Your retention numbers look great. Your senior team hasn’t turned over in two years. Your #2 and #3 show up every day, clear the work, and never complain.
That may not be stability. It may be rot.
Two data points from this year tell the story when you put them side by side. Harvard Business Review reports that 59% of senior leaders feel drained and 44% have considered leaving their jobs for well-being reasons. Gartner, looking at leaders who actually walk out the door, finds that 60% cite lack of career growth — not pay — as the reason.
Put those together and a third group emerges. Leaders who are drained. Leaders who don’t see a path. And leaders who aren’t leaving anyway. That’s the job hugger.
The job hugger doesn’t break down in public. They don’t miss deadlines. They don’t have a performance problem. They’ve simply stopped reaching for the next thing, because the next thing looks unavailable or unworthy of the effort. On every metric your HR dashboard tracks, they register as a retention win.
The damage shows up somewhere else. Fewer challenges in your staff meetings. Internal candidates who were supposed to be ready in eighteen months are still “almost ready” at month thirty. Strategic initiatives keep slipping a quarter, then another. Nobody is failing. Nothing is getting done either.
By the time revenue reflects it, you’ve lost two years.
This is the Lencioni problem most CEOs don’t want to admit they have. Vulnerability-based trust is what surfaces the stuck leader before the stuck leader becomes the missing leader. But that conversation almost never happens inside the company. Your #2 isn’t going to tell you they’re drained and can’t see a future. That sentence reads as a resignation letter, and they know it.
It happens somewhere else. It happens in a peer group of other senior leaders who aren’t in the reporting line. It happens with a coach who has no stake in whether they stay. Sometimes it happens with a CEO who has deliberately built the kind of relationship where “I’m stuck” is a data point, not a threat.
If your senior team is steady right now, that’s the question worth asking this quarter. Steady — or stuck?
The retention dashboard won’t tell you. A real conversation will.