Burnout. Disengagement. Quiet quitting. Leader fatigue. Organizations describe these as the defining elements of today’s workforce crisis and respond with better tools, faster systems, more incentives, and new performance metrics. Yet despite these efforts, the same patterns persist — often intensifying rather than resolving problems.  What’s frequently missed isn’t a lack of effort or capability, but a design flaw embedded in how work is structured and people are developed. People aren’t disengaging because they can’t do the work. They disengage because the conditions required to succeed increasingly demand chronic misalignment — suppressing professional reasoning, overextending strengths, absorbing ambiguity without authority, or