For two generations, the trust that let an executive team move fast was built almost by accident — hallways, dinners, travel, the unscripted hours between the meetings. Those hours have quietly disappeared. Remote and hybrid work siloed the network; AI is removing the small human exchanges that remained; and the people at the very top were already the most isolated in the building. The connection that used to form on its own now has to be built on purpose. The good news: it can be — and the change can be measured.
The quiet erosion.
Nobody decided to disconnect the executive team. It happened underneath three shifts that each looked, on their own, like progress.
Remote work made collaboration measurably more siloed. A study of 61,182 employees published in Nature Human Behaviour found that firm-wide remote work caused cross-group collaboration to fall by roughly a quarter, and the organization's network to become more static — fewer new connections, fewer bridges between disparate teams. The "weak ties" that move information and trust across an organization are exactly what thinned out.
The top was already the loneliest place in the company. Harvard Business Review reports that roughly half of CEOs experience loneliness, and 61% believe it hinders their performance. Among first-time CEOs, 70% say isolation is a significant challenge. A leader who can't be candid with anyone makes worse decisions — and sets the tone for a team that does the same.
This isn't only a business problem. In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness and isolation a public-health epidemic, with health effects comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and called on workplaces specifically to rebuild connection. Roughly half of U.S. adults report experiencing loneliness.
And now AI is removing what little contact was left.
The emails you used to write a colleague, the quick question you used to walk over and ask, the notes you used to compare after a meeting — they're increasingly handled by a model. Each one is a small efficiency. Together, they are the quiet removal of the micro-interactions that built familiarity and trust. Harvard Business Review and a growing body of research warn that as teams hand routine interaction to AI, human connection, collaboration, and trust erode with it. The most efficient version of your team can also be the least connected one.
"In an AI world, what you do is far more important than what you prompt."
— Mark Cuban
Cuban predicts that as AI — especially AI video — becomes so convincing that no one can tell what's real, it will trigger an explosion of face-to-face engagement and live experiences. He calls it the "Milli Vanilli Effect": the more convincingly fake the world gets, the more valuable the genuinely real becomes. He's put money behind it, investing in a live-experiences company.
The implication for a leadership team is direct. As AI commoditizes everything that can be automated, the real, in-person, shared experience becomes the scarce and decisive advantage. The teams that deliberately invest in genuine connection now will be the ones still able to move fast when everyone else is talking to a screen.
Why this is an executive-team problem — not a wellness one.
It's tempting to file "connection" under morale. For a leadership team, it's operational. Speed of decision, willingness to disagree in the room instead of the hallway, the candor to say "that won't work" to the CEO's idea — all of it runs on trust, and trust runs on knowing each other as people. A team that has never really connected can be perfectly polite and still be slow, guarded, and quietly misaligned.
What eroded — the bridges, the weak ties, the unscripted hours — is precisely the raw material of an aligned executive team. You cannot rebuild it with another video call, another offsite of presentations, or another Slack channel. Those are more of the thing that hollowed it out. It takes a shared, in-person experience vivid enough to drop the armor and remind a group of senior people that they're on the same side.
What actually rebuilds it — measured.
For 25 years we've designed immersive executive retreats around a single principle: an experience shows a team what they actually do, not what they know — and then we reinforce the change for 30 days and measure it against a baseline. Connection isn't the soft byproduct; it's the mechanism. And because we measure, we can show what it produces.
Measured behavioral change at 30 days for a seven-person executive team bridged across a work-ethic divide — our largest documented gain.
Mindset-score gain, measured 30 days post-retreat, for a $3B enterprise leadership team.
Improvement in teaming behaviors for a virtual leadership team of star executives poached from rivals.
Rise in abundance-mindset behaviors for a global firm's CIO and nine-person executive team.
Each figure is measured 30 days after the retreat against a pre-retreat behavioral baseline. Clients anonymized. Read the full engagements in our case studies.
What to do about it.
If connection used to be free and now isn't, the response is to make it deliberate — and to treat it with the same rigor as any other executive priority. Four principles:
- 1.Schedule it like it matters. The unstructured hours won't return on their own. Put real, in-person time on the calendar with intent, not as a perk.
- 2.Make it an experience, not a meeting. More presentations rebuild nothing. A shared, demanding experience lowers the guard that a conference room raises.
- 3.Start with one outcome. Connection for its own sake fades. Tie it to the decision, alignment, or trust the team actually needs right now.
- 4.Reinforce and measure. What isn't reinforced fades by Friday. Build in the follow-up — and measure the change, so you know it was real.
- 1 · Yang, L., Holtz, D., Jaffe, S. et al. The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers. Nature Human Behaviour (2022).
- 2 · Harvard Business Review. CEOs Often Feel Lonely. Here's How They Can Cope (2024).
- 3 · U.S. Surgeon General. Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation (2023).
- 4 · Harvard Business Review. Employees Are Relying on AI for Personal Support. That's Risky (2026).
- 5 · Mark Cuban, via Inc. Mark Cuban Just Made a Bold Prediction About the Future of AI and Human Interaction.