Why performing well at work says surprisingly little about well-being

If a chief executive is hitting targets, making decisions, managing a team, and keeping the machinery moving, we tend to assume they are fine. It is an efficient fiction, and a professionally convenient one.

Joel Yang, director and clinical psychologist at Mind What Matters, is wary of that assumption. “‘High-functioning’ describes what someone is able to do but does not tell us about what it costs them to do it,” he says. Someone may be “doing all the right things on the outside” while concealing “overwhelming negative emotions and deep-seated insecurities”.

The uncomfortable part is that competence can make distress harder to detect. The executive who looks composed may be running on perfectionism, fear, extreme self-reliance, or an aversion to asking for help, and none of those traits necessarily impair performance. In fact, they may help create it.

Yang therefore resists using achievement as a proxy for well-being. “Healthy functioning isn’t simply the ability to perform,” he says. It also includes “the ability to recover, adapt, experience a broad range of emotions, maintain meaningful relationships, tolerate imperfection, and ask for help when needed”.

That distinction matters because many traits that propel people upwards can become rigid at the top. Perfectionism becomes an inability to delegate, self-reliance becomes isolation, competitiveness erodes trust, and control starts following a leader home. The relevant concept, Yang says, is “psychological flexibility”: enough self-awareness to understand when a trait remains adaptive and when it has started exacting a cost.

“In the relentless pursuit of success, we can lose sight of who matters,” he says, “and sometimes the very people we wish to be successful for — be it children, parents, or loved ones — are the ones we end up hurting in the process.”

This is where therapy begins to look less like emergency intervention and more like maintenance. “You don’t have to be in crisis to benefit from therapy,” Yang says. “At times, therapy will be reactive, but it can also be preventive.”

He is equally careful, however, not to turn ordinary discomfort into pathology. We should be upset when a promotion does not materialise, he argues, just as anger and disappointment remain ordinary parts of an engaged life. Concern becomes more warranted when sleep, appetite, or mood remain altered long after the precipitating event has passed.

For leaders accustomed to executive coaching, this also marks an important distinction. Coaching can improve leadership behaviour and performance, while therapy can examine when stress has become debilitating, or when anxiety and low mood require more targeted attention.

More fundamentally, therapy allows someone to examine “the thinking and behavioural patterns that have helped you get where you are and decide whether those same patterns will help you get where you want to go next”.

Yang offers one useful test for anyone still insisting their problems are not serious enough: “If nothing changed over the next six months, would I be okay with that?” For an executive accustomed to reviewing every other part of the business, it is perhaps an oddly difficult question to evade.

Photography: Lawrence Teo
Art direction: Fazlie Hashim
Stylist: Dolphin Yeo
Grooming: Benedict Choo