A number of us went to the funeral and his wife told me (I had met her once before) that she was so happy that his co-workers came to pay their respects. It made her feel that he had a larger impact than she knew of and it was comforting to her.
I hate, hate, hate the way corps try to brush away any unpleasantness like ignoring it means it didn't happen!
I personally don't mind it. It's a good reminder that we as individuals are just replaceable cogs in the machine, that all of us are only as valuable as the productivity we can contribute in the future, and that our sense of loyalty to it should be adjusted accordingly.
Don't ever expect a corporation of any kind to act like a human or a family, because it's not, even if they try to put on a humanoid face.
Having said that, I expect more corporations will start trying to act more humanely in the face of this kind of trauma, precisely because those that don't will engender a sense of deep distrust and disloyalty from their employees, which will make them weaker in the long run. The more generations of people go through the machine and see how it really works, and teach their children the truth, the less they'll be able to take advantage of naivety. This also tends to be a reason that the powers that be want tighter control on social media, so people can't as easily share widely the truth of their lived experience that will preemptively poison the trust of others towards machines designed to use and discard people.
A man had been injured on a journey and was lying on the road, wounded. A good Samaritan saw him and helped him get up. Onlookers then retorted, "Well, the good Samaritan only helped him get up to signal their virtue!"
Another way to put it, is that while the individual might act selflessly with pure and honest empathy, with no conscious expectation of something in return, this kind of behavior wouldn't have survived in our gene pool if there wasn't some evolutionary advantage to behaving that way.
So, the onlookers would really have to specify whether they're talking about the conscious being who is the good Samaritan or if they're talking about the unconscious entity that is the generic big brained ape that has deeply embedded survival and reproductive instincts that drive their conscious behaviors and desires outside of their control.
I can simultaneously say that the person was honestly just being good while acknowledging that the biological entity may have achieved some kind of advantage by signalling their virtue. Alternatively, I could also say that the good Samaritan is actually acting in a way that is a detriment to his survival, and only happens because of a bug in his generic and psychological programming or an old beneficial feature that is no longer good for a new environment and will eventually be removed via natural selection.
This particular story teaches us that we should judge people by their individual intentions. Western cultures tend to judge that way[1]. Most other human cultures will ignore intentions and judge by outcome. They will also punish a whole family or clan, not an individual (except within their own clan or family).
So, according to our culture, we should judge people by their intentions. What about companies? Given that a company has many legal rights of a person, maybe we should judge it like a person - by the goodness of its intentions? Or maybe we can only judge individuals. But then why do so many individuals justify what they do with the needs of a company? Even questions about death, it seems.
[1] See Henrich's books: "The Secret of Our Success" and "The WEIRDest People"
That aside, I don't think you can judge the intent of a company's actions. Let's ignore the small family business for now, but if you look at a big corp, decision making is a distributed responsibility with individuals checking off their part as it passes through their department.
There is no single person you can ask to determine intent. The intent of the many people making the decision could be contradictory, or someone like the CEO could be acting in bad faith and misleading his employees to approve a decision that benefits the CEO and no one else. We see this more frequently with crime or negative actions, where sometimes the CEO is the scapegoat but we conveniently forget the various VPs and individuals that contributed to the decision.
My point is that companies shirk responsibility by obfuscating individual responsibility, and I think that would apply the same way to judging a company's intent.
Lastly, judging implies a verdict, and you can't put a company behind bars. Yet companies are more than capable of committing atrocious crimes the likes of which rival war crimes (child labor/slavery in foreign countries, polluting waterways/airways and poisoning entire cities, running propaganda campaigns against the interest of public health, etc.) I find it ridiculous that a company can enjoy our rights but shirk our duties and accountability.
And, like @Scarblac wrote, sometimes it's a bad idea -- if the others see through it?
That is on of vectors how culture is created.
Evolution does not "work" on behalf of individuals. It works on behalf of species. So if a member of a species is willing to sacrifice himself or take risks for the whole, that is an evolutionary feature not a bug.
