Why Grief at Work is Everyone's Business
The Business and Human Cost of Avoiding Grief and the Case for Leading Through It
Table of Contents
Grief isn’t a disruption to your business. It’s not an interruption to productivity or a temporary emotional detour. It’s a deeply human experience that is already present, whether it’s spoken or not.
Every workplace carries invisible losses: the teammate grieving a loved one, the parent navigating a child’s diagnosis, the employee mourning a version of life that’s suddenly out of reach.
You don’t get to decide if grief is in the room. You only get to decide whether you lead in a way that sees it—or silences it.
What Is Grief, Really?
Grief is more than sadness. It’s the internal upheaval that follows a significant loss—emotional, physical, cognitive, even spiritual. While most people associate grief with death, it can also follow a divorce, a diagnosis, an estrangement, a job loss, or the quiet disappearance of a future you thought you’d have. It’s the disorientation of losing something foundational and trying to make sense of a reality that you didn’t want or expect.
And no two people grieve the same way. Grief is deeply personal. What helps one person may harm another. What looks like strength in one person may be shutdown in someone else. There’s no map, no neat timeline, no single right way to move through it.
It doesn’t follow a clean timeline. It shows up as:
Exhaustion and brain fog
Irritability, anxiety, or numbness
Difficulty concentrating
Guilt or anger at unexpected things
Waves of emotion that come without warning
Grief isn’t something you get over. It’s something you learn to carry. And whether you see it or not, people on your team are carrying it right now.
The Cost of Silence
When leaders avoid grief, the message people receive is: “You’re not safe to be fully human here.” Most leaders don’t mean to send that message, but your silence is heard, loud and clear.
And it costs you more than you think:
People disengage or emotionally check out
Sick days, short and long-term disability increase.
Errors and quality issues increase
Trust quietly erodes across the team
Turnover rises, and often months later, when you’ve forgotten what triggered it
People don’t always quit during grief. They are already bearing as much change as they are capable of handling. But they remember how you showed up. And those memories of the past drive decisions about their future.
Grief is already shaping your culture. Whether you choose to engage with it or not, it’s leaving an imprint—on trust, on connection, on how safe it feels to be human at work. The only question is whether that impact is happening with your leadership—or in the absence of it.
The Business Case for Compassion
Let’s be blunt: avoiding grief isn’t neutral. It’s expensive.
The Grief Recovery Institute estimates unaddressed grief costs U.S. businesses over $75 billion annually in lost productivity, mistakes, absenteeism, and turnover.
A 2023 study by the Workplace Resilience Research Institute found that 58% of grieving employees reported significantly reduced productivity for at least three months, and nearly 30% considered quitting.
Only 7% of companies train their managers on how to support grieving team members.
Here’s what happens when you
Trust skyrockets. People remember who stood by them, and others.
Loyalty is radically strengthened. Employees supported through grief are 2–3x more likely to stay long-term.
Psychological safety grows. One act of care toward one employee sends a signal to the whole team: This is a place where you can be human.
Performance rebounds faster. Perceived support from your boss is one of the strongest predictors of how quickly grieving employees re-engage.
And it goes even further.
You’re In the Relationship Business
Whether you like it or not, you’re in the relationship business. You might be a brilliant operator, a sharp strategist, a results machine. At the end of the day, your effectiveness as a leader is determined by quality of relationships you’re able to create, maintain and grow.
And Here's the Bonus: These Are Life Skills
The skills you’ll learn in this guide aren’t just for work. They’ll help you show up better in every relationship you care about:
Your partner.
Your kids.
Your friends.
Yourself.
You’ll learn how to:
Stay steady in someone else’s pain
Listen without fixing
Validate without minimizing
Show up with presence, even when you feel unsure how to help
These are leadership skills. These are relationship skills. These are life skills. And how you use them will define what kind of leader, and human being, you become.
Great piece, Jason! We need to talk more about our emotional lives and stop pretending the only thing on our minds when we arrive in the office are our quarterly goals.