Rage Quitting: Why It Happens — and What It Reveals About Your Leadership Culture
- Merve Kagitci Hokamp
- Dec 1, 2025
- 7 min read
A few months ago, a client came to our second session. She'd always been composed, strategic, the kind of person who thinks three steps ahead. That day, she was exhausted.
"I quit," she said flatly. "Sent the email this morning. No backup plan. Just done."
She'd been at the company for six years. Senior role. Respected. Good at what she did. From the outside, everything looked fine.
But when we unpacked it, nothing had been fine for months. She'd been drowning in admin work that could have been automated. Her calendar was wall-to-wall meetings where decisions got deferred, not made. The strategic work she was hired to do — the work that actually energized her — had shrunk to maybe 10% of her week. She'd stopped speaking up in leadership calls. She'd gone quiet in Slack threads. All the signs were there. She just didn't realize how far gone she was until she couldn't take it anymore.
That's the thing about rage quitting. It feels sudden. It rarely is.
It's not impulsive - it's accumulated
Most people don't quit because of one bad day. They quit because they've been carrying too much for too long. The workload keeps growing. The meetings multiply. The context switching becomes relentless. And somewhere along the way, there's no space left to say "this is too much" without feeling like you're failing.
Dan Ariely's work on motivation gets at this beautifully. When work becomes high-effort, low-meaning, and full of friction, people disengage faster than you think. It’s not a test of resilience. It’s what happens when someone has been stretching far beyond their limits for too long.
AI isn't causing the problem — it's making it visible
Here's what's changed recently: AI is forcing people to see how much of their job is actually meaningful human work versus administrative filler that's been exhausting them for years.
Suddenly the contrast is sharp. Deep thinking versus shallow tasks. Strategy versus status reporting. Real influence versus inbox maintenance.
My client had started using AI tools to draft reports, summarize meeting notes, pull data. And that's when it hit her: if a tool could do half her job in minutes, what had she been doing with her time? More importantly — why was she so tired?
Once you see it, going back to "business as usual" feels intolerable. AI doesn't push people out. It just shows them what they've been tolerating — and why it's no longer worth it.
Manfred Kets de Vries writes about this in The Leadership Mystique: people disengage when their work no longer reflects their identity or sense of contribution. AI accelerates that reckoning.
The progression you're missing
People don't go from fine to resignation overnight. There's a pattern:
Frustration → Withdrawal → Disengagement → Emotional detachment → Exit
My client described it perfectly: "I stopped caring about outcomes. I stopped volunteering for things. I started showing up to meetings on mute. And then one morning I woke up and realized I'd already left — I just hadn't told anyone yet."
By the time someone rage quits, they've emotionally left long before they physically do. The resignation email is just the paperwork.
And here's the harder truth: rage quitting is almost never about the person. It points to the gaps in the system and leadership.
The team has outgrown its processes.
Meetings lack clarity.
The workload hasn't been reconsidered in years.
Psychological safety is uneven.
Communication is reactive, not intentional.
Harvard Business Review points out how micro-stressors accumulate over time and become system-level performance problems. It's not the big, visible crises that break people — the layoffs, the restructures, the emergency all-hands. Those, people can rally around. It's the small, relentless things:
The meeting that could have been an email.
The decision that gets revisited three times because no one has real authority.
The Slack message at 9pm that expects a response.
The project scope that quietly expands with no adjustment to timeline or resources.
The feedback that's vague enough to create anxiety but not clear enough to act on.
None of these things alone would make someone quit. But month after month, they compound. And here's the problem: most organizations aren't measuring for this. They're tracking engagement scores and retention rates, but they're missing the daily friction that's draining people dry. Rage quitting is one of the clearest indicators that the system needs a reset.
The silence that follows is worse
My client told me she wasn't the first to leave that way. Two others had quit abruptly in the past year. The pattern was there — leadership just wasn't connecting the dots.
Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety and managing through fear backs this up. When someone leaves dramatically, the unspoken message the team receives is: "This place burns people out." It takes months to rebuild that trust.
Because here's what happens in the wake of a sudden departure: the remaining team members start doing math. They're looking at their own workloads, their own stress levels, their own quiet moments of "I can't keep doing this." They're wondering if they're next.