If a species were truly focused on the individual, I imagine it would quickly die out, which, let's face it, seems like a threat to our species in our modern world when people choose not to have kids because they don't want the responsibilties involved.
But the Samaritan acted. Helped someone. Did a thing.
Action is not signaling. Action is action.
Maybe it helps one’s reputation doing it for the Gram, but you are actually helping another person and that is something.
In this case it was at the cost of their own reputation given how Samaritans were viewed at the time.
The Bible might say that if you are doing it only because of how you feel or what it means reputationally it is not the same as doing it out of compassion alone, but it’s still doing something and different than signaling.
> Action is not signaling. Action is action.
I don't really understand why those would have to be exclusive. I think taking action to help people is important, and if suddenly everyone became aware every time someone helped someone else to the point where it became an expectation, I guess I don't really see why this would be a problem. At the end of the day, if more people are genuinely being helped due to being charitable becoming table stakes, I don't really care whether the help only happened due to ego or due to actual benevolence. I can see it becoming a problem if people weren't actually helping people and only signalling, but I don't really see how that would apply to companies giving people time and space to grieve and then also setting the example for the rest of industry.
Too many people will ignore things like this. Too many people will stand around helplessly--if nothing else, at least call 911. The number of times I have been the first person to actually call 911 at an accident is embarassingly high--I have only ever been the first person on site once. The rest of the time a crowd was gathering but nobody bothered to call 911.
Personally, I'll take help even if they're doing it selfishly. And I'll thank you just the same.
Means you’re preventing someone from obtaining a blessing if you don’t take their gift. And by definition, it’s less blessed to receive than to give. But if everyone only gives, no one receives, grinds to a halt.
Metrics on virtue make things so difficult.
This is why I think that, more and more, people who have a heart, are moving away from big entities like this. I expect in a couple of generations corporations will be a thing of the past, or something so far removed from society, that it will no longer exist as a social norm.
The biggest problem is not the people, its the amount of people that organize together to make something happen. When you live and work in a sea of people vying for attention, to be seen and heard, there is no possibility of humanity. Its the size that makes or breaks the organization, not the people in it. It breaks accountability and it breaks social connections.
I see smaller organizations all the time that act responsibility. These organizations usually consist of smaller teams. This is the future, a new way of living, small decentralized organizations providing the world with what it needs in a human way.
You could just shorten this to "body", which has the same range of meanings. If you want to say "corpse" in English or Latin, you can use a more explicit word, but you don't have to.
The idea of "incorporation" is that something comes into existence - that it becomes "corporeal", not "soulless".
Alternatively, in a couple of generations, people who have too much heart/soul and can't stomach being part of a corporate machine will be bred out of the gene pool and/or thrust into the powerless underclass, while the psychopaths that have no problem with them will acquire the most resources and reproduce the most, passing on their genes and their way of thinking to their children.
Some might argue this already happened generations ago.
Many years ago, we hired a guy from halfway across the country. For money reasons he left his wife and kids behind and started the job ASAP, with the plan to rent an apartment and go back to get them over a holiday weekend approximately 1 month away.
So he worked with us for about 4 weeks, and then when driving his family here on that holiday weekend they were hit by a drunk driver; he and his wife were killed and the kids needed to be airlifted to a big city hospital.
Our CEO intervened with the insurance companies to backdate everything so his life insurance would pay out and the kids' medical bills would be paid for as long as they needed to be paid. He made sure that the kids got airlifted again - to the hospital nearest to their grandparents, and then said that any employees who wanted to travel to attend the funeral would get paid time off to do so (he went too).
The only people who are people are people.
