Grief...At A Distance
On remote teams, hold space for sadness.
I published my How to connect in remote teams article one month ago. But this article is about something ten times more important. It’s not about celebrating and having good times with your fellow remote workers. It is about the opposite. Of all of the 12 months of the year to pick from to really dwell on this topic, October is it; no better month than the one directly preceding Dia del Muertos or All Saints Day. We’re decorating with black cats, skeletons, and coffins. This is the month to acknowledge death as part of the circle of life. Depending on your spiritual beliefs, death and loss are absolutely necessary in our understanding of life. This article is for remote managers and it is about the importance of holding space for grief.
When I used to train new mid-level managers, one of the very first to-do list items I would give them would be: “Go to the store and buy a box of sympathy cards. You will need those far more than you ever imagined.” Why is that so important? Because death, loss, and grief are a part of life and most of our culture pushes against acknowledging it. As the manager, you will now know more of your team’s heartaches, some of which will be shared, but most will be private. I sent out five sympathy cards for every one that my remote team might know about. Because it was private that someone’s cat died just before a research conference. It was private that someone’s grandfather passed away and their grandfather raised them. It was private. It was quiet. It wasn’t spoken of. And it happens fast. And it happens often.
OK Heather, you say, isn’t there a 3 day bereavement leave allowance at your workplace? Just grant that as the manager and move on. That’s your managerial responsibility and it ends there.
No. First, despite those immediately two preceding paragraphs, I’m not necessarily talking all about death grief. I’m talking about loss grief. Loss. The grief we feel as professors when we lose a student to academic failure. That’s a biggie and inside this long article, I’ll spend the most time on that topic. Also the grief we feel when the next wave of change knocks us back a few steps in our careers. The grief when the paycheck isn’t enough to cover your life problems. The grief when you pet has died and your home office is so silent, you can’t stand it. The grief of a cancer diagnosis. The grief when a national election didn’t go your way. And I’m now talking more about empathy than sympathy.
As a remote manager, I want you to leave space in your team meetings for sadness. Think of it like a chair left open, on purpose. Leave space for sadness. It’s important.
How did I learn this? We have to go back to 2012.
The university I worked for decided to change the name of my department from Liberal Arts to General Education. There were a few old school professor types that grumbled. I was a new manager and I didn’t understand why. It’s just a name change. One of the more experienced managers coached me through the emotionalism of what was happening. She guided, “It’s only proper to say a few words for the dearly departed.” What? Who died? As I listened to the concerns of faculty though, I began to understand that they felt that were letting go of the western (Greek) heritage of espousing inquiry and going for a name that felt more base. Regardless of whether I agreed, I felt empathy. The managers made space in team meetings for discussion. It was what we needed. It was not on any university agenda. I realized that it was important to acknowledge that bad things, or more commonly in the work sense, undesired-for-things, happen and we become sad. It is important to hold space.
Let those who are grieving, grieve.
And it's not always private.
Longer term, I learned that this space holding was important for my team in 2 work areas and 1 non-work area. Those short stories follow:
Most common: a faculty member loses a student.
I don’t mean loses a student to death-- although I have been one of those faculty members myself. I mean that we lose a student due to academic failure. I doubt students know that faculty take this very much to heart. The student is likely to become a university drop, which due to the online nature of the institution (read: convenient), often means that no hope is left. The student has left higher education permanently. I used to monitor how many fails like this we had ongoing around my team and when 2-3 of a team of 12 faculty experience this, I knew it was time to talk about grief and loss and normalize it in a team meeting. The faculty members were feeling like failures themselves. They felt that they'd lost their touch in helping students. Why go on if I don't have what it takes?
What I used was a combination of borrowed experts and plants. I had an advantage in that I had access to faculty members trained in basic grief counseling. You can find these in nursing, teaching, and public health fields. They can come and do a presentation on the stages of grief. If they are a good educator, they will mention that people move back and forth in stages, occupying more than one stage at one time, etc. Grief is not a linear path. However, all you really need to do is open the door on a discussion of what it feels like to lose a student. Next, I used a plant. (Plant definition = someone already vetted on a topic and is poised to share information during a meeting.) I would find a faculty member that perhaps weathered a student loss six months prior and ask them privately in advance if either: a) would they be the first to volunteer to talk about what happened or b) could I tell their story and keep their identity hidden? Once a person started to share that yes, it was sad to lose a student, the other faculty would recognize the grief feeling and start sharing helpful words centering on the theme of we are humans. Feelings that include the sad ones are normal. I was lucky to have 50% biologists with me, so a little ‘circle of life’ talk reminds us all that good and bad times come and go and that it is natural. And the end, we look within ourselves to see that we maintain our own standards. Did we help as much as we could? Yes? Then we did our best.