They're thinking, "If she couldn't make it work here, and she was good at this job, what does that say about the rest of us?"
People become more cautious. They stop volunteering for stretch projects. They hold back in meetings. They start buffering — saying yes less, committing less, investing less of themselves. Not because they're checked out, but because they're protecting themselves from becoming the next person who breaks.
And leadership often misreads this as a motivation problem. But it's not motivation — it's self-preservation. The team has just watched someone they respected hit a wall, and the implicit lesson is: this environment doesn't catch you before you fall. So they start catching themselves, which means pulling back right when the organization needs them to lean in.
That's the real cost of losing someone this way. It's not just one exit. It's the slow erosion of trust, engagement, and psychological safety across everyone who witnessed it.
What leaders can (and should) do next
Rage quitting isn’t a dramatic outburst. It’s a systems issue that finally becomes visible through one person’s exit. And while the story often starts with an individual, it ends with the organization.
Leaders have far more influence over this pattern than they think.
Here’s where to focus:
Leadership Tip 1. Redesign workloads — don’t redistribute them
When someone leaves abruptly, the instinct is to spread their tasks across the team. This guarantees another burnout cycle.
Leaders need to step back and ask:
What work is no longer relevant?
What can be automated?
What needs clearer ownership?
What genuinely requires human input?
Workload design is leadership work — not admin.
Leadership Tip 2. Protect meaningful work
One of the biggest predictors of disengagement is the loss of work that feels purposeful.
People disconnect when their roles stop aligning with their identity and core strengths. When the meaningful part of someone’s job shrinks, so does their commitment.
Leaders must actively safeguard the parts of the role that stretch, energize, and grow people. This is the key to retention.
Leadership Tip 3. Audit your meeting culture
If you want to prevent rage quitting, start with calendars.
Look for:
meetings with no agenda
recurring rituals no one questions
decision meetings where no decisions are made
update meetings that could be written summaries
rooms full of people who don’t need to be there
If you want to know where burnout lives, look at your meeting patterns. They reveal a lot.
Leadership Tip 4. Create real psychological safety
Not the “our culture is open” version — the practical version Amy Edmondson writes about
Psychological safety is built through:
leaders who admit when something isn’t working
teams who can say “I’m drowning” without fear
transparency about priorities
clarity around what doesn’t matter
role expectations that are explicit, not vague
When people can voice strain early, they don’t rage quit late.
Leadership Tip 5. Make 1:1s about alignment, not updates
A status-update 1:1 hides problems. A reflective 1:1 surfaces them early.
Ask:
What’s feeling heavy right now?
What’s getting in the way of your best work?
What’s one thing you wish we’d stop doing as a team?
Where do you need support?
And listen to the answers with curiosity, not defensiveness. If you want fewer surprises, you need more honest conversations.
Leadership Tip 6. Rebuild trust after someone leaves abruptly
When someone rage quits, the team watches what you do next. Leaders usually want to “move on quickly.” That’s exactly what erodes trust further.
Instead, acknowledge the impact. Name the workload shift. Reassure people they won’t drown. Ask what support they need.
Silence is what scares people. Transparency is what stabilizes them.
Leadership Tip 7. Treat early signs as real data
If someone goes quiet in meetings… If they stop taking initiative… If they stop offering ideas… If their tone shifts from proactive to resigned…
These aren’t personality changes. They’re warnings.
You don’t need an engagement survey to know something is off. You just need to pay attention.
The bottom line
Rage quitting looks sudden, but it’s years in the making.
It signals:
workloads that need redesign
leadership rhythms that need recalibration
psychological safety that needs strengthening
conversations that need to happen sooner
work environments that haven’t evolved with the demands placed on them
Leaders can’t stop every resignation. But they can build environments where people don’t reach the point of emotional detachment.
As a leader your job is to create a workplace where people can be honest long before they hit the wall.
The costs of not doing that are always higher in morale, in culture, in trust, in time - and often business performance.
Hi! I’m Merve. 👋 I help leaders build environments where people don’t burn out, shut down, or rage quit — and where teams can perform at a high level without losing themselves in the process. If you’re noticing signs of overload, silence, or cultural friction on your team, I run strategic-planning and leadership workshops that help organizations reset, realign, and rebuild healthy performance rhythms. Reach out anytime if you’d like to explore what could help most.
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