s a business leader, you keep your attention on your competitors, the shifting market, brand sentiment, and regulatory shifts in your industry. However, your biggest operational risk might be the staff member sitting in the third row of your all-hands meeting who has stopped caring.

Welcome to the “Great Detachment”: a workforce too tired to quit but too checked out to contribute. High retention rates may feel like stability, but the reality is that many enterprises are experiencing a surge in organizational friction—a heavy, invisible drag in which trust has been replaced by performative busywork. This isn’t a communication issue; it is the result of a fundamental leadership trap—disconnectedness.

When you manage by the numbers and at a distance, you lose people, the human glue that holds an organization together. Once connection is gone, it is really hard to reestablish. You can’t just throw systems, money, or software around to fix a team that has stopped caring.

Decision scientists who study organizational friction break it down into three types. One, procedural friction—the bloat of burdensome and redundant processes and meetings. Two, cognitive friction—the energy employees spend preparing for the-meeting-about-the-meeting. And three, relationship friction—this is the “trust tax” that comes from wasting energy on polishing work to satisfy a distant boss rather than doing the actual work of moving the project forward. It’s negative work, spending effort to look involved because that’s what’s valued by leadership.

This friction isn’t just a bad-vibes-in-the-workforce problem; it’s a financial one. In the 2019 report The High Cost of a Toxic Workplace Culture, the Society of Human Resource Managers revealed that 20 percent of workers left a job due to culture, and 76 percent stated their manager sets the culture of their workplace. This turnover resulted in $223 billion in expenses over the previous five years of the study, roughly $15,000 per full-time employee. Researchers Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao, in The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder, identify five sources of friction, and number one is “Oblivious Leaders: Those who fail to notice the friction their decisions create.”

Connection with both the company’s mission and its leader are important, but they function differently. Mission connection provides a stable sense of purpose (the long-term why), while leader connection offers relational trust and psychological safety (the daily how). Both are important. A compelling mission without connected leadership can lead to unsupported burnout, whereas a great leader without a connected mission often results in a highly motivated team with no direction.

In the 2024 Gallup report The Great Detachment: Why Employees Feel Stuck, a staggering 73 percent of employees stated that, since 2020, they had weathered constant, disruptive change—navigating chaotic restructures while battling the emotional distance that comes with organizational change, hybrid work, and evolving technologies like AI. Additionally, the unspoken promise that loyalty earns security has vanished. This broken psychological contract has fueled four types of disconnection:

• Loud quitting: “You aren’t listening, so I’m making sure you hear me.”
• Quiet quitting: “I’ll do the job, but I won’t give you my soul.”
• Quiet staying: “I hate it here, but I can’t find a better exit.”
• Quiet cracking: “I want to care, but I’m too exhausted to try.”

With the disconnect ranging from guarded and paralyzed to hostile and eroded, employees are prioritizing personal well-being over blind corporate loyalty. The Gallup report observed that the COVID-19 pandemic caused many to reevaluate what they want from their career and employer: “The Great Detachment [also] coincides with significant declines in two critical elements of employee engagement: clarity of expectations at work and feeling connected to the company’s mission and purpose.”

Alaskans have been doing remote work since way before COVID-19. From spoke-and-hub work sites to rotational jobs, the way we work in Alaska is often asynchronous, with frontline staff getting clear instructions and leaders trusting them to execute without direct oversight. In these high-autonomy environments, it’s easy to mistake self-reliance for satisfaction. We assume rugged employees don’t need a connection, but even the most independent worker can’t remain aligned with a mission they can no longer see. Between travel, relocation, and the small talent pool in the state, losing a rugged employee can be catastrophic for Alaska firms. When distance meets low-touch leadership, the Alaska Factor stops being a competitive advantage and starts being a recipe for disconnectedness.

When these pressures collide with leaders who fail to see or grow talent, the result is a serious workforce alignment issue. A big part of being a leader today is stabilizing a workforce that feels increasingly invisible and disconnected from the organization and its leaders.

It is easy to mistake a lack of pushback for personal brilliance when it might just be that leadership has created its own echo chamber. Connectivity requires the humility to realize that your vantage point is limited, and your organization’s strength comes from its staff.

Flora Teo, president and CEO of Junior Achievement (JA) of Alaska, is uniquely qualified to talk about connection within the workforce. JA brings students and business leaders together through hands-on mentoring, celebrates visionary leaders at the Alaska Business Hall of Fame, and builds community through active projects like the JA Company Program, Biz Camp, and various networking events. In a recent sit-down, Teo shared connection insights gathered from twenty-four years at the organization.

