I sat with a client in their leadership team meeting recently and felt the silence press in on us.

Everyone fidgeted on their devices, waiting for the "leader" to start. She opened with the agenda, and they followed it like a recipe. It was efficient, and ended early.

But the whole meeting felt rote, mechanical, boring, and insignificant. One person at a time spoke, giving updates, while everyone else took notes (or did something else while looking present.) The total cost of the meeting, just adding up the hourly wage of the attendees, totaled well over $1,000. The value of the time to all? Zip.

Esther Perel has a name for what I was watching. Social atrophy. In Fortune this month she warned executives that the everyday human contact that used to hold organizations together is quietly eroding, and that AI is speeding it up. Ask a chatbot instead of a colleague, she says, and you do not just skip one exchange. You erase every conversation that would have followed it.

The numbers underneath this are not small.

Gallup puts global engagement at 20 percent, the lowest since 2020. A Workday index found that since AI arrived in their workplaces, nearly a third of employees have less patience for small talk, more trouble reading a colleague's tone, and a harder time working through conflict without something digital in the middle.

Here is the line from Perel I cannot stop thinking about. "You can only handle the hard conversations," she says, "if you have built a foundation of small, insignificant ones first."

That foundation is exactly what is disappearing.

And if you run a small or mid-sized company, this is your issue more than anyone's. You cannot out-spend the giants on tools. You never could. What you have instead is proximity. Your leaders touch more people, more directly, than any manager at a ten-thousand-person firm. One leader who still asks "what is energizing you this week" and waits for the answer moves your whole culture.

That is not a soft advantage. At your size it is THE advantage.

The muscle of connection atrophies because we stopped using it, like all muscles, which means we need to keep working out. Start with one person, one real question this week, and the discipline of not rushing the answer. I call it the Heart Habit, and it does not scale, which is exactly why it works.

But I promise it will save you time, in the end.

Humaning at work pays off big time, over time. Invest now, and save later due to the very real downstream costs of fixing broken trust, misaligned communication, and disengagement resulting is weak-ass performance.

Reply and tell me. Where have you watched the small conversations disappear at your job?

With care,

Moe

P.S. If reading this made you think "this is the work I want to help leaders do," that is exactly what I teach people to deliver. I am holding a small open house about the licensing event for the Leading People Program it on August 13.

Join me; REGISTER HERE. It is free, will answer all your questions, and a replay is available.