I got it wrong the first time and probably the second time too. I’ll likely get it wrong again, so here I am writing a reminder to future me.

A beloved colleague died unexpectedly. The email came the same day, evening for me, direct, no euphemisms. The video call was set for the next afternoon, late enough that people had a night to sit with it before they had to be on camera together. Someone senior said her name out loud and then let the silence sit instead of filling it. By every measure I’d use later to judge how this should go, it was done right.

Then, the following week, we sold part of the business, and a dozen people I’d worked closely with - people I looked forward to working with - were suddenly on someone else’s org chart. There was no email like the first one. Just an announcement calling it a strategic move and a Slack channel that went quiet within hours. Nobody had died. But it landed on top of someone who just had, and I remember thinking: we know how to do this well, we did it a week ago, so why does this one feel like an afterthought. I didn’t say that to anyone. It felt like complaining about a paper cut in a room where someone had just been in surgery.

Nobody hands you a runbook for this. We have runbooks for a full disk at 3 AM. We have severity levels, escalation paths, comms templates, and a blameless review afterward. When a person is gone, most of us walk into the room with nothing, and the team watches to see what we do with it.

This is what I’ve pieced together since. None of it is expertise, believe me. It’s fumbling, written down.

Kenneth Doka has a name for grief that isn’t openly acknowledged or socially allowed: disenfranchised grief. Most workplaces create it without meaning to, because nothing at work makes room for grief. There’s no casserole, no service you’re expected at, no week off. There’s a Slack announcement, a reassigned Jira board, a cold email, and a standup the next morning where everyone is waiting to see if it’s okay to talk about it.

Usually, it isn’t, because nobody says it is. So people don’t. They process it alone or not at all, and it shows up later as the engineer who stopped arguing in design reviews, or the one who started interviewing.

It doesn’t have to be a death to land this way. I think about three kinds:

Someone dies. The obvious one, and the one we’re least equipped for. The shock is real, and so is the operational hole.

Someone leaves without leaving. A divestiture, a carve-out, a team transferred to another company. Pauline Boss calls this ambiguous loss: the person is gone from your world but not gone. They’re still on LinkedIn. You still see their name in git blame, their avatar in an open pull request. Their Slack account is deactivated and their knowledge is still the only copy of how half the system works. It gets announced as a strategic win, so there’s nothing to mourn, officially. People mourn anyway, quietly, with no end point.

A third of the room is gone. Layoffs. David Noer wrote about this in the early 90s and called it layoff survivor syndrome. The people who stay carry guilt about why it wasn’t them, scan every all-hands for the next signal, and pick up the work of the people who left without anyone adjusting a single deadline. A Leadership IQ survey of about 4,000 layoff survivors found 74% said their own productivity dropped and 69% said the quality of the company’s product did too.

That tracks with everything I’ve seen. People under threat stop taking risks. They pick the safe option, ship less, flag less, propose nothing. Stevan Hobfoll’s Conservation of Resources theory says it plainly: under stress, people protect what they have left. Your team is conserving.

Three different losses, one failure mode. The company treats it as a transaction and moves on. The people can’t, or can’t without feeling like they’re doing it wrong.

The systems keep going. This is the part I’d want someone to have told me.

When someone dies, the automation doesn’t know. Their name is still in the PagerDuty rotation. They’re still in CODEOWNERS, so PRs auto-request their review. The calendar invite for their 1:1 still fires every Tuesday. A bot pings the channel asking them to update a stale ticket. A welcome-back reminder from the HR tool arrives the day they would have returned from PTO.

Each one of those is a small wound delivered by a system someone on your team built. They’ll notice every one. I notice every one.

