The one skill I wish was in all workplaces
Career grief literacy may be one of the most needed people skills of this moment to navigate the variety of tangible and intangible losses that maybe you or folks around you are experiencing right now.
I keep thinking about how many workplaces, or even ourselves, are asking people to navigate precarity and uncertainty, maybe even calling for business-as-usual. Even if meant with good intentions, it doesn’t work. We’re calling it burnout or time to bounce back, but it's so much more than that at this point. And that rhetoric likely causes unintentional hurt because we live and work in a grief-averse society and have lost this critical skillset.
Working in the intersection of career and climate grief, there’s a lot of commonality and overlap with how folks are experiencing losses that are tangible and intangible, individual and collective. Tangible losses right now are the massive wildfire smoke and burning forests we’re witnessing across Canada and the US, and the continued layoffs and organizational shifts. Intangibles might feel like a slipping away of how you thought your institution worked, how you imagined our futures and your own career future, how you imagined your summer days outside, no longer possible in this moment, or only with a N95 mask or with applying to new jobs.
Every single loss (positive or negative) invites change and reorientation work through grief. Folks are losing various parts of their identity and ways of working or being.
What do you do?
First, you need awareness that career grief is a thing, just like climate and Earth grief most certainly are. But then you start to build the language and skill set of working with grief in a day-to-day context.
What this looks like within workplaces is folks who can hold uncomfortable or difficult conversations without rushing to fix or soothe. It’s leaders, colleagues, and managers who know how to recognize grief responses (and they’re different from burnout but may mask as that) and then know what to ask or offer next. It’s the ability to reduce negative contagion, as well as harm to morale and connection during organizational transitions. It's the ability to support identity reformation when programs, departments, or entire job categories change or close. It’s about leading with a wider range of reflection and repair that keeps you out of therapizing, rescuing, or overing behaviors.
Career grief literacy is helping folks learn to recognize, understand, interpret, communicate well, and engage with grief in workplace contexts. This is the work I train people in organizations to do because it strengthens relationships that protect trust, capacity, and humanity.
I offer workshops, trainings, retreats, and facilitated conversations for:
Leadership teams or leaders across an organization
Managers and supervisors or HR staff
Faculty and staff
Student-facing professionals
Mission-driven organizations navigating change
We can’t eliminate uncertainty, nor can we rescue folks from the discomfort of these times. But we can help build the skills for greater relational capacity and regenerative resilience needed to move through uncertainty without losing themselves and each other in the process.
If your organization is navigating change, restructuring, burnout, instability, or transition, and you want to support creating more human-centered leadership and workplace culture, I’d love to talk about how we can train grief literacy.
You can schedule a free consultation here.
Or simply email and tell me what you wish you and your colleagues knew or could do to support grief in work better.
Here are some things to tell me about:
What do you wish you knew about career grief?
Do you know how to recognize it or differentiate it from burnout or anxiety?
Do you know how to respond without fixing or dismissing?
Do you know how to create a culture and community that can hold grief and still move forward together?
