the graveyard of good employees

I.

He tells me I have a good read on the team. I smile and take a sip of the chai that he paid for. I like to think I keep myself informed, have a pulse on the environment that surrounds us.

It’s April 2026 and I’m experiencing a shade of burnout I didn’t know existed. My roommate might say I could have been warned. I felt like I hit the fast track to dependance, to company stardom, to success in the breakneck pace of medtech. I see now it was just the role I was placed in. 

Don’t get me wrong, I delivered. The toll had just caught up to me. 

I have no incentive to stop signing off on such ambitious work, he’d said at our fall company retreat, because you perform every time.

Then the COO reminds me that our scopes will always be changing, that I would need to thrive without structure.

It was who we were. And it was how we made the money. 

The money, 

The money, 

The money

Our goal is to make eight million this year, you know. Last year we made four. 

II.

In some ways I am a vastly junior member of what felt like, Joel would say, a star studded cast. He would know all the names of the actors, and Max and Tyson would play a game, passing the actors’ names around, trading directors, cutting out a long construction paper chain of people holding hands. I felt like the last in a long line of greats.

And he was a great. A Lifer. 

It always amazed me that we had those. Someone straight out of college, starting as an intern, and never leaving. Growing with the company, staying with the company. 

Until 11 years later.  

No, I am not a lifer. But it doesn’t mean I can’t see a pattern.

Like forest animals fleeing the woods before a fire, we lost six of them in under six months. Not just any ones. The greats. 

And the first hurt the hardest. 

III.

She was more than a boss to me, she was an umbrella. 

Over my head she held heavy things from sliding down into my arms. Work I wasn’t ready for. Campaigns I was apt to understand but too green to make work. Meetings I wasn't ready to lead. Even the anger of a disintegrating relationship with my boyfriend. 

Is it odd to feel grief over a colleague?

I watched her become more and more frustrated. Back then she wouldn’t tell me what it was, to protect the organization she loved. But I watched her become stretched thin. I watched her become angry. Then, after her 8 years, I watched her go. And I wept.

“I don’t understand what it’s like to have that relationship,” says another account manager. “I didn’t have an Abby.”

The only other account executive quit a few weeks later.

Then we had none. 

IV. 

“I don’t understand why people are upset over the processes we are trying to implement,” she says. “They asked for more structure, more processes, and we answered. Now they are leaving.”

My brain runs on processes. I read about it in the book of Nehemiah. The people rebuild the wall and praise Yahweh for being a God of order. Structure. They mention it twice. I underline it with my pen. 

That’s why I like it, I think. 

Because I”m like my Dad. 

And I do want processes. 

I want a menu of services that is definable. One that has price tags, so I can sell it. I want a solidified offering that I can create a baseline around. I want the basics of what I do day in and day out to be easy, reachable, repeatable. I want templates. 

I want time and date and place. I want logistics. When I create clarity out of ideation, I want a frame for it. I capsule. A skeleton. 

That is what I mean when I want processes. 

When we hire someone I want them to be equipped with processes. I want them to read a handbook and see the menu and know the work. 

It doesn’t mean I can’t make a custom dish. It actually means that when those requests come in, I can give my all to them because everything else I have is simmering nicely on my stove top, just like the recipe said. 

V.

Whose recipe is it?

Our web designer loves cheese. When we rebranded the company for the first time, she found a lorem ipsum cheese text generator. It’s in the brand book, I still remember. That one sentence made me laugh out loud.

Who moved my cheese fromage manchego cheese triangles who moved my cheese boursin pepperjack macaroni cheese?

It’s the third exit in as many months and we plan our going away gift soberly, each writing a recipe that involves cheese and binding them together in a big book. The local printer prints it for us for free, given the subject matter. He knew her. She’d worked here for 10 years. 

Whose recipe is it?

The CEO writes his with ChatGPT. 

VI. 

I released an album two Augusts ago. It’s called “claude monet’s eyes” and it’s a dialogue on how transformation takes time. It encapsulates the years of my life that I spent learning how to forgive. 

Monet’s ever famous Water Lilies adorns my computer backdrop. I use his painting The Cliff Walk at Pourville as my mousepad. I find the blues and greens calming, and the pictures breathtaking.

But in Monet’s time, his style was considered undignified. Conventional artists thought it was sloppy and critiqued impressionism for its imprecise brush movements. It horrified them.

People always seem to fear new and foreign technologies. 

But Monet painted the feeling behind what he could see, the movement hidden in the realities before him, the “impression” of the moment. He studied his subjects, painting a series of works over and over again, capturing them in different lights and weather conditions. And in doing so he revealed the truest truth about the things he painted. The truest emotion. The truest beauty.