To the company as a whole, yes. To each other? No, I don't think I believe this. This doesn't mean you owe anything to your teammates in terms of staying in a job if a better opportunity comes or if you aren't happy or treated right, but we're still all human beings seeing each other every day, and if you build a bond with those you work with, it's not any less real just because you only happened to meet due to the coincidence of being hired by the company. I've only been out of college for less than a decade, and I've had some coworkers I did not get along at all with, some who I was indifferent towards, a great many I had casual friendly relationships with, and a select few who are this point are as close to any friends I've met outside work and remained that way after one or both of us moved on from the job where we met. I still don't think I'd be completely emotionally unaffected if someone who I was currently working with in the first two categories happened to die, and I certainly would be if someone I worked with in one of the latter two groups did. It's not at all uncommon to feel grief or numbness when even a casual acquaintance outside of work dies, and the fact that whatever company you work for happens to consider you only a value-generating machine doesn't magically make this go away. Humans are humans even when working together, and I don't think pretending that's not the case is in any way more emotionally healthy than acknowledging it.
I was IT director and I had to do a post mortem (no pun intended) about his activities in the facility by checking his badge-ing in and out of various doors to determine the time of death... that was super fn weird.
We were able to determine he went to the break room at ~1am or something, made himself a cup of tea, went back to his cube and died before he even drank his tea.
it was an EVP... married with kids....
He may be dead now but he left lockheed to become a park ranger.
---
head of HR comes to me with sme issue with her blackberry.. I have her unlock it, and my phone guy is right there as she was claiming some issue...
We open her phone, and the first thing that pops up is a video of her giving the evp of sales a BJ...
my phone guy NOPED THE FUCK OUT ASAP...
that was fun trajectory to manage...
instead, building friendship outside of work(if you have friends at work, that's good too), and spending more time with your family,etc. I think this is also called work-life balance.
This does not work for people that needs extra help though, e.g. those who experiences mental illness, depression, down-cycles in life etc. HR and benefit package should have a humane way to do it better, at least, providing free hotline as a medical insurance add-on for all employees.
A good manager should stay aware of personal concerns cautiously in the team other than just checking their agile sprint schedule, it's part of your work. For years that a direct manager never met a key team member, never video chat with him/her, still keeping him as a contractor after 7 years, sorry, I put quite some blame on the manager.
A good manager takes great care of his team, which in the end, will benefit his own boss/company too. Blaming the corporate for your team members' lack of benefit is barking the wrong tree, it's you who did not fight hard enough for your key team members, you're the one should be blamed.
Remember that study that found psychopathic traits in upper management?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...
Mental health is an enormously under-discussed issue in an increasingly digital society that hides suffering in so many of us.
Work becomes an increasingly integral element of our connection to others while certain employment becomes increasingly transactional.
We all can do better. So sorry to read about another human being lost too soon.
It’s not seriously discussed because it’s under-discussed.
I think most people understand the seriousness of cancer, or a heart attack, or other life threatening ailments. They accept that those things are often outside of one’s control, and so there is never any hesitation to take it seriously. When someone in a work setting is diagnosed with something serious, everyone pays attention.
Mental health issues are hard for some people to understand if they haven’t experienced their own challenges. And because it’s not discussed frequently/seriously enough, it’s easy to downplay it or believe that the person struggling can change just by thinking hard enough.
And the people suffering from it don’t feel the same freedom to share those struggles because they’ve also been conditioned by the same collective mindset about mental health and worry what opening up about it will mean for them.
Someone with severe depression who struggles with suicidal ideation has to wonder if people will think less of them, or if they’ll be understand at all. Even though awareness has grown, those old stigmas and default behaviors remain just under the surface.
Someone with a terminal illness will receive an outpouring of support and encouragement.
I’m happy that awareness continues to grow, but there’s a long way to go.
My own struggles have taught me that at least in some cases it seems to be more like a "mental obesity" than a "mental disease". It's not necessarily that there's something wrong with the person's brain, but that their depression/anxiety is a perfectly normal reaction to a lifestyle that's toxic.
If you never take the time to do the activities you really, truly enjoy (by this I mean the type of thing where afterwards you feel better and think to yourself "that was great; I'm so glad I took the time out of my day to do that" - not necessarily things that are hyper-engaging), don't eat vegetables and fruit every day, sleep poorly, live alone, don't make the time to socialise with others and are constantly surrounded by a hostile environment (cluttered, tripping over things, disgustingly/unpleasantly unclean sights and smells), then the depression is just a "healthy" response.
