August 4, 2026
When a steel mill ‘cobbles’ — when red-hot steel jams the production line — everything stops.
Production halts.
Customer orders wait.
The operators watch and wait while the line cools enough for them to get close.
Once cool enough, the steel can be cut and removed. Then repairs begin. While repairs are happening, the mill is at a standstill. The systems keep running but have nowhere to go. A single cobble can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I remember this from my steel days. Billets – long 6-inch by 6-inch bars of steel – would be fed into the reheat furnace at room temperature and leave for the rolling mill at a crisp 1,250°C – ready for its transformation.
The billet passes through a set of rollers, changing its shape from square to round. Its profile smaller than before. As it elongates with each pass, the steel speeds up. It reaches the next set of rollers faster than the first. The ability of the subsequent sets of rollers to receive the incoming steel has to be precisely considered – in timing and in placement.
A fraction of a second off and the whole thing cobbles up the way Wile E. Coyote hits a canyon wall.
Steel companies recognize the importance of maintaining this system to ensure it can continually produce quality steel in a volume that makes the business viable. So, they invest heavily in maintenance.
Weekly shutdowns.
Forensic assessments of breakdowns.
Assessments of equipment replacement or upgrades.
An investment to ensure better performance going forward. Counterintuitively, stopping production regularly to perform this maintenance actually maximizes output.
Slower is sometimes faster.
If you’re familiar mechanical or electrical systems, this is a no-brainer. That’s obvious when it comes to manufacturing. It’s easy to make a business case for maintaining an external system and optimizing its results.
So why don’t we do that for our people?
You know, the ones who run the machinery, perform the maintenance, and determine the upgrade options and capability that can better the business.
We understand maintenance when the system is mechanical. We question it when the system is human.
Many leaders expect a lot from their employees. They expect them to work hard, apply their technical skills, and get results. But what I’m seeing is that there are no maintenance or upgrade plans for these individuals. Somehow, they believe a paycheck is enough. They lose sight of what makes people, people — that their needs go beyond a job.
When I refer to what makes people, people, I’m referring to their humanness: the capacity for connection, belonging, and being seen as a whole person – not just a job function. It’s the need for community, for feeling like you matter. Like you are loved.
Yes. Love.
Not the romantic kind, but the kind that says “I see you as a human being, not just a resource.” This isn’t a soft skill or a nice-to-have. It’s a fundamental need. When this need goes unmet, people disconnect and performance degrades — just like neglected machinery. But unlike machinery, most humans don’t come with warning lights.
Here’s what happens when an organization finally runs diagnostics on its people.
In Dr. Bréné Brown’s book, Dare to Lead, she tells the story of Colonel DeDe Halfhill, Director of Innovation, Analysis and Leadership Development for the US Air Force Global Strike Command. Early in her command, one of her airmen asked her a straightforward question: when was the pace of operations going to slow down, because everyone was so tired?
The easy answer would’ve been to adjust the pace. A quick fix. Grease the parts, keep the line moving.
Halfhill didn’t take the easy answer, though. She’d recently read research linking exhaustion to loneliness — not workload. So instead of patching the symptom, she asked the room a different question: “Who’s lonely?”
Half the hands went up.
That’s the maintenance moment. Not the diagnosis but the willingness to ask the harder question and look deeper at what was really happening for her people.
She didn’t know what to do with what she found right away. But she stayed in the room instead of moving on to the next agenda item. That’s what a forensic assessment looks like when the system in question is made of people instead of steel.
Why were they lonely? Turns out everyone was disconnected from everyone else. There was a missing human element — a recognition and validation of the internal experience. The professional environment didn’t account for this, nor did it offer a space where it could be accounted for.
What I found most interesting was the Air Force’s manual on leadership, written in 2011. It embodied the core values of the Air Force, which had evolved from seven leadership traits found in the Air Force’s very first manual on leadership, from 1949. One of those original seven traits was humanness. The document described the values with words like: “to belong, a sense of belonging, feeling, fear, compassion, kindness, friendliness, mercy, and love.”
Yes. Love.
Likely not the first word that comes to mind for a military organization — at least not from an outsider looking in.
But the document spoke to the human experience when informing leaders on leading their teams. This language addressed the real emotions individuals feel.
A stark comparison to the revised values, described with terms like strategic leadership, operational leadership, tactical leadership. All great things — but they set leaders up to fail, because they strip out the maintenance protocol altogether. They don’t consider the complexity of the human experience. We’ve moved so far away from meeting individuals at their humanness for the sake of business.
Going back to the comparison to rolling steel: the rollers, like people, will roll. But ignoring the human needs of the people will eventually lead to a cobble.
How do you consider your people system? No matter their technical skills, their ability to think through and resolve problems, their vision for a prosperous future — remember that they are humans first. Humans who have a NEED for community, belonging, and love. This is not a luxury. It’s a NEED. Only when you meet this need can they sustainably do amazing work for you.
This is where the leaders in your company have a tremendous opportunity — to create the kind of environment that values the humanness in your workforce. They can be the multiplier effect that boosts morale and builds trust, which in turn gives people permission to bring their best. Leaders who communicate with humanness build the kind of influence that pulls the team toward the company vision — not because they have to, but because they want to.
Without this mindset and these skills, the warning lights start coming on:
- Burnout — increased absenteeism and healthcare costs as employees take more time off to rest and reset
- Quiet quitting — loss of innovation and competitive advantage as team members stop contributing ideas that help the company stay ahead
- Attrition — replacement costs of roughly 1.2–1.5x salary when employees leave for a better work culture (article on this coming soon)
By the time you see them, the system has already cobbled.
On average, it costs roughly 1.2–1.5x the salary of the person who’s left just to keep things moving and replace them. I’m always curious if companies maintain a budget line for this kind of cost. Wouldn’t it be more cost effective to invest in people instead?
If you think about the loss a company takes when someone leaves, what fraction of that cost would be better invested in taking care of your people? one tenth? Seems like a good deal — and a strategic decision.
The equation is simple: invest a fraction of turnover costs in strong, mindful leadership, genuine human connection, and maintenance or pay the full price when the system cobbles.
The steel industry figured out the system decades ago.
Your steel has a maintenance schedule.
Your equipment has an upgrade cycle.
What’s the maintenance schedule for the people who run both?