Mentorloop

AI will help some organisations do more with less. But Sol Mardones reminds us to be honest about what "less" actually means.

When you flatten a structure or reduce headcount through technology, you don't just lose a layer of management. You lose the intentional points of connection that were happening inside those teams every single day. 😔
The conversations where people felt seen. The moments where someone noticed a team member was struggling. The quiet, unglamorous work of making people feel supported and developed. Work that mostly lives at the individual team level, with the individual team leader doing it.

That work doesn't automatically find a new home when the role disappears. And when those needs go unmet, the consequences are predictable: disengagement, and the loss of exactly the people you most want to keep. 😬

Sol's ask isn't to resist the technology. It's to be genuinely deliberate about where those human experiences are going to continue to live before you make the structural change, not after.

Because you can redesign a structure in a quarter but you can't rebuild trust and belonging on the same timeline.

We measure managers on delivery, output, or whether the job got done.

Sol Mardones thinks we're not measuring a crucial thing. 😯

Her view: team engagement should be a performance indicator for managers. Because if engagement matters to the organisation, it needs to be tied to how we measure and reward the people responsible for it.

And beyond engagement, she's pointing to a set of capabilities that rarely show up on a performance review but probably should:

✅ Maintaining clarity and alignment when everything is ambiguous

✅ Fostering genuine psychological safety

✅ The ability to make people feel seen, cared about, and connected enough to go above and beyond.

These aren't soft skills. They're leading indicators of retention, productivity, and performance. The challenge is that we've been treating them as nice-to-haves while measuring everything else instead.