Cohesion Isn't Constant Contact
“Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.”
This week was the first time in three weeks that my whole team sat in the same meeting.
Summer vacations staggered through July. Someone was always out, someone was always just getting back, and for nearly a month we never once had everyone in the room at the same time. We logged on yesterday and I was genuinely excited to see everyone and felt energized by hearing what they have been up to.
By the logic most of us subconsciously run on, three weeks without a proper team meeting should have been a problem, especially as a startup (that is lightyears in startup world). Less contact, less alignment, things slipping through the cracks. And yet things kept moving. Work shipped. Decisions got made. The team held. Looking back, what carried us was not only how close we felt in those weeks. It was also the scaffolding we had built earlier. Clear roles, real trust, the authority to make calls without waiting for a meeting, and routines people could rely on.
What stayed with me was smaller and more personal. Last week was the quietest one, the one with our COO (and my right hand person) out. We had a couple things bigger come up and I texted her once, but other than that, she was away. I had the longest uninterrupted stretches, and it was a week I got a lot done (no offense Charlotte!!). It made me wonder, how much time do we need solo and how much do we need together to be a cohesive team? Naturally, I dove into the research.
We tend to treat availability as a stand-in for commitment, and constant contact as a stand-in for cohesion. But research suggests that collaboration has diminishing, and sometimes negative, returns.
Teams need enough contact to build shared understanding, trust, and coordination. They also need enough separation for people to concentrate, exercise judgment, and complete demanding work. The question is not whether teams should work together or alone. It is whether they can distinguish which kind of work requires which mode. I remind myself, work relationships are still relationships and the balance between we and me is so important.
The Myth of the Always-On Team
There is an unspoken assumption baked into how most teams run. We believe more connection is always better. More meetings, more check-ins, more threads, more visibility. If a little collaboration is good, then constant collaboration must be great.
Human attention does not actually work that way. Every ping, every quick sync, every jump from one task to another carries a hidden cost. You never see it on a dashboard. You see it everywhere in the quality of the work. It is impossible to go deep. Personally, when I "go dark," something good always comes from it.
What Solitude Actually Does
Organizational psychologist Sophie Leroy studied what happens when people switch between tasks, especially when they are pulled away from something before it is finished. She named the effect attention residue. Part of your attention stays stuck on the first task even after you think you have moved on, and in her experiments that leftover residue measurably hurt performance on what came next (Leroy, 2009). Her research names something every leader has felt.
So the quick interruption is rarely as quick as it looks. A brief interruption can cost more than the minute it takes, because the person has to redirect their attention and then reconstruct where they left off, and that quiet reconstruction is where the real time goes. Multiply it across a whole team, and a group that protects no one's focus pays a tax all day long.
Solitude is what makes the time together worth something. People who have had room to think bring finished thoughts to the table instead of half-formed reactions.
The Hidden Tax of Togetherness
This cost is bigger than lost focus, and it falls unevenly. In their landmark study of collaborative work, Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant found that the time managers and employees spend on collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more over the past two decades. At many companies, people now spend roughly 80% of their time in meetings, on calls, and in their inbox, which leaves precious little for the focused work only they can do (Cross, Rebele, & Grant, 2016). I imagine the mass move to remote work made this even worse, as we all seem to want to prove to each other that we are working and not just at the beach.
The load also lands on the same few shoulders. The research found that 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from just 3% to 5% of employees. Over time, collaborative overload can turn your most capable people into bottlenecks and raise their risk of burnout and departure. Everyone seeks them out, few people think to protect them, and the cohesion you are proud of ends up financed by your best people's depleted reserves.
"There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas." — Susan Cain, Quiet
Why This Matters Now
None of this means we should all work in isolation. It means we should design the rhythm on purpose. A recent Harvard Business Review essay by Gretchen Gavett makes a similar argument, that quiet, uninterrupted time can be just as important to good collaboration as the time a team spends together (Gavett, 2026). The implication is that effective teams need to move deliberately between focused individual work and meaningful collaboration.
Knowing the difference is a leadership skill, and it is in short supply right now. Gallup's 2026 data shows that manager engagement fell from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, and that decline accounted for most of the recent drop in overall engagement (Gallup, 2026). Here is my own read on what tends to happen next. When managers are stretched and depleted, the instinct is to add more touchpoints rather than fewer (especially in remote environments), when the more useful move is often to protect the team's attention. That protection is one of the highest-leverage things a leader can do, mostly because almost no one else will do it for them.
The Groops Take
Cohesion is not measured by constant communication. We watch teams confuse the two all the time. They read someone's responsiveness as loyalty and their presence in every thread as commitment to the group. But a strong team stays connected, coordinated, and reliable even when people are not in constant contact. A team that cannot sit with a few hours of quiet from a teammate is running on anxiety, not trust.
Real cohesion is the trust that someone can go heads-down, be unreachable for an afternoon, and come back with something better than they could have made in the group. The strongest teams guard each other's focus the way they guard each other's time off, as a shared value everyone honors. Solitude, done well, is one of the deepest forms of trust a team can show.
Something to Try This Week
If your team runs on constant contact, you will not fix it with a memo about being more focused. You have to make the space real, and you have to make it shared. I do this personally but teams benefit when done together. Try this for the next two weeks.
1) Name the block. Pick one recurring window each week, say Wednesday mornings, and declare it a team-wide no-meeting, no-ping zone, and be explicit about why. Put it on the shared calendar so it is real and visible to everyone.
2) Protect it out loud. As the leader, go first. Decline the meeting that lands in that window, and say why. People take their cues from what you actually protect, not from what you announce.
3) Agree on what counts as urgent. Decide together what is worth breaking the block for. A live customer issue counts. A "when you get a sec" does not. Everything else waits, and people learn quickly that it can.
4) Debrief after two weeks. Ask the team one simple question. Did the quality of your thinking change? Let their answer, more than any policy, decide whether it stays.
None of this is about caring less about each other. It is the opposite. You are showing your team that focus is a gift they give one another, and that connection means more when people choose it than when it simply never stops.
Want to Build This Skill Set?
Knowing when to bring your team together and when to protect their quiet is one of the least-taught skills in leadership. It means reading the rhythm your team actually needs instead of defaulting to more contact. The leaders who get this right build teams that do their sharpest work and want to stay.
The Advanced track of the Applied Leadership Groop is built for exactly this: leading at scale, building your leadership legacy, and shaping the leadership brand you're known for. Applied to what you're navigating right now, not theory.
The next cohort starts July 29. If you're an experienced leader ready to lead with more clarity and intention, this is where that work happens.
References
Cross, R., Rebele, R., & Grant, A. (2016). Collaborative overload. Harvard Business Review, 94(1), 74–79. https://hbr.org/2016/01/collaborative-overload
Gallup. (2026). State of the global workplace 2026. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx
Gavett, G. (2026, July 14). The best teams know when to work alone. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2026/07/the-best-teams-know-when-to-work-alone
Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168–181. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.04.002