The Biggest Threat to South Cone Mining Isn’t Geology or Permitting—It’s Your Leadership Culture

Copper and lithium across South America are entering a pivotal stage. Pipelines are strong, with major investments planned and new incentive regimes attracting large-scale capital. Regulatory frameworks are evolving, and investors expect delivery to match ambition.

Copper and lithium across Chile, Peru, and Argentina are entering a decisive phase. Official government data estimate over US$182bn in more than 110 greenfield and brownfield projects, spanning multiple permitting and investment stages. Frameworks are shifting, and investors expect delivery to match ambition, especially amid the significant growth in investment over the las years.

For CEOs and their leadership teams, the conversation still defaults to capex, commodity cycles, and permit timelines. These are important topics, but they miss the human engine that moves projects: nurturing leaders, teams, and trust. 

Companies are racing to secure the talent required for this cycle. Compensation still moves people, but it no longer keeps them. What creates real advantage is harder to replicate: a culture people want to belong to, and teams that work effectively together under pressure. 

In recent months, we spoke with GMs, COOs, CHROs, and project leaders across the South Cone. Three themes surfaced repeatedly: 

• GM churn is real and right now 50% of GMs in the South Cone have been under 12 months in role. The root cause is rarely compensation alone. 
• Project talent is scarce, and portfolio intensity will amplify the gap through 2028. 
• Permits and community trust are still treated as parallel tracks when they should be a single strategy. 

This article explores what effective action looks like for CEOs and senior leaders can when talent and trust are the real constraints.

If you are a mining leader in the South Cone, you’ve felt the revolving door effect, particularly in large copper assets, new lithium developments, and complex expansions. Competitors phone your best people with a slightly bigger package and a shiny project, and you lose yet another cornerstone leader. It’s tempting to respond with higher pay, retention bonuses, and tighter non-competes.

That response works for a month. Sometimes two. Then it breaks.

What shifts attrition decisively is not a thicker paycheck but a Retention Engine: visible succession for critical roles, development pathways that feel real, and a team climate where people belong and are proud of the work they do together. In mining, the stakes are immediate—safety, productivity, and schedule integrity. When leaders believe they can grow here and their teams feel psychologically safe to surface issues early, poaching becomes far less effective.

Across the South Cone, poaching persists not because competitors are more attractive, but because many organizations never built the conditions that make leaving unattractive in the first place. When development paths are opaque, succession is informal, and team dynamics are fragile, compensation becomes the only currency of loyalty. 

For CEOs, the task is both simple and demanding: make development and team belonging as tangible as the pay slip. If your best GMs can’t see their next role (or the next skill they will master), they may invent it somewhere else. 

Chile’s permitting reform is a tailwind. Peru’s portfolio growth is undeniable. Argentina’s incentives are opening doors. Yet we continue to see projects slip because social license is managed “over there,” while legal and technical permitting sprint “over here.”

That separation is costly.

Permits and people are a double helix: one strand is Legal/Permits; the other is Community & Social Performance. If they don’t twist together from the concept study onward—shared cadence, shared issue log, shared stakeholder map—you’ll win on paper and stall on the ground. Communities don’t read Gantt charts. They read intent, presence, and whether your teams show up early, listen well, and solve with, not for, them.

This isn’t about lowering standards or doing more meetings. It’s about knitting trust into the sequence. The result is the same thing investors want: predictability.

You’ve heard it. Maybe you’ve said it: “Don’t bring me a problem unless you bring the solution.” It sounds productive. In practice, it buries risk until it becomes cross-functional and expensive.

Healthy project cultures make early flagging a norm and no-blame reviews a ritual. Teams escalate issues quickly, knowing they won’t be penalized for raising a half formed concern. Leaders ask better questions instead of rewarding “heroic fixes” that arrive late and shiny. Trust here is operational: it lowers incident rates, reduces rework, and protects critical path items you can’t afford to slip.

When projects fail at scale, the post-mortem often points to engineering, procurement, or sequencing. In reality, the root cause is frequently cultural: teams felt pressure to present certainty they did not yet have. Issues stayed local, risks went quiet, and escalation came only when options had narrowed, and costs had multiplied.

