Early in my career, there were two versions of me at work.
There was work Kristine, who ran the meetings, hit the numbers, and kept everything crisp. And there was the other one, the person who loved to sing, went to more Dave Matthews shows than I’ll admit in print, and was raised by a single mom who is still my best friend. That second person never came to the office. I left her in the parking lot every morning and picked her back up on the way out.
I thought that was professionalism. Everything was about the work. Get in, get to business, get results. I didn’t ask people about their lives, and I didn’t offer much about mine. If a conversation drifted to the weekend or the family or anything that wasn’t the task in front of us, I steered it back. I genuinely believed that was the disciplined, respectful way to lead.
What I couldn’t see was the cost. Keeping the personal out of everything makes work purely transactional. People bring you a request, you hand back a deliverable, and that is the entire relationship. It stays that way until someone decides to change it. My colleagues knew my work. They didn’t know me, because I never once let them, and I didn’t know them either.
That changed at a leadership retreat. The facilitator asked each of us to share something personal, and I sat there learning things about people I’d worked beside for years. A hardship someone had carried quietly. What actually drove another person. Over and over I thought, oh, that makes sense. I could suddenly see how much of the way each of them showed up at work traced straight back to who they were at home, the things I’d never bothered to ask about.
Then something happened I didn’t expect. A colleague who was not my biggest fan came up to me afterward. Something I had shared, a real thing about my own life, had landed with him. He said so. And from that day our working relationship was different. Warmer, more honest, easier. Nothing about our jobs had changed. What changed was that we finally knew each other as people.
I left that retreat seeing the job differently. You cannot get the best out of people you don’t actually know. So much of how any of us makes decisions at work, what we push for, what we protect, what we’re afraid of, is driven by who we are outside of it. If you only ever meet the work version of someone, you’re leading half a person and guessing at the rest.
There was a harder thing to admit, too. I had been asking my teams to trust me, to bring their real thinking into the room, while I gave them almost nothing of who I was. You can’t expect people to go first when you never have.
So I stopped leading with only the work. I started sharing pieces of myself, not a diary, just enough for people to understand what I cared about and why. I asked about their lives and actually listened. The wall came down faster than I’d have believed. People trusted me sooner. They brought me the real problems instead of the sanded-down ones. And they let me see who they actually were, because I had finally done the same.
Here is what I wish I’d known back then. People connect to the human being, not the output. They can respect your work from a distance, but they follow the person, the values, the story of how you got here. Keeping all of that in the parking lot doesn’t make you more professional. It just keeps everyone at arm’s length and leaves you leading people you never really met.
Let them meet you. All of you, the one who runs the meeting and the one who knows every word to every Dave Matthews song. You never know which part of you is the reason someone finally lets you in.