It’s a scenario that keeps leaders awake at night: A top-performing employee who consistently demonstrates initiative, embraces learning, and delivers oversized value abruptly quits.

Management is left blindsided, having mistaken high output for high engagement. What is the reality? The employee didn’t feel engaged with the work or the organization; they felt invisible. This reveals a critical, modern threat to organizations. The most significant risk isn’t the employee doing the bare minimum; instead, it is the high performer doing the maximum for the minimum reward. This costly phenomenon is popularly becoming known as ghost growth.

Ghost growth is the silent, unrewarded development of your talent. They aren’t quitting. They’re *growing—*taking initiative, learning new skills, absorbing departed colleagues’ responsibilities, and mastering new technology and systems.

Ghost growth is invisible to the organization. It’s unrecognized. It’s unacknowledged. It’s when we ask for innovation and grit, but then the employee’s title doesn’t change, and their pay doesn’t budge. This quiet betrayal of the modern workplace was identified 25 years ago in the Journal of Applied Psychology, and if it continues will silently kill workplace engagement and drive high-performer burnout. Also, if we don’t learn to see and reward this invisible labor, the best employees will, quite fittingly, just disappear.

The good news is that this is manageable. It doesn’t require a massive budget, but it does require a fundamental shift in how organizations and leaders see work and how employees bring visibility to their work.

Organizations Need Agility

If the system itself is rigid, employees and leaders can only do so much. An organization’s structure should be agile enough to reward growth as it happens. The annual promotion cycle is a relic. If an employee’s capabilities have outpaced their title by June, waiting until next April to acknowledge them is a formal invitation to your competitors. According to the Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance, organizations must focus on employees’ work and organizational engagement by building pathways for agile advancement opportunities.

HR departments must audit compensation and leveling systems, asking themselves if we are still paying for the static, five-year-old job description or for the value the person is delivering today? If a Junior Coordinator has been performing at a Senior Strategist level, their title and pay should reflect reality. If not, the doors of your competitors will invite them to join.

Leaders Bring Visible Validation

An antidote to ghost growth is visible validation from their curious and action-oriented leaders.

Trade assumptions for curiosity. Stop assuming an employee is content in their role or engaged in the work simply because they aren’t complaining. An annual performance review is too little too late, so make monthly coaching a habit with calls and growth check-ins. Asking specific, observational questions:

• What new responsibilities have you taken on that I may be unaware of?
• What part of your job is energizing you right now?
• I saw how you navigated our new software. Where did you learn to do that?

Act as translators. When you see an employee demonstrating a new skill, name it. Don’t just say, “Thanks for helping the team,” say, “The way you organized the data and translated the narrative is advanced strategic communication.” By naming the growth, you make it visible. You also provide the employee with language and evidence to advocate for themselves as they begin building their case for formal advancement.

Employees Bring Visibility to Their Work

For employees experiencing ghost growth, arm yourself with data showcasing your value proposition to the organization and identifying the current marketplace demand, and schedule a courageous conversation with your manager outlining an individual career plan. And if your organization or manager still ghosts your growth, you are left with a logical conclusion: “To grow, I may have to go.” Use this as encouragement to update your resume.

Ultimately, solving ghost growth is about closing the gap between value delivered and value recognized. It demands curiosity from managers and agility from the organization, as employees are already investing in their own development and showcasing their capabilities. Start acknowledging employee contributions, rewarding their value, and making their growth a tangible reality, or start watching them and their talent disappear for good.

References

Albrecht, S. L., Bakker, A. B., Gruman, J. A., Macey, W. H., & Saks, A. M. (2015). Employee engagement, human resource management practices and competitive advantage: An integrated approach. Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance, 2(1), 7-35. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOEPP-08-2014-0042

Demerouti, E., Bakker, A. B., Nachreiner, F., & Schaufeli, W. B. (2001). The job demands-resources model of burnout. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), 499–512.

Saks, A. M., Gruman, J. A., & Zhang, Q. (2022). Organization engagement: A review and comparison to job engagement. Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance, 9(1), 20-49. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOEPP-12-2020-0253