Career Purgatory: The Silent Trap Holding Back Your Best People

Workplace lingo comes and goes, but every so often a phrase cuts through because it names what so many are feeling. Career purgatory is that phrase right now, and it’s more than a passing buzzword. It’s a warning sign for leaders: if you’re not paying attention, you could be losing engagement, momentum, and even your top talent.

How Career Purgatory Can Hide in Plain Sight

Career purgatory is easy to miss because it often masquerades as something else. Leaders might mistake it for steady loyalty or contentment and assume an employee is satisfied simply because they haven’t left. To leaders, it may look like the employee has lost ambition, but in truth the employee has just given up hope that things will ever improve. Sometimes it might just look like the person has plateaued.

The real issue? Opportunities, mentorship, or recognition have stalled. Career purgatory is the slow burn of employees who feel stuck and caught between roles, with no clear path forward. They’re doing the work, showing up to meetings, and hitting deadlines, but inside, they feel trapped in limbo. For leaders, this is far more dangerous than it sounds. It can hide in plain sight.

Leaders: Pay Attention

Career purgatory is not an employee problem. It’s a leadership failure. When leaders ignore stalled growth, broken promises, or empty recognition, they send a message employees can’t miss: you don’t matter here. High performers stop pushing, engagement collapses, and morale bleeds out quietly. Before you take notice, people are gone, not lured away by a competitor, but driven out by your inaction. It isn’t a slow leak; it’s a drain that can cripple teams and destroy institutional knowledge. You lose talent not just because of opportunity elsewhere, but because your team believes there isn’t one with you.

Can It Be Fixed?

The short answer is, yes. Career Purgatory isn’t inevitable. It can be prevented, and it can be reversed. However, it requires leaders to take deliberate action.

Make the Career Paths Clear

Lay out the steps for growth in your organization: the skills they need, realistic timelines, and the support you’ll provide along the way. Clarity removes frustration before it has a chance to take root.

Keep Your Promises

If you commit to training, mentorship, or advancement, then create those opportunities. Empty promises break trust faster than anything else. Leaders who deliver on their word show they’re paying attention.

Recognize Progress in Real Time

Not every achievement needs fanfare, but growth should be visible. Stretch assignments, new responsibilities, or leadership opportunities signal that you see and value their contributions.

Check In Early and Often

One-on-ones shouldn’t just be about metrics and output or problems and promotions. Have a conversation. What is and isn’t working relative to your role? What are your ideas and challenges? Listen carefully and act decisively.

The Bottom Line

Although the balance of power in the U.S. labor market has shifted back toward employers in recent months, it is an endless cycle and will swing back toward employees again. Your goal should be to build and reinforce your company’s most important assets. Your people. Trendy terms like career purgatory stick because they describe a reality that is going unaddressed. These buzzwords always shed light on issues that demand leadership attention.

Trust-based environments enable leaders to acknowledge and address issues early. It facilitates organic employee retention and engagement. It unlocks motivation, loyalty, and growth. Ignore the signs, and the cost will show up as missed opportunities.

As with most engagement issues, the solution isn’t complicated: communicate clearly, follow through consistently, and recognize progress meaningfully. Employees don’t need perfection. They need proof that leadership sees their future as clearly as they do. If you want to get started but don’t see a straightforward approach, Liddell Consulting Group creates simple and actionable solutions that produce measurable results. Here’s how you can schedule a call.