Leading when your team is grieving

I am writing about work right after redundancies – but applied to every leader who needs to lead after change, sadness, reorgs, or loss.

Last week was hard, and now there’s a kind of silence that settles after a round of redundancies It’s not just the absence of colleagues and friends — it’s the emotional fog that follows.

People are sad and angry and tired. Some feel guilt for still being employed.

And the instinct, especially in big organisations, is often to move on quickly. Look past the pain or the emotions. Focus on what's next. Keep up momentum.

We start reframing the losses in business language — so we can all feel better. So we can feel detached.

But that misses a key challenge. One that emotionally intelligent leaders understand:

People aren’t machines. You can’t optimise your way through grief.

This is a time to acknowledge the sadness — not avoid it. We say that it hurts and that the people we worked with matter. Feeling loss isn’t just okay — it’s expected.

Because pretending it’s not hard — or wrapping it in polished language — doesn’t create resilience. It creates distrust. It’s where psychological safety erodes, and toxic behaviours creep in.

That said, we also can’t stay stuck in the pain. We can’t lead by sitting in the dark with no plan to stand up again. We always get back up — that’s resilience.

So we name it. We hold space for it. And then — when people are ready — we invite them to rise.

Resilience isn’t pretending things are fine. I always tell people: feel the feels — all the feels — then let go.

It’s feeling what’s real and still choosing to show up the next day.

This isn’t just hard on our teams. It’s hard on us as leaders too.

But we show back up. We model the emotion and the resilience.

And yes — your team may already feel like they’ve been resilient for too long. That’s probably real too. But it isn’t changing.

So maybe today isn’t about a rally cry. Maybe it’s just about being the steady hand on the wheel

If you’re leading a team right now — especially one that's smaller than it was last week — this post is for you.

They don’t need perfect answers. They just need to know you see what they’re carrying.

#HumanLeadership #Resilience #RewritingLeadershipNorms