If your team meetings are mostly status updates and “green traffic lights,” you’re probably delaying important conversations. Shift them to issue-finding instead of image-managing.

The mining industry is pushing for broader inclusion, and that’s welcome. But bringing in new faces without equipping legacy teams creates friction that may slow execution. Real inclusion is a capability, not a sentiment. Frontline leaders need concrete tools: how to run a toolbox talk where everyone contributes, how to resolve conflict in shift, how to set team norms that survive heat, altitude, and tough production targets.

Without these capabilities, inclusion efforts unintentionally add execution risk, particularly in remote sites and legacy operations where trust and cohesion may already be thin. The result is not only disengagement, but slower decisions, unresolved conflict, and operational drag.

When inclusion becomes habit, with clear operating norms, managers trained to lead diverse crews, conflict handled in the moment, you get what everyone wants: safer shifts, faster problem solving, and a team climate where people stay because they can do their best work together.

In mining, teams—not lone experts—deliver safety performance, schedule integrity, stakeholder trust, and innovation. When teams work well, individuals are more likely to stay. To address this, we suggest five practical ideas:

Salary is a ticket to play. It’s rarely a reason to stay. Create visible succession slates for GMs, Project Directors, and Community and Social Performance (CSP) leaders. Make development practical—rotations, stretch assignments, coaching that connects to real project demands. And codify a cultural contract (leadership standards, team rituals, decision rules) that shows up in the shift, not just in HQ slides.

Inventory internal capabilities by discipline and site. Map the external market country × discipline × commodity. Put mobilization agreements in place with clear service levels for peak phases (commissioning, ramp-up). Build a bench for owner’s team skills where you know demand will spike. The goal: compress time to mobilize when the schedule can least absorb delay.

One cadence. One issue log. One stakeholder map with trust metrics your Board can read. Integrate CSP in the earliest design conversations so engagement isn’t “bolted on” after technical decisions are made. The payoff is fewer surprises and a more believable schedule.

Make weekly cross functional reviews standard. Reward escalation, not image management. Train middle managers to host issue-focused conversations where raising a half-formed risk is considered a service to the team. Over time, this becomes your operating edge: problems emerge earlier, solutions are shared faster, and rework shrinks.

Deliver microlearning in shift (10–15 minutes) on inclusive leadership, team norms, and conflict resolution. Use real scenarios from your sites. Tie learning to immediate practice: how we run this toolbox talk tomorrow, how we decide under time pressure, how we escalate respectfully. Inclusion becomes muscle memory—and productivity follows.

The South Cone has the geology, capex, and increasingly the regulatory scaffolding to execute the copper–lithium cycle. The differentiator is no longer the spec sheet; it is how your people work together under pressure and how your stakeholders trust you to do it. Build the retention engine. Orchestrate the project talent market. Twist permits and people together from day zero. Normalize early flagging. Equip inclusion.

For CEOs and CHROs, culture, team effectiveness, and development pathways are now core operating systems. The more intentional and systemic the approach, the stronger the leadership pipeline—and the more predictable the delivery investors and communities demand.

We continue to work with Mining leaders across the region on these challenges. If this reflects your reality, we welcome a discussion. Get in touch.

EY / Cochilco — Chile’s Mining & Metals Investment Guide 2025

EY / Cochilco - Catastro de proyectos mineros en Chile 2022-2031

EY - Chile’s mining and metals investment guide 2025

Gob.pe - Cartera de Proyectos de Inversión Minera 2025

MINEM (Peru) — 2025 Mining Investment Project Portfolio

ANDINA news brief 

Chile LMAS (Law 21,770) — Ley Marco de Autorizaciones Sectoriales

MINING.com — Chile cuts permitting times by up to 70%

Dominga case — UPI; MercoPress coverage

Argentina RIGI — Boletín Oficial (Decreto 749/2024)

MINING.com — Argentina approves Rio Tinto’s US$2.5bn Rincon project

Rio Tinto — Rincon project overview

USGS — Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025 (Copper; Lithium)

WA Government — MARS Landmark Study

North American Mining Magazine — Examining mental health connections in mining

The Intelligent Miner — Integrating psychological health & safety

Springer — Emotional Intelligence Training study