Work Grief

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A couple of months ago I was on CJ Gustafson’s podcast "Run the Numbers" and he asked such an interesting question (well, many, but this post is about one). We were talking about his experience with "giving away his legos" throughout his career, and he asked, “Is it normal to go through the stages of grief when you have to give up something your identity is tied to?”

Earlier that morning, I’d been sitting in a circle with some members of the Glue Club and someone had talked about the fact that their CEO didn’t want to make any space for people who felt grief after a re-org. He just wanted people to be excited about the future.

And the day before another member of Glue Club had mentioned that they had layered some people inside their organization — meaning they hired someone to be the boss of some people on the team — and that the folks who had been layered were struggling with the change. The manager was trying to figure out how to help them. 

Work Grief is something we don’t talk about enough. And it is everywhere. All of these situations above were essentially people talking about the process of grieving change at work — whether good change or bad — but that’s not something we tend to talk about much in a work context.

Grief itself is something that has been written about over and over again. It has been studied, examined, and broken apart. If you’ve experienced a death or something similar or if you’ve just read about it, you will be familiar with the stages of grief. People say there are 5 or 6, but they go something like this: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Grief has been written about as a personal experience, but I haven’t seen anyone write about Work Grief except in the case of losing your job. 

The truth is that Work Grief is an incredibly common experience and something we need to make more space for. A major change happens — good, bad, ugly — and you need a minute to process the new reality, mourn what is in the past, and get ready to move forward. 

I’ll give you a few examples of times when it is extremely normal to experience grief at work: 

• Layoffs (managing them, being someone who remains, being someone who is laid off)

• Getting layered

• Re-orgs

• Giving up part of your job

• Moving into a new role in the same company

• When you get promoted above your peers

• Acquisitions

• Leaving a company

It’s important to note that not all of these are negative examples. Work Grief can show up as a part of many different kinds of change: you are grieving what was. What is common among all these examples is experiencing enormous change and needing a moment to process it.

Sometimes, as managers, we want to push people to be in the acceptance phase as quickly as possible. In moments like layoffs, re-orgs, etc., it is tempting to push hard to move forward into the future, not dwell on the past. But as with a lot of forms of grief, it’s valuable and important to let people have time to process — to have time to grieve. And, as with other kinds of mourning, there is often not a lot we can do to solve the grief other than give people space and time. With time, people move through the stages or work grief and are ready to move forward.

So, to CJ’s question at the beginning: "Giving up your legos" is an important skill and muscle to develop in order to thrive inside startups — you need to be able to grow and change as fast as your company is growing. But that doesn't mean it's easy. Giving things up comes with an emotional rollercoaster. Part of the skill of getting good at scaling is learning to experience those emotions but not let them derail you. 

Work Grief is a normal part of working inside a growing and changing company. It is something we all need to get better at acknowledging and giving ourselves the time to feel before we push forward into the next phase.