That's just not true. You can't do all of them, of course, but you can take one step at a time over the course of months/years. It's a positive feedback loop that really does help.
>If you’re depressed, you don’t have the energy to do the beneficial things you’re recommending above.
Again, I'm not sure this is true either (at least in the general case). For many people, there's no obvious cause for their depression, but they "just are". There's no peace that needs to be made or trauma that needs integrating, just learning to live life in a way that isn't toxic to your mind.
For me, therapy and mindfulness meditation were both beyond useless.
Learning to stop over-intellectualising everything and implementing strategies to make mundane, day-to-day life more pleasant and wholesome has done wonders.
I agree “just doing stuff” can help to. But for many people, as others have pointed out, such advice is not immediately actionable. People can be made to do stuff, but if they hate doing those things then they’ll still be depressed.
> For many people, there's no obvious cause for their depression, but they "just are"
And for many people, their depression can be traced back to specific events or situations.
Mine: C-PTSD from a pretty screwed up childhood. Most people I know would never know, but I’m working to build an entirely new way to frame the world and my responses to it.
I appreciate that not everyone has the same background, but what I’ve learned through my journey is that there are more people with similar challenges than I ever realized. And in a way that’s the theme of this thread.
> You can't do all of them, of course, but you can take one step at a time over the course of months/years
The key here is the word years. At least for a period of time, one step at a time is mostly indistinguishable from “don’t have the energy to do the beneficial things”.
Yes, one can be making progress, but it often takes some time to see the results.
> Learning to stop over-intellectualising everything
And this characterization of the problem is exactly the kind of undercurrent that continues to stigmatize mental health issues, IMO. “Just stop over intellectualizing everything” is not going to help someone who’s currently “in it”. Certainly not going to help if someone is at the point of being suicidal.
> For me, therapy and mindfulness meditation were both beyond useless.”
And for me, therapy probably saved my life.
> and implementing strategies to make mundane, day-to-day life more pleasant
No offense, but this is “rest of the fucking owl” stuff. I’m pretty sure most people focused on improving their depression want this.
The answer is not just “implement strategies” any more than a novice painter’s journey to master is to “paint better”.
The process is often long, slow, and pretty difficult.
It isn't an either-or situation. As you said, everyone has a different experience.
When I spoke to professionals or listened to others having the "mental health conversation" the focus was entirely on dealing with trauma or, if there was no trauma, taking antidepressants because clearly my brain was broken.
Being told to "draw the rest of the fucking owl" was one of the most eye-opening and empowering things I heard, precisely because the conversation focuses on people with experiences similar to yours.
I was told by society and doctors that I was a victim of my neurochemistry and that could never change. Turns out I was just bad at looking after myself as an adult. I am now less bad at it, and one day hope to even be good.
Bingo. This is the root of the problem IMHO. We're really good at recognizing and empathizing with a gaping physical wound, but if we can't see it/touch it/feel it/etc it's hard to grok.
It is a mind problem, but that makes it harder, not easier to address. The only real solution IS "happy, not depressed", but it is terribly difficult to do if you have poor tools and learned patterns.
Medicine can help break up patterns.
This is exactly right. Even in the last few years I feel more understanding about mental health struggles, and I strive to be supportive as well, but even I judge people who take time off for mental health reasons, and I hesitate to tell people about my own struggles.
The reason some of us downplay mental health issues is because we hear stats like "97% kids are ADHD" or "74% of university students are on Ritalin" or "108% of Americans are on anti-depressants and visiting psychiatrists"
"Mental health" (without further qualifications) is closer to herpes than to cancer.
Quite frankly, this is a poor excuse. I don't draw sweeping conclusions about "physical health" issues because of cherry picked stats about extremely prevalent physical health issues.
"73% of adult Americans are overweight" doesn't make me downplay physical health across an entire spectrum of issues.
Another conclusion one might draw is "holy shit, this is a crisis!". And there is growing evidence to support this. Humans haven't evolved to deal with the realities of the current century. We're only just starting to understand the impact of modern technology and many other developments of the last decade.
