Leading Your Team Through Loss
Over the years I have worked with leaders who have experienced significant losses at work: losses of their staff due to budget cuts, loss of identity as their company was merged with another entity, loss of staff due to fatal accidents, loss of their building or forest due to fires, and loss of a beloved colleague due to death.
While loss is always difficult for us as humans to deal with, leading through loss is particularly challenging because you are charged suddenly with two crucial (and somewhat competing) tasks: supporting yourself and your team through grief and getting the work of your business done. Regardless of the grief that you and your team are experiencing, you still have fires to fight, or patients to see, or bridges to build. As a leader you must be able to hold both tracks of work in your mind, and be able to help your people do this as well.
Here are four areas of focus to support you as you lead your team through loss:
1. Attend to yourself as a leader
If you are leading through loss or grief, the first thing you need to do is attend to yourself. What do you need to feel as solid as you can while you support others? Your ability to be aware of your emotions, the impact of the loss, and what you need for support will directly affect how others feel in your presence as you manage the loss in the system. This may mean finding someone you can talk to (a coach, therapist, or friend outside the system), and making time to reflect and digest some of the impact of the loss for yourself.
This task of grounding yourself and getting what you need may feel selfish or impossible, but it is so important. You may be a new leader to the organization and feel lost or overwhelmed at helping people you don’t know well — grounding yourself in that truth and being able to own it and express it is what will make you trustworthy. You may be a person who doesn’t wear their emotions on the outside and grieves quietly or much later. Self-awareness empowers you to be authentic and allows your people to experience your words and behaviors as congruent, while understanding that your coping style isn’t an expectation of their behavior. This provides safety and stability through the process.
2. Attend to your leadership team
Supporting an organization through loss is a team sport. Encourage each of the members of your leadership team (or most senior staff) to do what you did: get the support they need to be as solid as possible, and to reflect on the loss so they have some understanding of the impact on themselves.
Embrace the diversity of coping in your team. You and the members of your team will have different coping styles for grief and loss. Some people may be fully in their emotions — feeling them, expressing them, openly crying. And some people may be reserved, emotionally numb or shut down, and everything in between. Allowing your team to be authentically themselves, while appreciating a diversity of coping styles, allows people in your organization to see themselves in their leaders.
No one heals alone. Remind your team to lean on each other and know that they will need breaks or time-outs. Normalize that they will trade moments of holding it together and “losing it.” Grieving is intermittent and inconsistent. People can feel fine and then get hit with a tidal wave of emotion. This is normal and should be expected.
3. Identify structures and supports
Identify the structures or meetings that will support the grieving process for your team and organization given the nature of the loss. This might be a town hall for an organization that has endured significant layoffs, or a community meeting for a first-responder organization holding the loss of a community member, or a memorial service for the death of a colleague. Don’t confuse the event with the process of grieving. Understand that the event allows people to connect as a larger whole around the loss and creates time for reflection and understanding, but it is not the end of grieving, but instead, often, the start.
4. Attend to stabilization
Significant loss is experienced physiologically and psychologically as a crisis. And as such, the initial goal of leadership needs to be stabilization:
Are people safe?
Are they informed?
Do they have the resources they need?
Are the priorities clear?
Have we cleared away unnecessary work and demands so the crucial work can continue while we adjust to the loss?
Identify the support systems inside and outside the organization that can help you and your people. Make sure you or a trusted teammate have spoken to these supports (EAP, counselors, etc.) so they understand the context and the needs of your people. This allows your people to get the help they need without first having to educate the helpers, wherever possible. Make sure that the support resources exist in an easy-to-find and easy-to-use format. And make clear by what you say and do that using supports is not a sign or weakness, nor is it mandatory. The goal is for people to get what they need to heal and grow through the grief so they regain their footing and stay connected to themselves and their relationships.
5. Connect healing and meaning
Perhaps one of the greatest gifts of loss and grief is that it reminds us to pay attention to what is important. It reminds us that we are humans connecting to other humans, doing the best we can at any given time. Grieving and healing takes the time it takes and will be different for everyone. Don’t imagine there is a timeline. Allow people to work through it as they are able. But one thing you can do as a leader is to help people take their experience of loss and connect to empathy or compassion for the people they serve or the people they love. Can the loss help them understand the losses of their patients or clients or community members better? Can the loss help them understand how important their purpose or mission or values in their work is? Your leadership through this process can allow your team and your organization to be stronger and more connected as a result of the crisis.
© 2024 Gretchen Schmelzer, PhD