The day your most valuable employee stops raising their hand
Explaining the definition and impact of midlife identity drift.
Peter said something to me that made my left eyebrow twitch (which is never a good sign): “I don’t say much in meetings anymore.”
He sounded a little surprised by it, like he’d only just noticed. He was my coachee at the time and I’d come to know him as someone senior and experienced. The kind of person others turn to when things get difficult.
So I asked whether it had always been like that.
He smiled. “No, I used to be right in the middle of it.”
The two versions of you
That gap between those two versions of him is where this gets interesting.
Every team has one of these people: someone who sees how things connect and can judge where a conversation is going before it gets there. Think of them as the person who has already read the last page of the book while everyone else is still on chapter three.
But then, at some point, they stop being involved in the same way. They’re still present and get the job done. Colleagues still consider them reliable. It’s just that they’re no longer shaping what’s happening around them.
Organisations tend to translate this into something they already understand. They call it a dip in motivation or claim that this person got a bit too comfortable in their role. That explanation sounds plausible, but to me, it just doesn’t hold up.
If the experience is still there and the judgment has been sharpened over time, why would someone with all of that start pulling back?
Peter was one of the very first people I started coaching. Since then, I’ve worked with a disturbingly high proportion of people who describe their professional role in similar terms. Enough to recognise a pattern that I don’t think organisations are generally equipped to see.
These are people that have built something, established themselves and played the game well enough to know how it works. And then, without any clear trigger, the game starts to feel different. Not exactly worse, but less engaging in a way they find strangely difficult to explain, including to themselves.
Think of it like a favourite jumper you’ve had for years. It still fits and despite some pilling, nothing is technically wrong with it. You just find yourself reaching for it less often, without quite knowing why.
How you grow ≠ how you perform
Herminia Ibarra, who researches how professional identity evolves over time, makes a useful observation: people don’t grow in a straight line. At certain stages, who you are and the role you occupy stop lining up as neatly as they once did.
From the outside, nothing looks off. But from the inside, it takes noticeably more effort to stay fully present.
People rarely describe it in those terms. They usually put it in simpler words: “I’m just not that interested anymore.” “I already know how these conversations go.” “I just do what’s needed.”
Peter’s role hadn’t changed in any meaningful way for quite a few years: same expectations, same environment, same conversations. But he had changed through accumulated experience, responsibility and time. And the role hadn’t moved with him.
He said something else that I still remember. “I sit in those meetings and I can see the whole thing play out before it happens. I’ve seen the pattern so many times. I just don’t always feel the need to step in anymore.”
Midlife identity drift
To me, that’s not someone who has checked out. I think it’s someone whose relationship to their work has shifted.
I call this midlife identity drift. The idea is genuinely simple: the person changed, but the job didn’t change with them. And because nothing looks wrong from the outside, nobody notices. Including, quite often, the person themselves.
The problem isn’t motivation or performance, it’s all about identity.
Which is precisely why the organisation’s standard toolkit doesn’t reach it: performance reviews, incentives, a promotion that turns out to be a larger version of the same role rather than a different one. Meanwhile, someone’s position on the 9-box matrix goes into freefall and everyone concludes they’ve lost their edge rather than asking whether the role still fits who they’ve become.
There’s also a practical reason people don’t raise midlife identity drift themselves. By this stage, they’ve built a career that works. They have status, stability and a level of predictability that isn’t easy to walk away from. So even when something feels off, the default is to stay and adjust. People become more selective about where they engage and more conservative with their energy. From the outside, that looks like consistency. But from the inside, it feels more like a slow detachment.
The risk of midlife identity drift
The real risk for organisations isn’t that their most experienced people leave. That’s visible, and you can plan for it. What’s much harder to manage is when they stay and keep performing, but gradually stop contributing in the way that made them worth keeping in the first place.
For individuals, midlife identity drift reframes the question: not how to get back to where you were, but whether that’s even the right destination.
For organisations, it shifts the focus too. Instead of asking whether someone is still performing, the more useful question is whether the role still matches who that person has actually become.
It’s worth asking before someone decides they don’t really need to raise their hand anymore.