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:
- 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.
- Collaboration by design, not department — forming peer-led GenAI learning groups that built trust across silos while upskilling the company.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
