For HR Directors and Chief People Officers

EXECUTIVE COACHING • July 20, 2026

The Exit Interview That Doesn’t Add Up

It’s 6:40 on a Wednesday evening, and Crystal is still at her desk with the overhead lights off and her laptop screen the only light in the office. She’s 41, the VP of People at a 300-person logistics company, and she’s rereading an exit interview transcript for the third time. The employee, a director who ran two major integrations in the past year without a single missed deadline, gave all the polite, plausible reasons. Better opportunity. Time for a change. Nothing wrong here, just growth.

Crystal has a sticky note stuck to the edge of her monitor, curling at one corner, with three words in her own handwriting: “Something’s not right.” She wrote it two weeks ago, after a different conversation with the same director, and she still hasn’t crossed it out.

“I keep rereading this transcript like it’s going to tell me something it isn’t telling me,” she says, when we talk a few days later. She has her reading glasses pushed up into her hair and a half-finished cup of coffee she microwaved twice. “I’ve done probably four hundred of these conversations in my career. I know what a real ‘better opportunity’ sounds like, and I know what this sounds like. This sounds like someone who ran out of whatever she was running on. But I can’t put that in a report. I can’t even really say it out loud in this building. I just have a sticky note.”

In my work coaching leaders and the people who support them, I hear a version of Crystal’s sticky note often. Not from executives who are unraveling in an obvious way, but from the HR directors and chief people officers who are the first to notice the smaller signs: the missed deadline that doesn’t match the person, the good-bye email that’s a little too composed, the meeting where someone who’s usually the sharpest voice in the room goes quiet. I’ve written before about how easy it is to mistake this quiet, competent unraveling for something else, including in the specific ways executive burnout differs from ordinary burnout. What I want to spend this piece on is the question underneath Crystal’s sticky note, because it’s the one I get asked most often by the HR leaders I work alongside: what do you actually do with what you’re noticing, when noticing is not the same thing as knowing?

Crystal doesn’t get an answer that afternoon. The transcript stays open on her screen. The sticky note stays on the monitor. She closes her laptop a little after seven and drives home still turning the conversation over, not sure yet what, if anything, is hers to do about it.

What HR Can Actually See, and What Isn’t Yours to Diagnose

Here’s the tension I want to name directly, because I think it’s the one that keeps HR leaders like Crystal up at night: you are often positioned to see behavioral change before almost anyone else in the organization. Attendance patterns, performance shifts, the tone of a resignation letter, the timing of a sudden request for leave. That’s real information, and noticing it is part of your job.

What you can see: behavior, patterns, and change over time. A leader who used to answer every email within the hour and now takes three days. A director who used to volunteer for the hard project and now visibly avoids being noticed. An exit interview that hits every professional talking point and somehow still leaves you with a sticky note on your monitor.

What you can’t responsibly do with that observation: turn it into a diagnosis, a theory about someone’s family history, or a private conclusion that this person has experienced trauma. I say this not to discourage you from noticing, but because the leap from noticing to diagnosing is where good intentions can cause real harm. It can lead to assumptions about someone’s fitness for a role. It can create a paper trail that reads as if HR made a clinical determination it had no standing to make. And it can, ironically, make the person you’re worried about less likely to trust you, because being on the receiving end of someone else’s amateur diagnosis rarely feels like being cared for.

The useful move, in my experience, is narrower and less dramatic than it might feel: notice the behavior, name what you observed in behavioral terms, and point toward resources without deciding what’s wrong. “I’ve noticed X pattern over Y period, and I want to check in and make sure you have what you need” is a sentence HR can say. “I think you’re dealing with unresolved trauma” is not, and saying it, even with good intentions, steps outside what you’re trained or authorized to determine.