The first week is still the best version of this I’ve seen, so the checklist starts there. Treat it like an incident, because it is one:

  • Confirm the facts, then say it the same day. Plainly, no euphemisms. Rumour spreads faster than a Slack post.
  • Tell the people closest to them first, privately, before the broad announcement. Not in a channel. Not by email if you can help it.
  • Give people a night before you put them on camera together.
  • When you do get everyone together, say their name and let the silence sit. Don’t fill it.
  • Pause the automation before it fires: on-call schedules, code review assignment, recurring meetings, ticket bots, HR and payroll workflows, anything that sends a message with their name on it. Don’t deprovision the account in a way that erases their history. Their commits and docs are part of the team’s memory.
  • Give people the EAP number and say out loud that using it is normal. Then use it yourself if you need to.
  • Don’t reassign their work in the same breath as the announcement. It will need to happen. It doesn’t need to happen that day.
  • Let the team decide how they want to remember them. Some teams want a channel, some want a donation, some want to name something after them. It’s not yours to pick.

Divestitures and layoffs need the same playbook. We had it. We didn’t use it the second time. Say what happened plainly. Name who’s gone. Don’t let the reorg announcement be the only acknowledgement. How the company treats the people who left is the clearest signal the people who stayed will ever get about how they’ll be treated.

As a leader, you lost them too.

Arlie Hochschild’s term is emotional labor, managing your own feelings to meet what the job expects. For a manager during a loss, the job expects calm. So you do the work of being calm, all day, for everyone, and then you get to your own feelings sometime after the last meeting, if at all.

You’re also in the middle. Leadership above you wants the roadmap back on track. Your team below you needs time and a lighter load. Both are reasonable. They can’t both be fully met, and you’re the one who has to decide how much of each to give, usually without guidance, usually while absorbing some of the dropped work yourself.

I don’t have a clean answer for this. What’s helped:

  • Telling my team that I’m finding it hard too. Not performing it, just saying it. It gives them permission they won’t otherwise take.
  • Saying what I expect, out loud. “I don’t expect to see you online until the next steps meeting.”
  • Having one peer manager I can be honest with. Not my boss, not my team.
  • Pushing the roadmap conversation upward explicitly instead of quietly eating the gap. “We lost a person and a third of our context. Here’s what moves.” That’s a capacity conversation that you’re allowed to have.

If you’re the person above the managers: they need somewhere to put this. If you don’t give it to them, you’ll find out where they put it when they resign.

What I’d do now is mostly small and unglamorous.

Say the thing. Name the person. Name what happened. Staying quiet can feel like you’re giving people space. From their side, it looks like nobody noticed. That Leadership IQ survey had one bright spot: survivors who rated their manager high on visibility, approachability, and candor were 72% less likely to report a productivity drop. Being present and straight with people moves the number.

Don’t aim for closure. Especially with layoffs and divestitures, there’s no event that ends it. People will keep running into the gap for months, every time they need the person who knew how the billing pipeline worked. Expect that. It’s not a performance problem, but it is a visibility problem: the time lost working around that gap won’t show up anywhere unless you put it in front of leadership.

Cut scope on purpose. The team is smaller and sadder. Pretending it has the same capacity is how you turn grief into burnout. Stop the low-value work explicitly and let the team help decide what goes.

Make it safe to not be fine. Amy Edmondson’s psychological safety isn’t a poster. After a loss, it’s whether someone can say “I can’t take that on right now” in standup and have it be okay. It doesn’t come back on its own, and you rebuild it by going first.

Keep checking in after everyone else stops. Week one, everyone is kind. Week six, the calendar has moved on and the person who’s still struggling is alone with it. Put a reminder in your calendar six weeks out. Then ask. Let them brush it off if they’re fine. Be the one who remembered.

Accept that you’ll fumble. You’ll say something clumsy. You’ll forget to pause a bot. You’ll check in with the wrong person and miss the right one. Show up anyway.

Those two weeks sit side by side for me - one loss handled so well it became the standard I measure everything else against, the other that never got a fraction of that care because nobody called it a loss out loud.

If I could go back, I’d tell myself the paper cut is still a cut. It doesn’t need a comparison to earn the right to be noticed, and neither does anyone on your team who’s still running into the gap six weeks from now.

I bring them up now, usually when someone I’m talking to is in their own version of it and doesn’t quite believe it’s allowed to hurt this much. It’s not advice at that point, just proof that someone else has been there. I still get a pit in my stomach telling it, longer after it happened than I’d have guessed. I’ve stopped expecting that to go away.