The Connection You’re Actually Making

What genuine connection looks like — and what it builds over time

In 1989 I went to work for the YMCA of St. Louis as Associate Executive Director at the South County location. The Executive Director, Steve Harty, had recently stepped into his role and hired me to help him build something different — a culture grounded in honesty, genuine relationship, and a standard of leadership that the previous culture hadn’t always modeled.

We were on the same page from the beginning. Same values. Same instincts about how to treat people. Same willingness to have the hard conversations that culture change requires.

But knowing you’re aligned with someone and genuinely connecting with them are two different things. I didn’t fully understand the difference until a performance review that could have gone very differently.

I was scheduled to have an MRI — a procedure that in those days required medication to manage the anxiety of the process. The drugs were effective. I was calm. Perhaps more calm than my usual professional self would have been. Steve and I agreed to hold the review anyway.

I laughed before we even started. I told him he could probably tell me anything and it wouldn’t register the way it normally might.

What happened instead was one of the most honest, most real, and most unexpectedly joyful professional conversations I’ve ever had. We laughed. We were direct. And when we compared how he had rated my performance against how I had rated myself — the numbers were nearly identical.

As I walked out of that meeting, I knew something I hadn’t been able to fully name before. We had a strong connection. Not the professional kind that looks good on paper. The real kind — where you can laugh and have a good time during a formal performance review and still hold the space to be completely honest with each other.

Almost 40 years later, Steve Harty remains the most influential boss I’ve ever had. His character and honesty were impeccable. He rarely avoided confrontation — but he was always respectful in those moments. He showed me what it looks like to truly connect with the people you lead. Not through formulas. Not through management techniques. Through the quality of his presence and the consistency of his character.

———

I had worked for a different kind of leader before Steve. The kind where the relationship was clear and uncomplicated: his way, or the highway. I delivered results. I did my job. I was professionally successful in that environment.

But I was not known. And there is a difference.

Being liked is available to almost everyone who performs well and stays out of trouble. It requires competence, reliability, and a reasonably pleasant demeanor. Most leaders can achieve it without much self-examination.

Being known requires something else entirely. It requires the willingness to be seen — not just your results, but your thinking, your doubts, your actual experience of the work. And it requires creating the conditions where the people around you feel safe enough to be seen in return.

Most of us spend our careers becoming more skilled at being liked — and less practiced at being known.

That’s not a character failure. It’s a rational adaptation to most professional environments. In organizations where showing uncertainty is risky, where disagreement is unwelcome, where the performance review is something to survive rather than a genuine conversation about growth — you learn to manage your presentation rather than reveal your reality.

The problem is that managed presentation doesn’t build anything that lasts. It builds compliance, at best. And compliance is not connection.

———

Vivek Murthy, the former U.S. Surgeon General, spent years studying loneliness — not the loneliness of people who are isolated, but the loneliness of people who are surrounded by others and still feel unseen. He found it was epidemic. And he found it in workplaces as much as anywhere else.

The loneliest people in organizations aren’t the ones who sit alone. They’re the ones who are always in the room but never really seen.

They attend every meeting. They’re copied on every email. They deliver results and receive positive reviews. And they go home at the end of the day carrying something they can’t quite name — a vague sense of being present without being present. Of performing a role rather than inhabiting a relationship.

I’ve coached enough leaders to know that this experience is more common than anyone admits. And I’ve lived enough of my own career to know that the antidote isn’t more meetings or better communication strategies.

It’s the willingness to be known. And to create the conditions where others can be known too.

———

Steve Harty didn’t connect with me through technique. He connected with me through consistency — the same person in the performance review as in the hallway, the same person in a difficult conversation as in a moment of unexpected laughter, the same honesty whether the news was good or hard.

That consistency is what made the MRI performance review possible. The drugs didn’t create the safety in that room. They just made it impossible to pretend the safety wasn’t already there.

That’s what genuine connection builds. Not a pleasant working relationship. Not a team that gets along. A culture where people know they’re seen — and stay because of it.

Almost 40 years is a long time to remember a performance review. But I’m not remembering the form or the ratings. I’m remembering what it felt like to be in a room with someone who actually saw me.

That’s what this series is about. Not connection as a management technique. Connection as the condition under which everything else — trust, honesty, growth, belonging — becomes possible.

Who has been the Steve Harty in your career — the leader who saw you clearly and created the space for you to do the same? I’d genuinely like to know.

Jim Pacey runs Pacey Consulting & Coaching, specializing in emotional intelligence-based leadership development and executive coaching. With 38+ years of nonprofit C-suite leadership experience, Jim has learned what genuine connection makes possible — and what its absence costs. Learn more at paceyconsulting.com.