Kristin Gleitsman

Leadership in Biotech

Category: Case Studies in Connection

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From Loneliness to the Connection Operating System

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On November 5, 2025

In Case Studies in Connection

When Luis Velasquez and I first wrote about loneliness as a leadership challenge in Harvard Business Review, the response was gratifying. Leaders weren’t only intrigued, they were relieved. It put words to something many of us had felt but hadn’t named: that loneliness isn’t just showing up as a societal epidemic, it’s revealing itself in how teams work, lead, and connect.

For the last several weeks, I’ve been exploring what it actually looks like to build connection into the operating fabric of a team in a series of weekly posts. I’ve shared stories from my own work — not grand gestures, but small, durable practices that quietly shape belonging:

  1. Shared identity through rituals like our Discovery team onsite — infinity peanuts, Pictionary Telephone, and team tees that make us laugh and remember who we are.
  2. Collaboration by design, not department — forming peer-led GenAI learning groups that built trust across silos while upskilling the company.
  3. Leading with humanity, even when it means sharing a mistake — like the story I told new hires at Guardant about the time I failed early and was met with grace.
  4. Designing for belonging through structure — team-driven “About Me” rituals and annual culture calibrations that keep connection alive as a shared ethos, not a top-down edict.
  5. Sustaining connection at the top through Rising Women in Biotech — a circle that started with a single email and became a space for truth, trust, and perspective.

Each of these moments — personal, practical, sometimes a little silly — reinforces the same lesson: connection scales through intention, not intensity.

Connection is not a workplace perk or an HR initiative. It’s infrastructure: the quiet architecture beneath how people see each other, how learning happens, and how work gets done.

And now, we have new tools to help us do it better.

AI can help instead of hinder connections

AI can’t create trust, but it can help us remember, retell, and reinforce it — capturing stories, surfacing themes, and prompting reflection before the moments slip away.

If loneliness is the epidemic of our time, connection is our shared antidote.

And leaders, especially those of us building at the edge of science and technology, have both the opportunity and the responsibility to design for it.

Even though this is my last post in this series, I’d love to keep the conversation going. Please reach out and connect if this is a space you also care deeply about!

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Case Studies in Connection: Even Leaders Need Connection

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On October 29, 2025

In Case Studies in Connection

The higher you rise in your career, the fewer peers you have …and the pressure to appear composed and decisive only grows. It’s no wonder they say it’s lonely at the top.

One of the most meaningful antidotes for leadership loneliness for me has been Rising Women in Biotech.

We’re a small group of women leaders in life sciences and diagnostics who meet quarterly. On the surface, it looks like a leadership roundtable. In reality, it’s become a circle of trust, a place to bring career transitions, tough decisions, and the sticky points that are hard to navigate alone.

The funny thing is, it started with a simple email I sent out. Some of the women I knew well, others I had only met once or twice. We were joking about that email recently and how something so small became a group that now feels indispensable (at least to me).

That’s the power of peer circles: they don’t need to be complicated. They just need intention and trust.

Leaders often underestimate how much their own connection needs shape the cultures they create. If we’re isolated, we risk cascading isolation down the org.

But if we model the opposite — building our own scaffolds of trust and perspective — we give others permission to do the same.

AI could make this easier too:

  • Peer Circle Curator: imagine downloading your contacts from LinkedIn, uploading them to an AI tool, and having it suggest potential circle members who share values, challenges, or experiences, including people you might not think to invite.
  • Reflection Prompts: AI can also help capture what you take away from these conversations, turning raw insights into stories or reminders you can carry back to your teams.

Culture mirrors the top. If leaders are too busy to be human, teams will be too. But when we invest in our own connection, we create the conditions for everyone else to thrive.

Question for you: Who would you include if you sent that one email to start your own circle of trust?

Four coworkers sit at a table looking at a laptop together. They are happy and enjoying the interaction

Case Studies in Connection: Design for Belonging

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On October 22, 2025

In Case Studies in Connection

Belonging doesn’t just happen, it’s designed through the routines that shape how teams work together.

One of our simplest, most consistent rituals is that we start every team meeting with a short “About Me” from a rotating member. It’s two minutes, one slide, sometimes a photo. Over time, it’s transformed us from a collection of experts into a community of known people.

We know whose kid just started a new school, who’s training for a triathlon, whose garden is exploding with chile peppers. We even discovered an improbable number of birders on our team this way. These details accumulate into trust.

Another anchor is our annual culture and operating-rhythm review. Once a year we pause to ask:

  • Are our meetings effective?
  • Are we working on the right things?
  • Do our shared values still guide us?

Then we commit to concrete changes based on what we discuss. Sometimes that means reworking meeting cadence, clarifying decision roles, or adding new rituals.

Building shared practices

Here’s what’s important: these practices weren’t decreed from the top. The idea for “About Me” came from the team itself. And while I create the space for our annual review, I haven’t led the session for the past two years, team members have. Culture in our team is not a leadership initiative, it’s a shared ethos that everyone owns and shapes.

AI could quietly strengthen practices like these by:

  • Sense-making: surfacing themes across culture check-ins and feedback.
  • Memory: tracking commitments and reminding teams months later what’s evolved.
  • Support: suggesting new “About Me” prompts or reflections to keep stories fresh and inclusive.