The designers—artists, I call them—are told to put their intelligence in Claude, automate their calendars and their project management systems. Claude will own every capability, write anything they need it to, proof for them, generate for them, live for them.

Instantly.

These are the processes they have been asking for, they are told. But artists value sweat, handiwork, passion, study, handcrafted design.

Asking their years of experience to fit inside an AI tool is bound to upset them.

VII. 

“I didn’t know how to tell him, but I just don’t feel like I’m being creative anymore,” he said over tacos. 

The table agrees. 

Forms, revisions, tasks about revisions, miles of red tape, and an error log to keep track of the mistakes we make.

“I’m not designing anything anymore,” said another. “I’m just doing project management.”

I feel bad, because my job was project management before I needed to wrangle the moon and take bites out of it. 

“I just don’t know how to say it because he asks for feedback but gets upset when we are honest.”

Another one quit last week, taking almost 3 more years of experience—and some of the most creativity I’d ever seen—with him. 

VIII.

I ask around about the starting point of all of this chaos. Six people don’t leave back to back without a reason. 

Six good, empathetic, thoughtful, give-it-a-chance people. 

How long of a chance?

“We had the best quarter one we’d ever had this year,” I am told. 

Quarter one, I think. Matthew, Mark, Luke? No, January, February, March. That’s right. 

That was before they left. Six curious, kind, thorough people. The only people worth hiring, I think. 

But some people you can hire for a lot cheaper. You do need to train them a lot more rigorously, and you may not be able to trust them to act autonomously. But it will save on your costs. Which, if you are looking to make 8 million, may be the best news you’ve heard all year. 

Or perhaps, all quarter. 

I think back to the quarter before the best quarter of all time.

We are asked to go around the room and give a number that pertains to how we are feeling about work. 

3, he says, and begins to cry. 

At the end of that retreat we are told how entitled we are. We, with our Cadillac of an insurance policy, company gifts, flexible work hours, quarterly retreats. And maybe we are being whiny. I’m not really sure which way is up anymore.

So some write kudos and give thanks and make sure they are being appreciative. It seems to be the thing leadership craves the most. Much more than honest feedback, which has a habit of morphing into something else. 

So now it’s August 2026 and we are having lunch with a fresh ex-employee. 

We are talking about how our longest standing team member left without notice in the middle of the day 10 days ago and hasn’t been back since.

“They killed the golden goose,” he says.

IX. 

This is what a business does, I think. 

Businesses have rules. Businesses exist to make money. What is the problem?

You are Elastigirl, I quote, from The Incredibles. Pull yourself together!

But I can’t seem to make it happen. I cheer myself up with operations work and poetry. God is a god of structure, I say. 

I am exploring a cave with a keychain flashlight, trying to boost morale while researching AI website strategy and attempting to close the $11,000 gap for quarter two.

We have to push ahead because we can’t fall behind. But the fever pitch is here, and it’s emotionally smelly. 

Aromatic.There are hurt feelings and years of anger and young ambition and intense revenue goals and clients being let go and egos needing tending and massive, massive stakes. 

Yet no one is really telling, because no one is really listening. 

Instead we are rebranding the logo for the second time in three years because the name of the company might be losing us business. 

X.

I press in. I put my ear to the ground. 

What is the problem?

I take a deep breath and plunge my head under the water. The atmosphere snaps and pops in my ears. 

Every company is entitled to its goals and its operations. It can’t be that. 

What remains?

Creative work is no longer creative. Creatives are treated like they are on probation. Account services hemorrhage undefined strategy. Metrics increase in importance above all else. 

If you don’t like it, too bad. 

The work is chaotic, undefineable, ever-changing based on the taste of the wind. The new tech. The way we feel about what a client says. The fear of losing business. What’s new and shiny and fun. And how we contort to go get it, whether we should or not.

The processes we develop should act as buffers and support. Instead they clamp on over our wrists like manacles. 

What should be templates and menus and repeatable offerings are logs that measure how many hours are worked and where all the mistakes are happening and how much money we make and how to make it all go faster. 

But we have always hired observant, brilliant, gentle, steady, and creative people. You know, the greats. 

They are people who need to be seen and listened to, without ulterior motives or secret ego checkboxes or hurry up, performance! over everything else. 

They need to be believed. 

XI.

He tells me I have a good read on the team. I finish the chai in front of me and ask him what he thinks about burnout. 

“Every environment I have ever been a part of has been like this,” he says.

His advice was to be aggressive about rest and return to work to play hard. But the burnout never went away. 

It just grew more somber and less ignorable with every headstone in the graveyard of good employees. 

Until I was next.