I think part of why this distinction is hard to hold onto is that HR sits so close to the emotional texture of a workplace without having the clinical training to interpret it. You hear the tone of someone’s voice on a call. You watch a leadership team during a reorg and notice who’s gone quiet and who’s gotten sharp-edged. You read the same exit interview three times because something about it doesn’t sit right. All of that is real perception, and none of it, on its own, tells you what’s actually happening inside another person’s life. A missed deadline can mean burnout. It can also mean a sick parent, a divorce, a diagnosis that has nothing to do with work, or simply a bad month that resolves on its own. The behavior is the same regardless of the cause. Only a person with the training, the relationship, and the consent to ask deeper questions can responsibly sort out which one it is, and that person is very rarely HR.

This is also where I’d gently push back on a framing I sometimes hear from HR leaders themselves, that noticing and staying quiet feels like a failure of care. I don’t think it is. Noticing, naming the behavior plainly, and then stepping back to let the person decide what they want to do with that observation is not the absence of care. It’s a form of care that respects the limits of your role and the other person’s right to define their own experience. The alternative, deciding for someone what’s wrong with them and then acting on that private diagnosis, tends to feel less like support and more like surveillance, even when the intent behind it is generous. I explore this same question, from the leader’s own vantage point rather than HR’s, in a piece on recognizing when you might be recreating old patterns at work, and the honest answer there is the same one I’d give here: recognizing a pattern is not the same task as resolving it, and both tasks deserve to be handled by the right person.

Why EAP Access and Use Vary So Much

Most conversations about employee mental health support eventually land on the employee assistance program, and most of those conversations settle into one of two unhelpful narratives: EAPs are a great resource, full stop, or EAPs are useless, full stop. Neither holds up well against the actual data.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures summarized in a research roundup from Journalist’s Resource, roughly half of U.S. workers have access to an EAP through their employer, but access is uneven. Seventy-eight percent of union employees have access, compared with 52 percent of nonunion employees. Workers in the highest wage quartile have access at more than double the rate of workers in the lowest wage quartile, 75 percent compared with 33 percent. Even where access exists, average utilization sits at 10 percent or less, per data cited from the Society for Human Resource Management.

Where EAPs tend to be well suited: short-term, situational stress; a first conversation for someone who isn’t sure what kind of help they need; practical referrals; and, for many employees, a genuinely lower-barrier entry point than finding a private-pay clinician who works specifically with professionals cold. A 2018 analysis of more than 24,000 counseling cases, conducted by Mark Attridge, Ph.D., David Sharar, Ph.D., Gregory DeLapp, and Barbara Veder and published in the International Journal of Health & Productivity, found that presenteeism, meaning showing up to work while not functioning well, dropped from roughly half of participants reporting the problem before EAP counseling to roughly a quarter after, and average absenteeism fell from 7.4 hours per month to 3.9 hours.

Where EAPs tend to be less well suited: longer-term or more complex clinical needs, situations that require a provider with specific expertise, and any circumstance where an employee has reason to want distance from anything employer-affiliated, even when that distance isn’t strictly necessary. This isn’t a verdict on EAPs as a category. It’s a case for treating them as one resource among several, worth including in your referral toolkit and worth being honest about their limits, rather than either oversold as a cure-all or dismissed outright.

I’d add one more piece that rarely makes it into EAP conversations: awareness gaps. In my work talking with HR leaders about their own benefits stacks, I hear the same thing often. The EAP exists. It’s in the employee handbook, it’s on the intranet somewhere, and most employees have no idea what it actually offers or how to access it without asking someone, which itself can feel like a small disclosure. If your organization has an EAP and utilization is low, it’s worth asking whether that’s a signal about the EAP’s quality or a signal about how clearly and how often it’s been communicated, separate from any conversation about a specific struggling employee. Those are two different problems with two different fixes, and conflating them tends to produce a program nobody trusts and nobody uses. This is also why, when I work directly with organizations on burnout among senior leaders, I ask early what the existing benefits stack actually includes and how well people understand it, rather than assuming the presence of an EAP means the need is covered.