Connection scales when it’s built into the way we work, not as something extra, and not as something handed down, but as the operating system we all help maintain.

Question for you: What’s one small practice your team repeats that quietly turns strangers into collaborators?

Photo of a man sitting in the woods, contemplating what he's looking at on his laptop. Photo by Hamza Tighza.

Case Studies in Connection: Lead with Humanity

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On October 15, 2025

In Case Studies in Connection

At my previous company, I used to share a story during onboarding.

It wasn’t about a big win. It was about a mistake.

In my first two months, I made a critical error. The details matter less than the response: my leaders at the time handled it with grace, empathy, and a forward-looking mentality. We didn’t sweep it under the rug, but we also didn’t spiral into blame. We focused on understanding what went wrong and where systemic improvements could make us stronger.

I told this story for two reasons:

  1. We’re human, and we’re all learning. Especially in R&D on the bleeding edge of innovation: no one has done this before, mistakes will happen.
  2. We tackle challenges together. Forward-looking, constructive, and with an eye toward improving the system, not punishing the individual.

By openly sharing my own mistake, I wanted new team members to know that psychological safety here is real. You don’t have to hide mistakes (and you really shouldn’t). You can admit them, learn, and grow, and in fact, that’s how we become resilient together.

That’s what “modeling humanity” means. It’s not oversharing. It’s showing that being human is allowed, and that’s how teams actually thrive.

Augmenting your humanity with AI

Now imagine if AI could help leaders do this more often and more effectively.

  • Onboarding Story Builder: Capture and distill real mistakes into stories of learning and resilience that new hires hear on day one.
  • Conversation Practice Lab: Roleplay tough moments (admitting uncertainty, apologizing, giving feedback) so leaders and teams build muscle memory for psychological safety.
  • Reflection Nudges: Tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot could surface subtle signals from our own communications, when humility or openness is showing up and when it’s missing, giving us all a chance to do better.

AI can help us practice, remember, and retell the moments that remind teams that humanity is not a weakness.

Question for you: If you could AI-ify one thing about modeling humanity as a leader, what would you want AI to support? Join the conversation on LinkedIn.

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Case Studies in Connection: Designing Collaboration to Build Trust

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On October 9, 2025

In Case Studies in Connection

When we rolled out GenAI at Veracyte, we didn’t cluster people by department. Instead, we formed peer-led learning groups around use cases:

  • Writing and editing
  • Coaching and feedback
  • Brainstorming and ideation
  • Data privacy and governance

Over six weeks, each group honed its particular use case and shared tips in real time. People definitely got better at using the tools, but something even more powerful happened alongside the skill-building.

New connections sparked across the company

Scientists were suddenly learning from sales reps. Legal and customer care were comparing notes on data privacy. Folks who had never spoken before started to understand each other’s struggles, frustrations, and sources of joy.

By designing collaboration around shared problems instead of org charts, we unlocked trust and empathy. The highlight for many participants — according to our post-program survey — wasn’t just new GenAI skills, it was the relationships and perspective they gained.

That’s the hidden power of collaboration-by-design:

  • Trust builds faster when people tackle real challenges together.
  • Boundaries soften when connections cross silos.
  • Innovation compounds when people see the bigger picture of the work.

AI was the reason we gathered, but connection was the outcome. And in a world where loneliness is a quiet threat to performance, those connections may be the most enduring thing we built.

Question for you: How do you design collaborations in your org so they intentionally build trust — not just output?

Close-up photo of a person's hands as they use their laptop. Next to the laptop is a coffee mug with an "infinity peanut" logo printed on the side

Case Studies in Connection: Shared Identity in Action

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On October 1, 2025

In Case Studies in Connection

At our recent team onsite in San Diego, the agenda wasn’t shaped around big dinners or polished presentations. When we asked the group what they wanted to do together, the answers were rituals we’d loved before and wanted to keep alive:

  • Infinity peanut (our design-thinking infinity loop exercise).
  • Pictionary Telephone (aka Eat Poop You Cat 🙃).
  • Team tee shirts.

On the surface, these are silly traditions, but they actually carry a lot of weight. The bad drawings from Pictionary Telephone now hang as office art. The tees feel like a uniform of belonging (it makes me smile every time I see someone in a meeting wearing a team tee). Even the infinity peanut loops back as a reminder of how we think and work together.

They’re fun, yes — but they’re also statements of identity:

  • We co-create our experiences.
  • We take the work seriously, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously.
  • We’re willing to look a little ridiculous in service of connection and learning.
  • We remember and retell our stories.

That’s the key: the rituals only become culture when the stories and artifacts keep them alive.

Here’s where I see AI being helpful. At Veracyte, I’ve already seen people use GenAI to generate artwork and slogans for peer-led learning groups during our initial GenAI rollout. It turned participation into artifacts that reinforced the group’s identity.

Imagine AI as a culture co-pilot:

  • Turning silly hand drawings into tee-shirt or sticker designs (no graphic designer required).
  • Weaving micro-stories from team rituals into onboarding packets or thank-you notes.
  • Resurfacing shared jokes and touchstones at milestones so the culture “remembers itself.”

The tech doesn’t replace the ritual. It helps the meaning stick.

Question for you: What’s one team ritual you’d love to see preserved, retold, or reimagined with a little AI help?

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