The Code Was Clear, The People Were Not…
Jason L. was 42.
Freshly appointed CEO of Quantivus, a cutting-edge deeptech startup building neural edge processors for autonomous systems.
His background?
Engineering. Smart. Curious.
He had dabbled in AI ethics during his EMBA.
Built scalable ops as a COO.
Held his own in strategy meetings.
But leadership?
That was new territory.
And the room he walked into?
PhDs.
Coders who spoke more TensorFlow than English.
Product leads who ran A/B tests on their personal lives.
Data scientists who had never worked with “non-replicable variables”—also known as people.
Day 1, he faced a wall of dashboards.
Everything was tracked.
Velocity. Uptime. Code coverage.
Even team morale was measured by an internal AI plug-in analyzing Slack tone and response time.
The team called it Moodex™.
It scored you between 0 and 1.
Jason’s first week? 0.43.
He wanted to lead.
To inspire.
To build trust.
But everything was automated—except connection.
He asked HR (a smart bot named Penny) if they had any mentorship programs.
Penny replied: “Mentoring correlation with retention: statistically insignificant.”
He walked into a meeting.
All cameras off.
Nobody looked up.
The engineer in charge was debugging a predictive maintenance model—on mute.
Jason asked if he could help.
The reply:
“We already optimized the executive loop. Your approval path is automated.”
By week four, Jason was quietly panicking.
He was respected—but not needed.
He signed off on funding.
Nodded through roadmap reviews.
Posted welcome messages to new hires written by AI.
Everything ran.
But nothing moved.
Until one Monday, the system flagged a spike in team errors—right after a major release.
Jason asked the AI:
“What happened?”
The system replied:
“Sentiment anomaly detected. Productivity forecast: unaffected.”
That was it.
No follow-up. No human. Just statistical comfort.
So Jason did the unthinkable.
He shut down Moodex™ for 24 hours.
He booked a room—an actual physical one.
He asked five engineers to join. In person. No screens.
He brought coffee. Bad pastries. Printed out the release notes.
At first, silence.
Then one of them said:
“Honestly? We’re burnt out. Nobody says it. The system flags red, we get auto-prompts to take walks, but the deadlines stay the same.”
Another added:
“We miss talking. Just… talking. Not prompts.”
Jason sat back.
That was it.
Over the next few weeks, he rolled out a new protocol:
• Weekly live retros—no transcripts
• Peer mentoring—not tracked by KPIs
• Anonymous “speak freely” hour—without AI filters
Some called it inefficient.
But for the first time, Jason saw trust forming.
One engineer even brought in donuts. Voluntarily.
He still uses automation.
Still believes in AI.
But he no longer lets it replace leadership.
Because Jason learned:
Automation can scale your reach—
But only humanity can build your core.
In the Labyrinth of Management, the path is not always optimized.
Sometimes, it is uncertain.
Imperfect.
Human.
And that is exactly what makes it real.
For more stories, reflections, practical leadership tips, and to stay updated you can follow me on Instagram, X (Twitter), and Facebook.