signals that usually prompt concern, missed deadlines, visible stress, a dip in output, are precisely the signals a high performer is best equipped to suppress.

The data backs this up at a structural level. NAMI's 2025 Workplace Mental Health Poll, surveying 2,376 full time workers, found only 57% of employees feel comfortable discussing mental health with their direct manager. That comfort drops at each senior level. The further up the org chart, the lower the sense of psychological safety people report, even though seniority is often assumed to come with more trust, not less.

That means often your highest performers and most senior team members are least likely to prompt disclosure. The organisation has no reliable way to tell a struggling high performer from a thriving one until something breaks, a resignation, a health crisis, a mistake that would have been unthinkable a year earlier.

This is the blind spot at the centre of most workplace mental health strategies. They are not built to catch invisible distress in someone who has spent years becoming very good at appearing fine.

The cost of staying quiet

The immediate cost falls on the individual. Sustained self silencing is exhausting in a way that rarely shows up until it does, often suddenly, often at a point well past where earlier support would have made the difference.
The organisational cost is less visible but no smaller. High performers who burn out silently do not just lose capacity themselves. They often take institutional knowledge, client relationships and team stability with them when they leave, and the departure frequently looks sudden to everyone except the person who made it.
What actually helps
The most effective interventions here are rarely about persuading someone to speak up. They are about changing what a leader notices and how they respond to it.
That starts with treating consistency as a signal worth checking, not a reassurance to relax into. A team member who never seems to struggle is not necessarily thriving. Sometimes they are simply well practised at not showing it.
It also means building the specific skill of asking a real question rather than a rhetorical one. "How are you doing" invites a reflex answer. A more specific, genuinely curious question, about workload, about what has felt hard lately, about what support would actually look like, gives someone a way in that "I'm fine" does not foreclose.
None of this requires a leader to become a counsellor. It requires the same kind of deliberate, practised capability this series keeps returning to, the ability to notice what is actually happening, not just what is being presented.
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Resources:
Mental Health Research Canada (2025), on disclosure rates and reasons for staying silent
NAMI 2025 Workplace Mental Health Poll (2,376 full time workers surveyed), on manager comfort and seniority