Policy changes
Like the name change from Liberal Arts to General Education, faculty do grieve policy, functional, and departmental changes. At times like that, I knew that the best thing to do was to metaphorically sit with my team, throw ashes on my head, and say ‘woe are we’ and let us stew in all the sad, bad-but-will-never-come-to-pass thoughts we were having. It’s only right and valid to let those feelings happen. Again, bottling that up or papering it over wasn’t going to help. Leaving a gap in the information wasn’t going to help either. I would share all I could about the bigger picture. I knew my team well enough to know that after ten minutes of woe, someone was going to say something like “Well, I can think of one bright spot to this...” and we would recover, one small step at a time. Then, after the public meeting, I’d check-in during private 1:1s and say “How did you think that topic went?” and I’d get a read on who needed more counseling or a watchful eye and who was going to be OK.
To be clear, I'm not espousing that if a team member experiences a loss like a death, you add it to the team meeting agenda. I'm encouraging that you monitor the critical emotional mass of your team and when 20% of them are in one emotional place, hold space for it. Hold space and by doing so, create the space for unconditional love for ourselves individually and for us as a team.
Danielle LaRock writes, "This is where true power comes from. When we are able to be in unconditional love, all of our thoughts, words, and actions flow from it. We are bringing more of that love into the world.
Which means holding space isn’t just beneficial for one. It benefits all.
By loving ourselves,
we also hold space for the world."
Tragic large scale events
Now don’t go into these alone, managers. Get professional help ready. Every manager should have at their fingertips the contact information for your company’s counseling service. In higher ed, it is often called the Employee Assistance Program (EAP). You should also give a sincere endorsement of using counseling as an OK thing to do-- just as normal as a daily walk or a trip to the gym. It is important that you role model that taking care of one’s mental health is just as important as one’s physical health. Make it OK to say “I have a tough time dealing with…, so I talk with a counselor.” I know that is typically HR’s Benefits area, but it is your job to normalize it.
As a remote manager, do everything in your power to be able to grant emergency leave for mental health days. Pick up all of their appointments, meetings, and email. Signal to the team that that person “is unavailable” for the rest of the day and don’t say why. It is your prerogative as manager not to provide whys on events like this; it’s part of the protection you can provide, holding space when team members need time to grieve privately for any reason.
The Take Away
By now, you may have figured out that this was just as much a leadership article as it was a remote management article. Because setting the culture within your team that it's OK to be sad rests with you, leaders. I'll end with the encouragement that you check out my sources, contact me if you ever want to talk through how to handle grief at a distance, and with a quote from Simon Sinek, "When a leader makes the choice to put the safety and lives of the people inside the organization first, to sacrifice their comforts and sacrifice the tangible results, so that the people remain and feel safe and feel like they belong, remarkable things happen."
Sources
Simon Sinek. Why good leaders make you feel safe. May, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmyZMtPVodo
"Leadership is a choice. It is not a rank. I know many people at the seniormost levels of organizations who are absolutely not leaders. They are authorities, and we do what they say because they have authority over us, but we would not follow them. And I know many people who are at the bottoms of organizations who have no authority and they are absolutely leaders, and this is because they have chosen to look after the person to the left of them, and they have chosen to look after the person to the right of them. This is what a leader is. …We call them leaders because they go first. We call them leaders because they take the risk before anybody else does. We call them leaders because they will choose to sacrifice so that their people may be safe and protected and so their people may gain,and when we do, the natural response is that our people will sacrifice for us. They will give us their blood and sweat and tears to see that their leader's vision comes to life, and when we ask them, "Why would you do that? Why would you give your blood and sweat and tears for that person?" they all say the same thing: "Because they would have done it for me." And isn't that the organization we would all like to work in?"
“What It Really Means To Be There And Hold Space For Someone Else” by Danielle LaRock. Retrieved from https://tinybuddha.com/blog/what-it-really-means-to-be-there-and-hold-space-for-someone-else/
Brene Brown. “When we are looking for compassion, we need someone who is deeply rooted, is able to bend, and most of all, embraces us for our strengths and struggles.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw
Brain Craft & The entire movie Inside Out, where Sadness is...surprise...the hero. https://youtu.be/ST97BGCi3-w
“It's often culturally and socially reinforced that there's something wrong or shameful about feeling sad. We have this cultural bias towards valuing positive thinking. But studies have shown that those who try and suppress negative thoughts actually experience more of them, which can lead to overeating and a stronger stress response. Another study found that people who experience happy and sad emotions at the same time, like "I'm sad or disgusted that there's broccoli on my pizza but happy because it means I can experience new things" show improvements in mental well-being over the next few weeks, even if the mixed feelings were unpleasant at the time. Inside Out shows us that negative emotions guide our rational thinking. Sadness is a trigger for seeking comfort and bonding. We’re often tough on sadness, but it’s important to our understanding of who we are. In his 1621 work "Anatomy of Melancholy", Robert Burton wrote that in experiencing melancholy, "increaseth sorrow… increaseth wisdom." Even those emotions we consider as negative can lead to good, rational decisions.”
Remote workers and managers, I wish you a month of contemplation and I wish you space.
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This article was posted to LinkedIn pre-pandemic on October 1, 2019
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/griefat-distance-heather-dodds