If someone sees a crisis and concludes that this must be something to dismiss, that says more about that person than it does about the crisis.
> "Mental health" (without further qualifications) is closer to herpes than to cancer.
And yet, people still take herpes seriously. People don't just dismiss ailments that aren't cancer.
But there's a more fundamental issue with the entire line of thinking raised by this comment. A key point that many people miss is that mental health and physical health aren’t really two distinct categories at all. The two are deeply intertwined, and usually inseparable.
Who you go to see, or what actions you take when you start to have issues will change, but you also see a dermatologist for skin problems, a cardiologist for heart problems, etc.
Societal reactions reflect that, both dismissive (“just exercise more”, “don’t be lazy”) and constructive (“we should find the cause - is it endocrine disruptors / social media?”)
Will you explain how/why you agree with that sentence?
To be clear, nothing in my comments concluded anything close to this. Your agreement is certainly not with me.
If I said “poverty is more similar to overspending than homelessness”, I’d expect someone to tell me this is a meaningless (and ridiculous) comparison, and rightly so.
Such conclusions are not useful, and don’t help anyone involved: not the person struggling, not the person trying to understand the struggle, not the people trying to fix it.
Will you help me understand the point you’re trying to make here? Because it’s unclear.
Causes of death are not fungible, dying in a freak accident and dying from suicide in a high pressure setting should not be treated the same.
Especially since we know that suicide can act like a contagion: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207262/#_sec_0078_ and the demands of the program they were in were almost certainly a factor
Your teammates are not entitled to know your cause of death. That's a personal thing, but you aren't there any more to choose if it's okay to share.
Your cause of death isn't a personal thing either by the way, it's a matter of public record in most states (and of course word tends to get out with something as emotional as a death)
If there is public record, they are entitled to that and nothing more.
The death person and his/her family have their own right to privacy and it trumps curiosity of collegues.
Again, this isn't some random suicide, these are people in a known high pressure environment already aware this person committed suicide.
The organization can pretend nothing happened (even though everyone already knew), or they can take charge and try and help these people cope with that devastating news and help anyone who might already be in a bad place...
Once you're dead you're dead, that's why causes of death aren't personal... there's no person left.
The organization doesn't even have to frame it in of terms this person's death, just a simple call out that "if anyone is struggling with this loss or needs help come to us".
Anything is better than pretending it didn't happen.
> Once you're dead you're dead, that's why causes of death aren't personal... there's no person left.
The family and actually close friends are left. And people who are about to die deserve to know their privacy will remain private too.
People learned this person committed suicide and the organization decided not to address it. That is strictly worse than addressing it no matter how you slice it.
OTOH, I’ve worked at office buildings that provided a clear view of a jumper, and there were formal communications that counseling was available to anyone who witnessed the jumper and felt they needed it. Which sort of underscored the fact that jumpers in the middle of busy downtown areas aren’t broadly reported to anyone who wasn’t likely to have directly seen them in the first place.
At one place, a guy who had left the company a few months prior died in a car crash. The guy had a wife and newborn baby. The CEO shared the news and the company made a contribution to a GoFundMe for the wife and baby. I think the company offered grief counseling.
At another, larger company, someone died shortly after I joined, so I never knew them. We were all notified, once again I think a grief counselor came, and the guy’s desk was left as a memorial until we moved offices a few months later.
It later clarifies that the clustering evidence is only focused on teenagers and young adults.
I would assume that those 3 cases are not applicable to the vast majority of full time working environments. If people are using this study as a reason to avoid discussing death by suicide in the workforce, it's because they just don't want to deal with it. If they were motivated by a higher moral purpose, they could ask for advice from a mental health professional or non-profit.
While there may be some cases where it is the right thing to do, silence by default perpetuates the shame and taboo around the subject which can affect the living and prevent them from seeking support.
https://mentalhealth.org.nz/media/reporting-and-portrayal-of...
I guess to be safe they sort of publish it without many details. Just "Person found dead at such and such".