Confidentiality, Records, and What HIPAA Actually Covers

I want to correct something I hear often, sometimes from HR leaders themselves and sometimes from the leaders they’re trying to support: the idea that paying privately for therapy means there’s “no record” of it anywhere, full stop. That isn’t accurate, and it matters that HR leaders have the accurate version, because it shapes what you can and can’t promise someone.

Therapists, private-pay or otherwise, keep clinical records. That’s a professional and ethical requirement, not an optional practice. What private pay does change is who has routine access to billing information: without an insurance claim, there’s no diagnostic code submitted to a health plan for reimbursement purposes. That’s a meaningful difference for some people. It is not the same as having no record, and it is not the same as absolute confidentiality, because confidentiality has legal and ethical exceptions in every state, including things like imminent danger to self or others, certain court orders, and mandated reporting requirements for abuse or neglect.

None of this is legal advice, and it isn’t a complete account of every relevant law. HIPAA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Family and Medical Leave Act, and health savings or flexible spending account eligibility each have their own requirements, and they interact differently depending on your specific benefits structure, your state, and the individual’s situation. If you’re navigating a specific case, the accurate next step is your benefits counsel, your plan administrator, or your organization’s employment counsel, not a blog post. What I can offer here is the general orientation: private pay changes some things about the paper trail, and it does not eliminate confidentiality’s legal boundaries or make silence guaranteed.

I bring this up because I’ve watched the “no paper trail, fully protected” version of this story do real damage in both directions. Sometimes it makes an employee overconfident about privacy in a way that isn’t quite accurate, and sometimes it makes HR overpromise something they can’t actually guarantee, which erodes trust the moment reality turns out to be more complicated than the promise. The more honest version, that records exist, that most disclosure requires the employee’s authorization, and that a handful of legal exceptions exist everywhere, tends to build more durable trust precisely because it doesn’t oversell.

The Person Everyone Brings Their Problems To

Brittany is 39, and she’s the head of HR for a healthcare staffing company with about 900 employees spread across six states. She has a standing joke with her team that her calendar looks like a therapist’s schedule, which she says, then catches herself saying, because it isn’t actually a joke she finds funny anymore.

“Every single person on my leadership team has cried in my office at some point in the last year,” she tells me, sitting very upright in the chair, the posture of someone who has spent a long time being the person who holds things together. “The CFO. The COO. Twice, our CEO. I am good at this. I don’t say that to brag, I say it because it’s true, and because being good at it means everybody assumes I’m fine. Nobody has asked me how I’m doing since probably March.”

She laughs, a short exhale more than an actual laugh. “I have a folder on my desktop called ‘Things I Notice But Can’t Say Out Loud.’ It’s mostly patterns. Who’s about to burn out, who’s about to quit, who’s having a hard time at home that’s leaking into work. I’ve started noticing that I’m in that folder too. I just don’t have anywhere to put myself.”

Sitting with Brittany, I found myself thinking about how often the people responsible for noticing everyone else’s depletion are operating with almost no visibility into their own. Not because they lack self-awareness. Brittany has plenty. Because the role itself is built to absorb, and absorbing well can look, from the outside, exactly like being fine.

I want to be careful here about what I am and am not saying. I’m not diagnosing Brittany with anything, and it isn’t my place to. What I notice, and what I’ve come to think of as the container problem, is a pattern I see often in people-operations leaders specifically: they are trained and positioned to hold everyone else’s disclosures, and there is often no equivalent structure for their own. That’s not a clinical finding. It’s an observation about role design, and it’s one reason I think it matters for HR leaders to have their own source of support, separate from the people they’re supporting. I see a related version of this in why an executive coach’s own grounding in relational patterns matters, and the short version applies here too: the people whose job is to hold everyone else’s weight need somewhere to set their own down that isn’t also their workplace.

Coaching vs. Therapy: A Distinction Worth Understanding

If you’re going to be in the business of pointing people toward support, and as an HR director or CPO you often are, it’s worth understanding the actual difference between executive coaching and psychotherapy, because the two get used interchangeably in casual conversation and they are not interchangeable in practice.

