How to Hold Grief At Work When It Happens (because it will)

As an executive coach, I’ve spent nearly 20 years working with highly successful leaders who’ve hit a bump in the road. I help these leaders get over that bump by clarifying their goals and making a plan to reach them. I work with my clients through my firm Paravis Partners and, with some of them, on my Harvard Business Review Presents Coaching Real Leaders podcast, where I take you behind the closed doors of real coaching sessions. I also host the Coaching Real Leaders Community, where an amazing group of leaders and coaches come together to take a deeper dive into the challenges of leadership. In this newsletter, I share takeaways from my many years of coaching conversations. My hope is that my efforts will help you lead (or coach) with more ease.

Grieving is hard, but it can be made more challenging when grief and work intersect.

Take losing a job: that’s a real fear for many people (especially these days) and grief can strike when it happens. But even when you survive a mass layoff, you’re left to face the fallout: the pain of your co-workers (past and present), and the persistent feeling that no one is safe.

Layoffs or other organizational changes can trigger the sense that our expectations of the organization have not been met. We believed we knew how our company leadership would take care of employees, but now we’ve been disappointed — and that hurts. So how do we deal with the enormity of it all?

Frame Your Inquiry for Appreciation

I got a lot from Deborah Riegel ’s article on Appreciative Inquiry about how to move forward from grief as a team. The approach harnesses your organization’s strengths by acknowledging people’s feelings. You can get curious while reframing questions into supportive language – e.g. asking “how can we make ourselves, as a team, feel safe and supported during this time?” while also processing “how do we deal with our disappointment?” This leads to a shared sense of agency while acknowledging the present reality of the situation.

But even with an attitude of appreciation, change and loss, and the grief that comes with them, can still be challenging.

Grief Lessons Learned

What also makes grief so hard is the notion that you have to “get through it,” and that there is a “right” way to do so. Both set expectations that can feel unattainable and pile on to the heaviness you may already be feeling. I personally can relate. When my mom passed away a few years ago, feeling the pressure to “keep it moving” for my clients and my firm was difficult.

What has helped me, and many of my coaching clients as they deal with their own professional or personal grief, is learning to gently reframe what grief even means – and how to hold it at work and beyond:

• Grief is a transition. Name that something has changed rather than acting like it hasn’t. Get ready to be patient with grief, as you and it move at its own pace. Grief is not something to “get through” – it’s something we live and change with.
• Grief is a period of learning. In my case, grief has been a period of learning how to move through the world without the physical presence of the one person who I knew for certain always cared for me and always had my back (even though she complained about me a lot!). The level of learning about myself, and subsequent growth as a coach, leader, and person, has been palpable. 

• Grief doesn’t get smaller or “go away.” It has weight, but we can carry it as we grow our capacity to hold it. This is not unlike learning to hold more complexity as a leader – the challenges don’t go away but our capacity to deal with them grows. I love this image inspired by Dr. Lois Tonkin’s model of grief which aptly visualizes this concept:

In the workplace or elsewhere, we can “grow around grief” by acknowledging it and reframing our relationship to it. At the same time, we can get curious about how to make room for what we learn about ourselves as leaders, about each other and about our teams through this growth.

In my next newsletter, I’ll talk more about how to have self-compassion, how to use it whether you are grieving or simply feeling like things are out of your control, and how to apply this to your leadership role. 

Meanwhile, you can listen to this episode of my Coaching Real Leaders podcast as I coach Melissa, a team leader, as she deals with her own grief while trying to stay motivated after surviving a mass layoff at her company. 

And if you’re comfortable sharing, let us know about a time when grief and work intersected for you or your team – and how you approached  it – in the comments.

PS If you’ve already listened to Melissa’s coaching session with me, you can check out  my latest episode of Coaching Real Leaders. I coach Jules, a leader who has the opportunity to design her next leadership position. But she’s not sure what she needs to ask for in order to be successful. I coach her through reframing what may be holding her back, and identifying the priorities she wants to focus on going forward. Listen here 🎧.

Thank you for reading my LinkedIn newsletter! Don’t forget to subscribe to Coaching Real Leaders on Harvard Business Review, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. And please join me in my Coaching Real Leaders Community, where I host members-only live Q&As, CRL episode debriefs, and more. You can also learn more about the coaching work I and my fantastic team do by checking us out at Paravis Partners.