Work Grief
👋Hi! I'm Molly. This is where I share the lessons I’ve learned from building fast-moving, messy, ambitious companies. For more from me, you can also find me on the WorkLife Podcast, on LinkedIn, and in Glue Club, a community for leaders who care about building great companies.
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.
