I have led three businesses that started small, grew over time, and sold them to a publicly traded company. I’ve started two others that didn’t make it. I’ve been a COO, CEO, and CBO, among other leadership roles.

And I’ve been lonely doing it. But I discovered that it didn’t have to be that way. I changed how I showed up in my relationships with my team and made the same adjustments in how I showed up with key partners. It was a lot easier than I thought. Afterward, life was even better than I’d imagined.

I’m not alone, unique, or special in my experience of feeling lonely as a leader. I wish I were, but unfortunately, it is an all-too-common phenomenon. Leaders tend to be lonely people.

Among other studies quantifying what we all qualitatively know to be true, Harvard Business Review found that over half of CEOs feel lonely in their role. Of those executives, 61% indicated that their loneliness hinders their performance. When you are a business leader, you are constantly corresponding with people. Answering e-mails, taking calls, returning team messages, following up via text, busily interacting all day, but still feeling isolated — alone in the proverbial crowded room.

How is it possible for us to be so busy, interacting with so many people, yet feeling so alone?

We have filled our lives with transactional, not transformative, interactions.

In our hustle to advance the interests of our enterprise and accomplish our organizational goals, we allow ourselves to lose connection with people. Some of us are so enveloped by conquest and all of the transactional interactions that we lose touch with what it looks like to have a connection at all. It happened to me. It happens to others.

In his book, From Strength to Strength, Arthur Brooks perfectly articulates how we lose sight of our need for connection amidst the grind. Brooks is taking his son fishing for a Christmas present. During the trip, he has a call come in that he has to take and describes the event as follows:

“I have to take this,” I told Carlos and sat in the car talking to the other man. The first five minutes were small talk about his family and mine, even though we weren’t personally close. Then we got down to business. After I hung up, Carlos asked who that was. “A friend,” I answered. Which was technically true — we liked each other well enough and were on a first-name basis. Carlos looked at me with the look he always gives me when he thinks I am full of it.

“A real friend, or a deal friend?” he asked.

Deal friends are not just a phenomenon reserved for customers or industry partners. They exist within your organization, your peers, and your teams. Our paradigm of leadership has somehow evolved to a place where we feel as though we must bury our humanity to be effective. As though our leadership effectiveness would unravel the moment our teams, customers, and partners saw us clearly enough to see our flaws.

Our paradigm is wrong.

Our conception of leadership as being assigned to perfect people needs to be corrected. We all know there is no such thing as a perfect person, so there can be no perfect leaders. But we cling to the delusion that we must bury ourselves behind a façade of perfection. Leaders are important. They make the difference in organizational success or failure. Leadership isolation and the perfection fallacy hurt people, obstruct the pursuit of our goals, and damage organizational performance.

So what are we to do about it?

If you are a leader, connect authentically with your people

Being close to people doesn’t mean having a one-on-one with them covering their performance. Or their goals. You won’t find connection getting together to review the organization’s progress toward the quarter’s objectives. You will find connection by discussing the things you are afraid to talk about. The things you try to bury when you go to work, but they crawl out of your subconscious to constantly distract you. Like a toddler marching about your brain banging a set of cymbals, defiantly asserting himself, the challenges of your life and work that are difficult to talk about but mentally refuse to be silenced.

Mental challenges like navigating your relationship with your teenage child and how that is weighing on you. The feeling of unease about a partner you’ve worked with in business for a long time, but suddenly something feels different in a distant, concerning way you don’t understand. The tension you feel between shining up the business performance projections for the team and the board and the team’s need to see the difficult terrain everyone must navigate in pursuit of the strategy.

Talk about the meta-problem if you can’t bring yourself to do that. In other words, talk about the very fabric of this article — the difficulty you are having in navigating work relationships that need to be closer than transactional. Explore how your team member sees that challenge from their perspective. How that person feels the rest of the organization might see the challenge. Their opinion about what the organization generally desires from relationships with leaders and what good interpersonal relationships look like.

Ask your team members questions about what is going on in their lives. The challenges they have outside of work. What they have going on in their relationships. How they want to develop, learn, and grow as people, not just professionals. Their struggles in parenting. The joys they find in their hobbies. Not the surface-level chit-chat but the underlying feelings and motivations connected to parts of their lives outside of work. Be curious. Really curious. About more than their work experience. Who they are in a sense that is much broader than team members.

When your team member shares something important, listen actively. Tell them what you have heard them share, that you see their experience, and that you understand their feelings. Remember that we don’t connect with people when we understand; we connect with people when they understand that we understand.

Organizations always undergo difficulty. Teams that achieve extraordinary results do so because they have extraordinary relationships with their leaders and with each other. We go much farther and endure much more difficulty for people we care about personally than those we do not. We do more for people and because of people than we do for organizations. Yet, as leaders, we can lose sight of the truth that remarkable things happen because of remarkable relationships — because people are close to one another, not in spite of their personal connections.

If you are a team member, share

Your leader expects you to be flawed. They expect you to be hardworking. Dedicated. Intelligent. Motivated. Committed to achieving a beneficial outcome. Not flawless. You will always go further professionally with genuine, deep relationships. People who care about you and want you to be successful. Within the organization, and later when you find yourself in another organization. The relationships you build in this way will serve you both within your career and beyond it.

For a long time, I had no real friends at work. My life changed for the better when I became more concerned with the quality of my relationships than with my perception of my image. Yours will, too. Not only did my life get better, but the organization got better, and our results got better. Everything is better when you are truly close to people.

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This article was originally published on Medium in the publication Career Paths.