I write about this distinction at length on Therapy vs. Executive Coaching: How to Choose, and the short version is this. Therapy is a licensed clinical service, delivered by a professional with legal and ethical accountability, and it’s built to address diagnosable conditions, unresolved history, and patterns rooted in a person’s past that are shaping their present in ways insight alone hasn’t resolved. Executive coaching is a present-and-future-oriented practice, generally unlicensed and unregulated as an industry, built to address strategic, communication, or skill-based challenges in someone who is otherwise psychologically stable.

Why this matters for you specifically: when you’re deciding what to include in a referral list or what to say to a struggling leader, precision here protects everyone. Suggesting executive coaching to someone who needs clinical care can leave a real problem unaddressed. Suggesting therapy to someone who mainly needs a sharper feedback loop and a leadership framework can feel like a misread, and can itself damage trust. Either way, the choice of provider and the decision to seek help stays with the employee. Your role is to make sure they know both options exist and how they differ, not to determine which one they need or to initiate the referral on their behalf.

Both/And: You Can Care, and It’s Still Not Your Diagnosis to Make

I think the tension Crystal felt with her sticky note, and the one Brittany feels running her own invisible caseload, comes down to a false choice a lot of HR leaders quietly make: either I care enough to do something clinical about this, or I stay in my lane and do nothing. Neither is accurate, and holding both at once is the actual job.

You can care, genuinely, about a struggling employee’s wellbeing, and it is still not your role to diagnose them, direct their treatment, or promise them confidentiality outcomes that aren’t fully within your control. Both of those things are true simultaneously. Caring doesn’t require clinical authority. It requires noticing, naming what you observed in behavioral terms, and pointing toward resources, then letting the person you’re pointing at make their own decision about whether and how to use them.

What this looks like in practice is narrower, and more useful, than most of the language in corporate wellness materials suggests. It does not look like HR determining that an employee has “unresolved trauma.” It does not look like HR promising an employee that their therapy will remain permanently invisible to the organization under every circumstance, because that promise isn’t fully HR’s to make. It looks like: here are the resources we offer, here’s generally how they differ, here’s how to find your own provider if none of these fit, and the choice and the contact are yours.

This also means being honest about what employment decisions and clinical referrals are not: the same conversation. If a performance issue needs to be addressed, address the performance issue through your normal process. If you also want to let someone know support exists, that can happen alongside the performance conversation, but it shouldn’t be folded into it as though attending therapy resolves a performance question, or as though declining a referral is itself a performance issue. Keeping those two threads separate protects the employee’s autonomy and protects your organization from decisions that blur clinical judgment with employment judgment. This is the same separation I ask leaders themselves to hold when we talk about using busyness to outrun a nervous system that’s overwhelmed: naming the pattern is not the same as fixing it, and both steps deserve their own space.

The Systemic Lens: Why Disclosure Is Never Just a Personal Choice

I recently found myself returning to Amy Edmondson, PhD, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, and the researcher who first named and measured psychological safety in organizational teams. Her original 1999 study in Administrative Science Quarterly found something counterintuitive: the teams that reported the most mistakes weren’t the least capable teams, they were often the most cohesive ones, because their members felt safe enough to talk about mistakes out loud rather than hide them.

I think about that finding constantly in the context of mental health disclosure at work, because the same logic applies. Whether an employee tells anyone, ever, that they’re struggling is rarely just a private, individual choice made in a vacuum. It’s shaped by whether they believe disclosure carries interpersonal risk in that specific workplace, at that specific moment, with that specific manager. Research on workplace mental health disclosure consistently finds that fear of stigma is one of the strongest predictors of whether someone stays silent, and that people are less likely to disclose at work than in almost any other part of their lives.

