Most leaders have a plan for the layoffs. Far fewer have a sentence for the Monday after.
Here is one, from a Fast Company article published in July: “I want to acknowledge that losing three colleagues to layoffs has changed how this team feels, and that is worth naming.”
It takes about ten seconds to say. It is also the kind of sentence many leaders would struggle to find.
Two kinds of grief at work
In Fast Company, executive coach and certified grief educator Lakeya Cherry argues that leaders have long treated grief as something that belongs outside work. Layoffs, restructuring and AI-driven change, she says, have made it hard to keep it there. One line stayed with us: “What we do not name, we cannot support.”
There is the grief of a death or loss in someone’s own life. And there is the collective grief of a team that has lost colleagues, a way of working or a future it had planned. Both turn up at the office on Monday morning.
What the research says
The Center for Creative Leadership surveyed bereaved employees, their managers and their coworkers. The findings are mixed, which makes them more useful. 60% of bereaved employees said their manager treated them with compassion to a great extent. And 20%, one in five, said they received little or no support. CCL also notes that most leaders have received no preparation for supporting grieving employees at work.
Good intentions are widespread. The skills are not.
Moments that Matter
In my book, Employee Engagement, What Else?, I have a name for the occasions that test those skills: the Moments that Matter. They are significant events that shape our working lives, such as “having a child, going through a divorce, dealing with a toxic colleague, or the sudden death of a team member.”
The reasoning is simple. I wrote that “As the lines between work and personal life become increasingly blurred, our brains don’t make a clear distinction between the two.” Something that happens at home does not stay at home. Recognising these moments shows that you consider your employees as complete individuals.
Drawing on Jacob Morgan, the book describes 3 types. Specific moments are the milestones in a person’s life, including losing a loved one. Ongoing moments are the daily interactions between colleagues and with managers. Created moments are planned, like a teambuilding or a project kick-off.
Grief touches all three. The loss itself is a specific moment. How a manager responds on the Monday after, and in the weeks that follow, is an ongoing one. And when a team has lost colleagues, marking that ending together is a moment a leader can create on purpose.
What leaders can do
Cherry’s suggestions are practical:
Name what has happened, even without perfect words.
Honour what is ending before asking for enthusiasm about what comes next.
Make support concrete: move deadlines, redistribute critical tasks, check in before important deliverables.
Accept that some things cannot be fixed.
Tend to your own grief, with a trusted peer, coach or mentor.
The last one is the easiest to skip. Leaders carry loss too, and the role rarely comes with someone to share it with. That is where a small, closed-door room like a Bravos Lab can help: peers who face the same decisions and who will not repeat what is said.
It is also why our assessment asks leaders and employees separately. Wellbeing runs through every pillar of the framework, and a leader’s view of how a moment was handled is not always the team’s.
Moments that Matter are rarely planned. In the book they are the ones that “stick with them long after the moment has passed.” People may forget the policy. They tend to remember what their leader did on the Monday after.
More in Employee Engagement, What Else?, in the chapter on the Employee Journey: book.employeeengagement.ae