Christina and Lunch

Christina was a good manager. Her team consistently delivered. Metrics looked right. No one was leaving.

And then the office got bigger.

When Christina’s company expanded and her team grew, something shifted that didn’t show up in any report. Christina was still there — still attending every meeting, still hitting every deadline, still technically available. But she had, in a way no one could quite name, become absent.

The trigger was logistical: new building, more people, a different floor, a commute that now required walking across a lobby. The lunches that used to happen spontaneously stopped happening. The informal conversations that had kept Christina connected to her team — the two minutes before a meeting, the walk to get coffee — had been quietly replaced by calendar invites.

Christina noticed the distance but didn’t understand why it had appeared. Nothing had changed in her commitment or her competence.

What had changed was her presence.

Presence, in the Connection Cycle, is not about physical proximity. It’s about availability — the quality of being actually with someone when you’re with them. What the spontaneous lunches had provided was not just time together but time without an agenda. Unstructured proximity. The space where trust is actually built.

When Christina understood this, she didn’t try to recreate the old office. She made a different choice: she started scheduling what used to happen accidentally. One lunch a week, no agenda. A standing walk with her direct reports on a rotating basis. Fifteen minutes before the staff meeting she used to arrive at exactly on time.

The team didn’t need her to be less busy. They needed her to be less absent when she was present.

Nina tells this story in keynotes about presence because it speaks to what most leaders actually experience: the disconnection didn’t announce itself. It crept in through the logistics of growth, of efficiency, of a schedule that slowly filled every gap. Christina wasn’t failing. She was optimizing — in a direction that cost her the thing that made the rest of her leadership work.

The invitation that follows this story is simple: where have you been present in form but not in fact? And what’s one place you could change that this week — not by adding more, but by bringing more of yourself to something you’re already doing?