Q: Flora, how have you seen leaders successfully balance trusting their team to execute while making sure they don’t feel invisible?

Teo: Alaska is special. We’re built on independence—our workforce is used to solving problems without direct supervision. Autonomy can quietly and quickly become isolation. What I’ve seen at JA is that the most effective leaders are deliberate about both connection and being accessible. They trust their teams to execute, but don’t outsource clarity or recognition. They focus on the “why” behind the “what” of work, making sure every team member understands how their role is part of a larger mission.

We see this in action when business leaders volunteer in JA classrooms: CEOs and presidents telling rooms full of third-grade students, “Here’s what our company does, and here’s how every role—from entry-level to executive—helps do that.” They know that spotlighting frontline contributions, sharing wins broadly, and tying individual effort back to community impact is what matters.

I believe trust is giving your team the room to operate, but leadership is making sure they’re fully seen and supported when they do it.

Q: You’ve worked with more than 100 visionary leaders through the Alaska Business Hall of Fame. When you look at organizations that have high trust versus those paying a trust tax, what is the one habit those leaders have to stay out of the Ivory Tower?

Teo: Engagement, for sure! They engage with everyone and in a way that doesn’t get tied up in bureaucracy or office politics. They’re also accessible. Leadership hierarchy is important, for sure, because you want efforts to be coordinated and not have employees going around their managers, but those frontline workers are usually the ones who see challenges and opportunities first, and leadership should know what they know.

You have to remember that speaking to your boss can be intimidating. Employees can be afraid of standing out, being wrong, and losing their jobs. There is a lot of guilt and shame when you make a mistake, and it’s easy to not speak up and not make waves. So that one thing is more like three things: intentionally engaging, staying accessible, and prioritizing trust.

Q: The JA mentorship model thrives on senior leaders guiding the next generation. How does a leader acting as a mentor help bridge the gap with their own disconnected frontline staff back at the office?

Teo: There is a saying, “You’re not a master of something until you can explain it to a small child.” Kids don’t care about what you do until they understand why you do it. They don’t care that you are the bank’s president; they want to know, “Why does the bank need a president?” Kids will also very clearly let you know when you have lost them—you just see them put their heads down. There is absolutely a humility component when serving as a role model.

I once had a former Anchorage mayor, just before stepping in front of thirty kids, say, “I’m really pretty nervous about this.” But it will make you grow as a business professional. It makes you more relatable and a much better communicator. It also makes you more curious because kids are all about curiosity, which may be an undervalued skill in adults.

Q: We talked about quiet cracking. What are the early warning signs you look for that suggest an organization’s human glue is starting to fail?

Teo: I think about this a lot, especially since I work for a mission-driven organization where our team cares deeply about outcomes for young people and works so hard. It seems like quiet cracking doesn’t start with big and dramatic exits. It starts subtly. It’s not in the numbers right away. It shows up in tone and behavior. Energy drops in meetings. People stop bringing ideas to you. Your high performers aren’t proactive; they’re transactional. Collaboration becomes compliance. You’ll hear phrases like “Just tell me what you want” instead of “This is what I was thinking.” People tolerate long hours when they believe in a cause. What they won’t tolerate for long is unnecessary bureaucracy or working for a place they don’t believe in.

I think the way you get in front of this takes three things. First, you have to know what you are struggling with—not just the metric or performance output, but really audit the problem and ask, “How is what I’m doing helping, or not?”

Next, reconnect to your people and reconnect them to the organization’s purpose. I think that burnout happens even faster when people are not connected. When we have staff go out to rural communities, they get reenergized. They’re doing the work of sending business executives out there, all that challenging logistics, but then you meet a kid who is more prepared for the workforce because of their efforts—and it hits.

Lastly, reward initiative and not just output. If people feel like they are going to get in trouble for trying new things, they eventually stop trying at all.

Yes, metrics matter, but if all you’re looking at is the numbers, you’ll be so focused on the “what” you’ll miss the bigger picture. Invite kind-hearted dissent. Curiosity is not being disloyal. When you’re more connected to your staff, your big picture goals, and your community, you’ll be re-energized as well.

Spreadsheets can track output, but they can’t measure engagement. Lead from a distance and by the numbers at the risk of your organization becoming much less effective, especially if innovation is needed. Turn that third-row staff member into a proactive, innovative employee who is connected to the organization and its leadership.

Those one-on-one “curiosity conversations” with a frontline staff member can help you reduce redundant processes and shift staff energy from performative busywork back to the mission-driven work that actually matters.

Join us next month as we explore greed.