Coming Up Next: Managing Employee Disengagement

Share your questions about why good employees check out – and what leaders often miss

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This month, we’ve been exploring Human Leadership in the Age of AI: where leaders need to stay personally present, what should remain meaningfully human, and how we can use new tools without losing the judgment, connection, and care that leadership depends on.

As we continue that conversation, I also wanted to pause and invite you into what’s coming next.

I’m beginning to plan our next topic, Managing Employee Disengagement, and I would love to hear what you want to understand before the series fully takes shape.

Employee disengagement is not always obvious.

Sometimes an employee becomes quieter, less enthusiastic, or less involved. But sometimes they continue meeting every deadline and producing good work while gradually withdrawing the ideas, energy, initiative, or care they once brought to the role.

And because people express engagement differently in the first place, it can be surprisingly easy to misread what is happening.

A naturally quiet employee is not necessarily checked out. A highly sociable employee can appear enthusiastic long after their investment in the work has faded. One person may respond to disengagement by doing the bare minimum, while another continues going above and beyond until the day they leave.

That is where personality can add some much-needed context.

Coming up, we’ll explore why good employees lose motivation, how disengagement can look different across personality types, what managers commonly mistake for checking out, and what may be happening when a once-invested employee starts pulling back.

But before I build the series out, I would love to hear from you.

If you feel comfortable doing so, share what you would like to see covered in the comments below. You might have a question about someone you currently lead, a situation you have experienced yourself, or a pattern you have never quite known how to interpret.

If you aren’t sure where to start, here are a few prompts you can riff off of:

• What makes it difficult to tell whether an employee is disengaged or simply has a different personality or working style?

• Have you ever watched a good employee gradually check out? What changed first?

• What questions do you have about talking to an employee who seems less invested than they once were?

• Are there signs of disengagement that you think leaders commonly overlook or misunderstand?

• How would you like to see personality incorporated into this conversation?

I’ve opened up commenting on this post so everyone can respond.

I truly do read every response, and what you share will help shape the situations, questions, and personality differences we explore throughout the series.

And if you have another leadership topic you would love to see covered in the future, all paying subscribers are invited to join the Leadership Council, where you can submit ideas directly. (This topic that we’re about to dive into came from reader requests.)

I’m especially interested in this topic because employee disengagement is easy to reduce to a motivation problem.

But people rarely check out for no reason.

They may feel underused, overlooked, micromanaged, disconnected from the purpose of their work, or tired of raising concerns that never lead anywhere. And the same workplace conditions can affect different personalities in very different ways.

That is the part I want to explore with you: not simply how to make employees appear more engaged, but how leaders can better understand what has changed – and what that change may be trying to tell them.

Until next time,
Carly from the 16Personalities team