Introduction
I want to start with a question that might be slightly uncomfortable.
When did you last feel genuinely connected to someone you work with? Not a productive meeting. Not a well-run standup. Not an email thread that ended with “great, thanks.” I mean, actually connected — the kind of moment where you walked away feeling like you really know this person, and they really know you.
If you are struggling to remember, you are not alone. And you are probably not a bad leader. You are just busy. Busy in the particular way that healthcare founders get busy — where every week brings a new fire, a new decision, a new thing that feels more urgent than the last.
But here is the thing nobody tells you clearly enough: the challenges that will cost you the most are rarely technical ones.
They are the co-founders whose relationship quietly curdled. The brilliant hire who stopped feeling engaged and then left without really explaining why. The leadership team that says all the right things in meetings but pulls in different directions when no one is watching. The culture that started with so much energy and somehow, gradually, lost its warmth.
These are not strategy problems. There are connection problems. And they are almost entirely preventable — which is precisely why exercises to deepen meaningful connections deserve a permanent place in how you lead, not just a one-off team away day.
The founder, who had plenty of communication but no connection
A founder I spoke with a while back said something I have not been able to forget.
“We were talking all the time. Updates, check-ins, reviews. But at some point I realised — we had stopped actually connecting. People knew what to do. They just didn’t know how each other were doing.”
Her company was growing. By most measures, things looked fine. Communication was happening constantly. What had quietly disappeared was something harder to name — the sense that people genuinely knew and cared about one another beyond their roles and responsibilities.
What she noticed first were small things. Conversations becoming more transactional. People are raising fewer concerns in meetings. A certain flatness to interactions that used to feel energised.
What she noticed later were bigger things. A resignation she didn’t see coming. A team that had stopped collaborating the way it used to. A culture that had drifted without anyone choosing for it to drift.
This is how disconnection usually happens. Not in one dramatic moment. In dozens of small moments where connection could have happened and didn’t.
Researchers who study organisational psychology have found that the quality of relationships at work shapes almost everything — how engaged people are, how well they learn, how resilient they are under pressure, and how safe they feel raising difficult things (Dutton & Heaphy, 2003; Edmondson, 1999). This is not soft science. It has real consequences for performance, retention, and — in healthcare especially — the quality of care that ultimately reaches patients.
6 exercises to deepen meaningful connections on your team
None of what follows costs money. None of it requires a workshop or a consultant, or a culture programme with a name. These are small, human things. Done consistently, they change how a team feels — and eventually, what a team is capable of.
Practice one
Before your next meeting, try asking a single question that has nothing to do with the work. “What is something that went well for you this week?” Or even: “What is taking up space in your head right now?” It sounds small. It is small. But it does something important — it reminds everyone in the room that they are human beings first and colleagues second. That reminder, made consistently, compounds into a culture where people actually want to show up.
Practice two
Most leaders know recognition matters. Far fewer do it in a way that actually lands. “Good work” evaporates. Specific appreciation stays. There is a meaningful difference between “you handled that well” and “the way you sat with that patient’s family on Thursday, when everything was uncertain — that took real skill and compassion, and I don’t want it to go unnoticed.” The second version tells someone they were truly seen. Research shows that genuine gratitude strengthens relationships and creates social bonds that last (Algoe, 2012). In healthcare, where so much of the most important work is invisible, being seen is not a small thing.
Practice three
Most of the damage that happens in working relationships starts with an assumption. We decide we already know why someone acted a certain way. We fill in the gaps with our own interpretation — and we are usually at least partially wrong. The antidote is not complicated. Before concluding anything, ask. Not “why did they do that?” but “what might I be missing here?” That shift — from judgement to genuine curiosity — creates space for understanding to take root where defensiveness would otherwise take hold.
Practice four
Most people came into healthcare because something about it mattered deeply to them. A parent who was cared for well. A belief that technology could change outcomes. A desire to fix something that felt broken. Operational life has a way of burying that original sense of purpose under a pile of tasks and targets. Every few weeks, try asking your team: what part of your work feels most meaningful right now? What impact are you most proud of? What reminds you of why you’re here? These are not indulgent questions. They are the ones that reconnect people to why any of this is worth doing.
Practice five
Most of us, if we are honest, listen while simultaneously composing our response. We hear enough to know what we want to say, and then we wait for our turn. Real listening is different. It means setting aside the urge to fix, redirect, or solve — and simply staying with what the other person is actually saying. For healthcare leaders, many of whom are trained to move quickly toward solutions, this can feel almost counterintuitive. But people need to feel genuinely heard before they are ready to receive anything. Skip that step, and you often end up solving the wrong problem entirely.
Practice six
Most organisations have values written somewhere. Fewer organisations have honest conversations about whether those values are actually showing up in decisions. As teams grow and pressures increase, the gap between stated values and lived values tends to widen — quietly, without anyone deciding it should. Creating space, even once a quarter, to ask “are we actually behaving in the way we say we want to?” is one of the most underused exercises to deepen meaningful connections within a leadership team. It surfaces the tensions before they become fractures.
On “soft skills” — a brief objection
I have never been comfortable with that phrase. It implies these things are somehow easier, less rigorous, and less important than the “hard” work of strategy and operations.
But tell me: what is soft about building trust inside a team that is under real pressure? What is soft about navigating a conflict between co-founders before it poisons the whole organisation? What is soft about creating an environment where people feel safe enough to say “I think we’re making a mistake here” before the mistake becomes expensive?
These are not peripheral capabilities. They are the ones that determine whether organisations hold together or quietly fall apart. For healthcare founders, especially, meaningful connection is not something that sits alongside leadership. It is what leadership actually is.
Conclusion
The founders who seem to sustain the most are not always those with the most impressive strategies. They are often those who understand, in a practical and unsentimental way, that organisations move at the speed of trust. And trust is not built in away days or an annual review.
It is built through regular, everyday exercises to deepen meaningful connections — a question asked before a meeting starts, a thank you that names something specific, a moment of curiosity instead of a conclusion, a conversation that goes somewhere real.
Individually, these things seem almost too small to matter.
Collectively, they are what hold everything together.
References
- Algoe, S. B. (2012). Find, remind, and bind: The functions of gratitude in everyday relationships. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6(6), 455–469. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2012.00439.x
- Dutton, J. E., & Heaphy, E. D. (2003). The power of high-quality connections. In K. S. Cameron, J. E. Dutton, & R. E. Quinn (Eds.), Positive Organizational Scholarship (pp. 263–278). Berrett-Koehler.
- Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
- Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish. Free Press.