Signs someone on your team is checking out
Disengagement rarely announces itself as poor performance. It shows up first as a change in pattern: someone who used to argue in design reviews goes along with things, someone who used to plan two quarters ahead talks only about this sprint. The signal is the change relative to that person, not any behaviour in isolation, which is why it is only visible if you remember how they used to be.
What does disengagement actually look like?
A narrowing. Scope of interest shrinks to assigned work, time horizon shrinks to the current sprint, and discretionary contribution, the review comment nobody asked for, the improvement nobody assigned: stops.
Output often holds up for months, which is why it is missed. Someone can be entirely checked out and still ship their tickets. What disappears first is the part of the job nobody is tracking.
- Stops raising ideas or objections they previously would have
- Talks about work in terms of tasks rather than outcomes
- Withdraws from optional collaboration and side conversations
- Stops referring to anything beyond the next few weeks
- Agrees quickly with decisions they would once have pushed on
Why is it so easy to miss?
Because each signal is a change from a baseline you have to remember, and the changes are gradual.
A quiet person going quiet is nothing. A previously vocal person going quiet is significant, and you can only tell the difference if you recall what they were like four months ago. Across a team of eight, over a year, with a reorg in the middle, most managers do not, the baseline drifts along with the behaviour and the change never registers.
What should you not read into these signals?
Any single one of them, on any given week. People have bad months, illness, family situations, and projects they find boring, and none of that means they are leaving.
It is also worth being clear about what a manager should not do with this: none of these signals justify monitoring someone's activity, checking their message volume, or building a case. They are prompts for a conversation, and the conversation is the only thing that actually tells you anything.
How should you respond?
Name the change, specifically and without diagnosis, then stop talking.
"You used to push back hard in architecture reviews and you have not in a while. I have noticed and I miss it: what is going on?" That is observable, non-accusatory, and hard to deflect with "fine". Compare it to "is everything okay?", which reliably produces "yes".
Then be prepared for an answer you cannot fix. Sometimes the honest response is that they want something you cannot offer. Hearing that early is still much better than hearing it in a resignation, because it gives you a quarter to work with rather than a notice period.
Keeping a baseline you can actually compare against
Since the signal is a change over months, the practical requirement is a record of what each person was like and what they told you they wanted, with dates on it.
This is the ordinary case for keeping short, current notes per person rather than relying on recall. Emily maintains that history as a by-product of capturing notes and follow-ups, and surfaces it before your next 1:1, so "they used to talk about this constantly and have not since spring" is something you can see rather than something you have to happen to remember.