How All Grieving Employees Should Be Led – Part 1

Over the past four years, a  leader has been faced with the following scenario.

The wife of a high performing, high potential employee is diagnosed with stage four cancer.  The news is devasting to the employee and his family of four.  The employee, who is considered to be someone who could run a business unit at some point, is thrown into a state of significant and prolonged grief.  His performance and his potential are both dramatically impacted.

Helping support the employee’s performance.  The employee’s leader is genuinely focused on their people.  The leader immediately engaged the employee in discussions about the situation.  Creating a safe, even comforting environment for the employee to discuss what he is experiencing and feeling openly.  The discussions also explore how to balance the employee’s needs with the needs of the business and adaptations to work hours, working from home, assignments, and workloads are made.  In terms of Adaptive Leadership, the leader has recognized that the employee, who is very high on the Stewardship, Trust, and Empowerment scales, will need more support, collaboration, and communication then they did previously.  In short, the leader has adapted their leadership style to meet the needs of the emotionally traumatized employee.  The leader has also enlisted the rest of the team to help provide support—something all the team members wanted to do but didn’t know-how.  All of these actions helped the grieving employee excel at work from a performance standpoint while being able to be present for his wife and children.   Keep in mind these discussions and adjustments have continued regularly for the past four years.

Helping support the employee’s potential.  The fact that the leader took the steps discussed above to ensure the emotionally traumatized employee could continue to excel at work puts them in a very small group.  What places this leader in an elite group is that they also helped support the grieving employee’s status as a high potential.  The leader recognized that while, in the short-term, this employee could not handle extensive travel or any job assignment that would require relocation, these were only two elements that would impact his future potential with the organization.  Working with the employee, the leader got creative and began to develop ways to bring the required experiences to the employee.  To this day, the leader and the employee continue to shape his role based on the experiences and skills the employee will need to develop to remain a high potential in the organization.  The leader is demonstrating true “People First… Mission Always” leadership.  Together, they have been able to balance the current needs of the employee with the current needs of the business.  Additionally, they have also been able to help the employee continue to develop his skills to ensure he will be able to meet the future needs of the business and remain a high potential.

Coming next week: What the company did well and how they can improve.

Author: Anthony Casablanca

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Anthony Casablanca

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