Organizations should process grief the same way people should: By facing it head on

Our best ideas, quick and curated | October 30, 2020

This week, how grieving organizations, like people, can fight their way back to feeling inspired and optimistic about the future. Plus, a survey of European small and medium-size businesses offers a gut check on economic sentiment, and McKinsey’s David Honigmann, a communication expert, on what he’s reading and listening to.

Most people think of grief as it relates to losing a loved one. And of course, that makes sense. But more broadly, experts say, it’s about our resistance to unwelcome change. When people lose their sense of identity or purpose, when they feel they’re losing control or their connection to the things that are important to them, they experience grief.

The business context. The wave of unresolved grief and loss unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to harm organizations from stem to stern. For leaders, such grief may make it hard to be at their best at a moment that unquestionably demands it. They may have difficulty bonding with others. Managers and employees outside the C-suite are also dealing with all manner of loss: a missed promotion, loss of a key customer or client, end of a project, disbanding of a team, retirement of a beloved colleague without in-person celebration. These can all spark feelings of grief that include shock, anger, sadness, and fear.

In a recent article for the McKinsey Quarterly, Charles Dhanaraj and George Kohlrieser of the International Institute for Management Development’s High Performance Leadership program discuss how loss and unresolved grief can seed myriad problems, including damaging both physical well-being and an organization’s financial health.

A sense of urgency. What can be done, besides hoping for a more normal 2021? First, leaders have to let the mourning process unfold in their own leadership approaches and, more broadly, in their companies’ organizational cultures. If they don’t, prolonged levels of uncertainty and disruption will only add to the grief and anxiety that employees experience.

Responsive leadership. By recognizing how the pandemic is fueling such feelings, leaders can take steps to transform grief into a creative force that turns loss into inspiration. There is life after grief, fueled by a strengthened sense of purpose. Leadership teams can start to embed a spirit of awareness, acceptance, and action in their companies to draw people out. They can also create organizational rituals that send powerful signals of recovery and transformation.

Bouncing back. The ability to move forward evaporates when people freeze up and freak out—and when they lose trust and faith in leaders and one another. Skilled leaders sustain hope by building psychological protections for employees and organizational cultures that are flexible, celebrate individuality, and enable employees to be their best selves at work. Let’s hear it for hard-won resilience.

OFF THE CHARTS

A reality check from Europe’s small and medium-size businesses

Small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) have been the lifeblood of the European economy. But few SMEs appear optimistic about their prospects for improvement anytime soon: more than half of those surveyed worry that they might not be in business in 12 months, and approximately four out of five think the European economy is weak.

Check out our chart of the day here.

PODCAST

Padding the global value chain from future shocks

Rarely have supply-chain leaders faced more complex, changing conditions than they have during the COVID-19 pandemic. “There’s certainly no industry that’s uniformly out ahead on this,” notes Susan Lund, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute and in McKinsey’s Washington, DC, office. “There are companies within each industry that are leaders—that have set up risk-management systems in their supply-chain operations and have used big data analytics to forecast demand—that scan the horizon and see shocks coming and respond. But there’s no industry that’s done a great job.”

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WHAT WE’RE READING (AND LISTENING TO)

David Honigmann

David Honigmann is a senior client-communication expert in McKinsey’s London office, concentrating on life sciences and the public sector. He is the coauthor of an article about how leaders can engage employees as they return to work.

Over the summer, I enjoyed Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel. This year, of course, has provided great native advertising for her Station Eleven, which is set around and after a deadly pandemic. The new novel is a meditation on responsibility and on what we owe to one another, but it’s also a ghost story and about the world of rich people—and what it feels like to live there if you’re not a citizen. The central sections, which see a massive fraud come to light and are told through the perspectives of the fraudsters, feel almost hallucinogenic. You don’t need to have read Station Eleven to enjoy The Glass Hotel, but you will get around 10 percent more out of it if you have.

My big novel for the spring was Mathias Énard’s Compass, a slow-motion, digressive—almost infinitely digressive—love story between two academics specializing in the Middle East. Its narrative stretches out between Vienna, Tehran, and Damascus.

I have occasionally struggled to get into Jahrestage, Uwe Johnson’s monumental novel that alternates between the Upper West Side of New York City in 1967–68 and the heroine’s parents in Germany before, during, and after the Second World War, setting the two timelines in uneasy dialogue. This time I’m reading it day by day on the corresponding date—so I know I should finish it on August 20, 2021. In these small pieces it’s an easier read, though the undertow is rapidly darkening.

I am also scaring myself with Bradley Garrett’s Bunker: Building for the End Times, which is a round-the-world tour of apocalypse preparation, seeing the eponymous structure as the defining form of architecture for our times. It’s often funny but with a pervasive sense of claustrophobic dread.

Next up is Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence, a book about this most prosaic of grammatical forms that takes a series of examples from literature as jumping-off points for reflections on how style, voice, and language work. This will be a personal as well as a professional pleasure.

To keep up with what’s going on in culture and the world at a level once removed from actual news, I increasingly rely on email newsletters: John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 and Matt Clifford’s Matt’s Thoughts In Between for tech and innovation; Matt Levine’s Money Stuff; and Helen Lewis’s The Bluestocking for some journalism “insider baseball.” My friend Matt Webb muses at interconnected.com on how humans shape and adapt to technology.

I also listen to a lot of music; let me recommend some recent highlights. Oumou Sangaré’s Acoustic is one of the many great records pouring out of Mali at the moment. It showcases Sangaré’s voice and her songwriting without any excess studio sheen: just kamale n’goni and guitar bouncing off each other. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Hard Luck Stories documents their marriage over the course of a decade, with lots of outtakes and live versions. Notable is how great the less favored albums—especially Sunnyvista—sound in this context. Lucidvox, four women from Moscow, infuse the sonic template of Warpaint with Slavic folk and heavy guitars on We Are. And on their debut Nayda!, the French-Moroccan band Bab L’Bluz plays pure, “trancey” rock ‘n’ Gnawa.

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— Edited by Barbara Tierney

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