For Anyone Who’s Ever Lost Anything: The Leadership That Grows Through Grief

From my very first groups and talks on grief, I’ve opened with, “If you’re here, you’re a leader. This is leadership training.” I often say similar things to clients, and the people who have taken the step to contact me. I’ve also worked with plenty of official leaders – from billionaires to C-suite execs – and seen that leadership rarely depends on a job title.

What I hadn’t fully put into words until recently was why. Through my recent writing and research, that connection has become even clearer: grief work and leadership draw on, and strengthen, the same core capacities.

Grief work builds the qualities – you could even say the emotional muscles – that true leadership is built on. You might already be leading in ways you haven’t recognised.

1. Turning towards pain – and reality

Being able to turn towards your suffering is an act of leadership in itself. It takes courage to be willing to face your true feelings – however painful – and to sense that there is something worth having waiting for you on the other side.

It takes leadership to meet reality where it actually is. Grief forces us to tell the truth. It takes honesty to admit that life or a relationship isn’t as fulfilling as you’d hoped or to recognise – even if only to yourself – ‘this really hurts’. It usually starts with being honest with yourself.

2. Time, limits and what really matters

It takes leadership to confront the limits of life and the finitude of our time on earth. For so many people, grief changes their relationship with time. People say things like ‘I don’t sweat the small stuff anymore’ or ‘I know what really matters now’, and everything changes as a result.

There’s also the grief of coming to terms with what you can and can’t control – and when you do, you often become more powerful – not less.

So many people feel clearer. They change jobs, take that dream scuba-diving trip, finally say the thing they’ve avoided for years, or honour someone in a way that only makes sense to them – from sending an image of a loved one into space to choosing to bring up someone else’s orphaned children because they had become, in every way, your own (both real examples from my recent clients).

Everything you want could be on the other side of your grief once you’re able to meet life where it really is.

3. Relationship complexity and emotional completion

Relationships – and human beings – are complex and often contradictory. It takes leadership to seek a fuller understanding of the relationship you have with someone you’ve lost – and to acknowledge the whole spectrum of feelings that are there, often not far below the surface.

In the methodology I find most helpful, we call the final arrival – even if it’s an ever-unfolding reality – emotional completion. It takes leadership to keep taking the steps you are guided through as you move towards a feeling of greater peace or resolution.

4. Asking for help

It takes leadership to ask for help. Grief breaks the fantasy that we can do life alone. It shows us how human and interconnected we actually are. It takes leadership to seek support and to say yes when it’s offered, however simply.

5. Compassion towards yourself and others

It takes true leadership to keep developing your capacity for compassion. To be able to ‘be’ with others where they are, to attempt to put yourself in their shoes, to avoid jumping to conclusions. And above all, to show that same level of compassion to yourself. The humanity we show each other can only ever go as far as the humanity we show ourselves. That’s a lifelong practice, not a destination. And it’s not about being ‘soft’ – it’s what makes the hardest things possible.

6. Speaking truthfully about what we’re taught to avoid

It takes leadership to talk about a subject that is still avoided for many understandable historical reasons. To use the words ‘death’, ‘dying’ and ‘dead’. It takes leadership to talk about death full stop.

7. Becoming someone other people trust

It takes leadership to become a person others trust and feel safe with. When those who are grieving can sense you have done – and will keep doing – your own grief work, you can meet them where they actually are, without needing to change or fix them or the situation, however strong and natural the instinct. You could call that congruence. Whatever it is, you’ll be leading from what’s true rather than something performed or polished.

8. Playing the long game

It takes leadership to play the long game. This is even more vivid in an endlessly optimised world where almost anything we desire can arrive on our doorstep within a day, and when a device in our hands appears to solve anything, instantly. While time alone will never heal grief as much as the actions you take in the time you have, grief teaches us the power of micro-gains. You may never ‘get over’ losing someone you loved – why would you want to? You can’t ever lose them or ‘move on’, but you can grow around the loss.

9. The difference other people can feel

It takes leadership for the ripple effects of what you’ve learned to reach the people around you. This isn’t something you overtly need to ‘do’, though I’ve seen plenty of people actively re-shape the way their families relate to each other or advocate for better policies and practices in their organisations.

It can happen just as subtly: when you are more complete with your relationships and with life as it is, you become clearer, more grounded – and more present. Others feel the difference without anything being said. And you don’t have to be perfectly emotionally regulated for this to happen either – that’s not the point. It’s your willingness to work with your emotions – not eliminate them – that changes the atmosphere you’re a part of.

Culture doesn’t change through the right words or corporate language alone, but through the qualities of the people inside it – and those leading it.

10. What grief teaches us about leading ourselves

One of the most helpful things grief has taught me – the hard way – is that we’re not completely helpless when it comes to how we choose to respond to our human experience. It takes leadership to hold the possibility that things can be better, even when it feels unimaginable at the time.

With the right help and understanding, grief ‘grows us’. It’s more than a disruption or an agony. It asks us to keep developing our emotional and relational muscles. It grows our capacity to be with what’s complex, painful or hard to put words to.

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In the end, when we learn to lead ourselves through grief, we change how we lead in every other part of our lives too. Grief is the fertile ground that makes wisdom possible – and wisdom is what true leadership depends on.