A SERIES OF GIFTS — No. 09: GOOD GRIEF
Posted on February 10, 2023 by Blake Leath
Organizational life (like life itself) isn't always a bed of roses.
Loss is part of it, and loss can be downright grievous.
One silver lining post-pandemic is that discussing mental health is less taboo. That's progress in my book because withdrawing, isolating, and feeling all alone only serve to deepen one's depressive state and delay recovery.
The same is true in organizations.
No organization succeeds all the time, but too few feel comfortable or equipped to process setbacks, losses, or outright failures COLLECTIVELY, the result often being silence or whisper campaigns in which employees are left to make sense of disasters on their own (and it's not unusual at all for those who take longer to 'process' Corporate loss to feel somewhat gaslit by leaders who pretend nothing happened in the first place).
GIFT #9 in our SERIES OF GIFTS introduces a framework and vocabulary for processing loss at scale (as individuals working together within an enterprise).
Grieving is, after all, natural, but so is feeling "stuck" in the crevasse between What Was and What Could Be.
Not everyone grieves the same things or the same way or at the same pace, making it all the more important to learn how to grieve better together.