Stop fighting resistance. Start leading people through loss.
Because people don’t resist change. They resist what they’re losing.
Too many leaders think of grief as something that happens outside of work. They naturally think of grief as reserved for death, illness, divorce, or some other deeply personal loss. It’s something to be magically left at home so you can focus on your very important spreadsheet-of-the-week.
That way of thinking is so dumb it’s almost criminal. Thankfully, it isn’t or I’d be serving multiple life sentences.
You might be asking yourself why this matters. Who cares?
Anyone who keeps getting blindsided by “resistance” and thinks the fix is a better slide deck or a performance improvement plan.
It’s not a communication problem. It’s a grief problem. Here’s why:
The same psychological process that unfolds after a personal loss also unfolds during organizational change.
Grief, at its core, is the long, painful, and complicated process of adapting to a significant loss.
And every major change at work—even the positive ones—requires people to let go of something. It might be a role they loved and excelled at. It might be the team that’s come to feel like a second family. Or maybe it’s the loss of predictability and stability in their otherwise chaotic life.
About fifteen years ago my life was consumed with my wife’s mental health issues. I admittedly wasn’t performing at work. I was demoted from my first management role. My boss viewed it as a simple cause-and-effect equation.
Even though I understood the decision, it was a devastating hit to my identity. And because he saw me as the architect of my own demise, he never checked in to see how I was doing. He never considered that even necessary decisions trigger a grief process. Instead of checking in, he focused on the mechanics of reorganizing the team while I was reeling from the emotional cost of it.
I left the company a few months later. What could have been a moment of leadership became a missed opportunity for support.
Heifetz and Linsky said it perfectly in their book Adaptive Leadership:
“People don’t resist change. They resist loss.”
And here’s the part leaders consistently underestimate: The way you show up for someone navigating a personal loss is the same way you need to show up when people are navigating organizational loss.
They don’t need your brilliance or strategy.
They need you to care enough to understand what the loss touches in them. They need you to let them express their emotions without treating those emotions like a problem or trying to fix them. And they’ll very likely need the gift of accountability. No one adapts to a meaningful loss alone, even though most of us try like hell to.
Let’s stop treating personal grief as emotional and organizational change as operational. We’re human beings, and our nervous systems aren’t great at drawing that imaginary line.
Loss is loss. Grief is grief. And change always has an emotional cost.
When leaders understand this overlap, they stop pathologizing and punishing resistance. They spend less time selling the change and more time understanding the human impact of it. And once they understand the impact, the resistance they feared starts to dissolve, because people feel seen rather than managed.
And for the leader, being human feels a hell of a lot better than acting like a policy-and-procedure enforcer.
Humanity isn’t a distraction from high performance.
Humanity is the foundation of high performance.
When leaders know how to walk with people through loss—whether personal or organizational—they create teams that adapt faster, trust deeper, and perform better.
The humans on your team don’t need you to fix, dismiss, or ignore their feelings.
They need you to lead them through the moment they’re in.
If this way of leading resonates with you, and you want the language, tools, and confidence to do it consistently, my guide Leading Through Loss goes far deeper.
It’s a practical manual for supporting your people through the hardest human moments without lowering the bar.
Who are you?
So, so true! Thank you for bringing awareness to this topic.