This is where I want to name the structural piece plainly, because it’s easy to miss if you’re only looking at one employee at a time. Access to support is not evenly distributed. The EAP data cited earlier bears this out directly: workers in the highest wage quartile have EAP access at more than double the rate of workers in the lowest wage quartile. Add to that the layered pressure many leaders carry around appearing competent at all costs, the additional scrutiny some employees face based on gender, race, or seniority when they show any sign of struggle, and the reality that “just talk to HR” assumes a level of trust that isn’t universal or guaranteed. None of this means individual conversations don’t matter. It means the conversations happen inside a system that either makes disclosure feel survivable or doesn’t, and building genuine psychological safety, in Edmondson’s sense of the term, is organizational work, not a single well-worded email.

I think this is also where Crystal’s sticky note and Brittany’s desktop folder connect to something larger than either of their individual situations. Both of them are trying to solve, alone, in their own offices, a problem that is partly structural. Crystal can’t make her departing director trust the organization enough to name what actually happened, because that trust, or the absence of it, was built over years by decisions well above Crystal’s role. Brittany can’t fix the fact that people-operations leaders are rarely given their own equivalent of an EAP, because that’s a gap in how most organizations design the role, not a gap in Brittany’s effort. Individual conversations matter enormously. They’re also not a substitute for asking, at the policy level, whether your organization’s culture actually rewards disclosure or quietly punishes it, regardless of what the employee handbook says.

What This Can Look Like in Practice

None of what I’ve written here is a substitute for your organization’s own legal, HR, and benefits guidance, and I want to be direct about that before offering anything practical. What follows is general orientation, not individualized advice for your specific policies, jurisdiction, or situation.

With that said, here’s roughly what a responsible version of this can look like. Notice the behavior, in specific and observable terms, rather than jumping to a cause. Have a direct, human conversation that names what you’ve observed without diagnosing it: “I’ve noticed you’ve seemed stretched thin the last few months, and I want to check in.” Make sure the employee knows what resources exist, including your EAP if you have one, and how it differs from seeking a private-pay clinician or an executive coach, ideally with language that doesn’t oversell any one option, drawing on the same distinction laid out in what trauma-informed executive coaching actually is and isn’t. Then let the employee decide, on their own timeline, whether and how to pursue any of it. If the conversation touches on safety, discrimination, harassment, retaliation, a disability accommodation request, or anything resembling a crisis, that’s a different pathway; route it through your internal safety, legal, or crisis protocols and, where appropriate, emergency services, rather than trying to resolve it through an informal wellness conversation.

If you’re building or refining a referral list, it’s reasonable to include a mix of options: your EAP, licensed therapists in your area or your employees’ areas with relevant specialties, and clinicians experienced with driven senior leaders, and executive coaches for situations that are more strategic than clinical, while being clear with employees about which is which. What isn’t reasonable, and what this piece has tried to model instead of repeat, is promising outcomes, retention numbers, or leadership transformations as the return on any referral. The return, if there is one, belongs to the person doing the work, on their own terms, with a provider they choose.

Crystal’s sticky note is still true, weeks later. Something wasn’t right. She never found out exactly what, because the director who left didn’t want to say, and Crystal, to her credit, didn’t push. What she did instead, the next time a different leader on her team started missing deadlines that didn’t match his history, was have a shorter, plainer conversation: “I’ve noticed X. I want to check in and make sure you have what you need.” No diagnosis. No promise she couldn’t keep. Just an honest opening, and then room for him to decide what to do with it.

Warmly, Annie

Related Reading

Edmondson, Amy C. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Hoboken: Wiley, 2018.

Attridge, Mark, David Sharar, Gregory DeLapp, and Barbara Veder. “EAP Works: Global Results from 24,363 Counseling Cases with Pre-Post Data on the Workplace Outcome Suite.” International Journal of Health & Productivity, December 2018.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “Employers and Health Information in the Workplace.” Office for Civil Rights, HIPAA guidance, accessed July 2026. https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-individuals/employers-health-information-workplace/index.html

Merrefield, Clark. “Mental Health Care at Work: Roundup of Recent Research on Employee Assistance Programs.” Journalist’s Resource, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School. https://journalistsresource.org/health/employee-assistance-programs-mental-health/

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027

Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women, including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs, in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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