Gallup's 2026 report dropped a number that should have stopped the industry in its tracks: 80% of the global workforce is disengaged.

Not unhappy. Not underpaid. Disengaged. As in, going through the motions. As in, present but not accounted for. The kind of disengagement that doesn't show up in velocity metrics because velocity metrics measure output, not intent.

The cost? $438 billion annually in lost productivity. But that's accounting, not diagnosis. The real cost is the human potential being strip-mined out of existence while we optimize Jira boards.

Here's another number from the same report that got less attention: manager engagement dropped from +11 over individual contributors to +3. The people tasked with cultivating others are themselves running on empty.

This isn't a tool problem. You can't AI your way out of a people problem.

The Extraction Economy

I call what most engineering organizations do to their people "strip-mining." It's not pejorative; it's descriptive.

Strip-mining is the practice of removing resources from a site without regard for the long-term health of the soil. You extract maximum value in minimum time. You measure success by tons moved, not by whether anything can grow there afterward.

Sound familiar?

The sprint cycle that never ends. The "stretch goals" that stretch people until they break. The performance review that rewards shipped features and says nothing about soil health. The manager who has fifteen direct reports and no time to know any of them.

These aren't edge cases. They're the default setting. And we've normalized them because the metrics are easy and the alternatives are hard.

MIT and Gallup ran the numbers on AI adoption: 95% of implementations show zero profit impact. Not because the tools are bad, but because the people using them are depleted. You can't automate your way out of disengagement. You can only deepen it.

The Cultivation Alternative

I wrote a business novel about this. The Soil Beneath the Code wasn't an accident; it was a necessity. I needed a vocabulary for what I was seeing that "employee engagement" and "developer experience" couldn't capture.

The agricultural metaphor works because it's ancient, because it's grounded, because it forces you to think in cycles rather than quarters.

Cultivation is slow. Cultivation is directional. Cultivation measures the health of the soil, not just the height of this year's crop. And cultivation requires something extraction doesn't: the cultivator has to care about what happens after they're gone.

The three questions from my mentoring framework apply here too. What are you cultivating? At what cost? For how long?

Most engineering organizations can't answer the first question. They can tell you what they're shipping. They can tell you what their OKRs are. They can't tell you what they're growing in their people because they've never asked.

What Cultivation Looks Like in Practice

I'm not going to give you a framework with seven pillars and an acronym. Frameworks are what strip-mining looks like when it's trying to seem human. Instead, here are directional signals; practices that indicate cultivation rather than extraction.

Cultivation invests in capacity, not just output.

The organization that sends its senior engineers to a conference to learn something unrelated to this quarter's roadmap is cultivating. The organization that cancels training because "we're too busy shipping" is strip-mining. Both are rational within their own logic. Only one of them compounds.

Cultivation measures soil health, not just yield.

Velocity is yield. Cycle time is yield. Bug count is yield. None of them tell you whether your best engineer is two months from quitting, or whether your team's collective knowledge is eroding, or whether your onboarding process is destroying the people it's supposed to grow.

Soil health metrics are harder. They require conversation. They require looking at what people do when nobody's measuring them. They require the patience to measure things that don't show up in dashboards.

Cultivation tolerates fallow seasons.

Not every quarter can be a harvest. Sometimes the soil needs to rest. Sometimes the team needs to refactor, to learn, to experiment without a delivery date. The extraction mindset treats fallow seasons as waste. The cultivation mindset treats them as investment.

I've watched teams go through "innovation sprints" that were really just compressed delivery cycles with a different name. That's not a fallow season; that's strip-mining in disguise. A real fallow season has no metric attached. That's what makes it uncomfortable, and that's what makes it necessary.

Cultivation is specific to the soil.

You don't grow corn in sand. You don't cultivate a backend engineer the same way you cultivate a product manager. The generic "leadership training" that gets applied to everyone regardless of role, temperament, or trajectory is the HR equivalent of broadcasting seed from an airplane.

Cultivation requires knowing the person in front of you. Not their resume; their soil. What do they lean toward? What depletes them? What regenerates them? These questions don't scale. That's the point.

The Manager Collapse

Let's go back to that Gallup number: manager engagement at +3 over ICs. It used to be +11.

What happened?

Managers got loaded up. More direct reports, more cross-functional coordination, more "people leadership" responsibilities added to the same technical workload. The manager role became the dumping ground for everything that didn't fit in an IC job description.

And then we asked them to "cultivate" their people on top of it.

You can't cultivate what you don't have time to see. A manager with fifteen reports isn't cultivating; they're triaging. They're deciding which fires to let burn. The human connection that makes cultivation possible — the walk, the conversation, the noticing — gets sacrificed to the standup, the status update, the roadmap review.

If you want cultivation, you have to protect the cultivators. That means fewer direct reports, fewer meetings, fewer "strategic initiatives" that translate to more hours and less presence. It means treating manager time as a finite resource instead of an infinitely elastic buffer.

The Speed Without Soil Trap

I've started using a phrase: "speed without soil."

It describes the organization that moves fast but leaves nothing behind. The sprint that ships a feature and burns out the engineer who built it. The acquisition that brings revenue and destroys culture. The AI adoption that promises efficiency and delivers exhaustion.

Speed without soil isn't just unsustainable; it's expensive. The cost shows up in turnover, in knowledge loss, in the slow erosion of quality that happens when nobody has the margin to care.

The alternative isn't "slow." It's "fast with soil." The organization that moves quickly because it invests in its people. The team that ships reliably because it has time to learn from failures. The engineer who solves hard problems because they haven't been depleted by trivial ones.

Soil isn't a brake on speed. It's what makes sustained speed possible.

What You Can Do Tomorrow

I'm suspicious of advice that starts with "leadership should." Leadership should do a lot of things. Most of them don't happen because the structure prevents it.

So here's what you can do regardless of your title:

If you're an IC: Notice what depletes you and what regenerates you. Track it for a week. The data is more useful than you think, and nobody else is going to collect it for you.

If you're a manager: Reduce your direct report count or delegate something else. If you can't do either, be honest that you're managing, not cultivating. There's no shame in triage when triage is all the system allows. But don't call it mentorship.

If you're a senior leader: Ask the three questions about your org. What are you cultivating? At what cost? For how long? If you can't answer them, you're strip-mining. That may be rational; just know what you're doing.

The $438 billion number is a distraction. It's big enough to seem important and abstract enough to ignore. The real question is personal: are you cultivating the people around you, or extracting from them?

Your answer matters more than any Gallup report.