What you need to know:
As a leader you may worry about saying the wrong thing or not doing enough, but this is your reminder that leadership is not about perfect words or quick fixes, but about presence. What an employee needs most is humane leadership that does not punish them for being human or measure their worth by the speed of their recovery.
Last week I wrote about coping with grief in the workplace, and this week I have come up with some insights on how managers and teams can support a grieving employee.
Grief changes people and behind every grieving employee is a person relearning how to think, focus, and care in a changed world. For managers, this can feel unsettling. As a leader you may worry about saying the wrong thing or not doing enough, but this is your reminder that leadership is not about perfect words or quick fixes, but about presence. What an employee needs most is humane leadership that does not punish them for being human or measure their worth by the speed of their recovery.
Most managers are trained to manage performance, allocate resources, and solve problems with clear inputs and measurable outputs. Grief resists all three, it does not follow timelines, respond predictably to intervention, or resolve within policy-defined windows.