We really need to start talking more openly about these things. If your coworker dies in a car crash nobody feels like they can't talk about the car crash or even acknowledge the cause of death. Yet with suicide, nobody wants to say it. The result is even more pain mixed with frustration.
When the day-to-day doesn't address the simple human aspects of work, it becomes even harder to address the difficult aspects.
Or the person died and they didn’t say it was a suicide.
Because if it’s the 2nd, that seems pretty normal. My right to know doesnt trump the family’s right to privacy.
This just seems bizarre to me to expect a special “all hands” session or something to discuss this.
Provide counseling services? Sure.
Put a “how Jimmy died” meeting on everyone’s calendar? That’s odd.
When a coworker died at work we usually understood the family was the one that needed support, not us. And if the family asked for privacy, then they got it.
And if any of us needed support, we helped each other. We didn’t need HR to pencil in a meeting.
And no, when someone dies their cause of death is not automatically public and most people (including employers) respect that.
It doesn't seem particularly helpful to send out a notifications to people other then those that would be affected by having to take on my workload. And what good would come from them being told I was dead vs just left?
While I have a strong emotional reaction to it, I don't think it's a bad thing, it is a part of life and a reminder for me to savor life.
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Help your people and don't be a dick and you'll be amazed at the bounty of unearned gratitude that comes back around -- and often not just once, but continuing for years. Being a good boss is "the gift that keeps giving" to good bosses everywhere.
My wife caught COVID last month while I was out of town. Since I continued testing negative, we decided that I would stay at the farm until either I tested positive or she tested negative. I posted a message on Slack explaining where I was and why, just as a “why is Tony joining all meetings remote this week” kind of update.
Immediately, three of my previous reports reached out directly to let me know that they were more than happy to drop off anything she might need: groceries, medication, Dairy Queen, anything. That is the kind of relationship a manager/leader and their reports can have. We’ve never really done much outside of work socially. We do the odd team dinner to mark special occasions. Two of them have had car trouble and are handy but didn’t have the tools they needed; I had the tools (tubing bender for a brake line, electric impact for getting a stuck bolt out) and dropped those off on the weekend.
The big dance I have always tried to do is make us into a team that always has each other’s back. I’ve made it clear that sometimes The Business wants us to do weird things that don’t always make sense and we’ve gotta just do it, but in general I’m doing my best to shield them from nonsense and help make sure we’ve got an environment where everyone can do their best work.
I dunno, it was all an experiment and it seems to have worked out.
There are benefits to the latter approach ... I could futz around on my phone in particularly boring or useless meetings. But keeping the cameras on does make connections feel more personal and overall I prefer it, particularly for small meetings.
Plus, everyone gets to see my dogs roughhousing in the background.
The fact those meetings are occurring is a failure of the culture, and especially the move to WFH. It's been the key differentiator for me post-COVID; companies that are begrudgingly remote try to keep the office norms in place, just now remote, vs the companies embracing remote finding new workflows, which means leaning on async communication, collaborative documents, etc, instead of meetings, and synchronous meetings only when absolutely necessary.
And it's been eye opening; in those former cases, no one wanted "social" Zoom meetings, myself included. But in those latter, people asked about it, championed it happening, etc.
People only have so much time they want to be in meetings online, and making sure it's used to build team bonds, instead of squandered on business problems that could be solved other ways, seems like a huge part of making remote be successful.
A significant component of that is that my only work experience is in a fully remote team of varying time zones. I imagine that changes the perspective of how these things should go compared to someone who's used to the social interactions of the office.
On the professional world, where money and titles are put on the head of people, things hardly ever go that way, I believe for many reasons but mainly due to competitivity.
Regardless, really happy to hear your experience and story. I'd love to be at an actual team as you put it.
As long as one is the person with the authority in a relationship one cannot really know which option it is.
The other piece is that this team has done this kind of stuff in the past for each other. As an example, one guy blew a timing belt on the highway about 150km out of the city (on Sunday night coming back to town for work Monday morning). Two of the other people on the team loaded up tools into their truck and drove out to meet him, try to see if they could fix the car on the side of the road, and when they realized they couldn't they towed it away from the road and gave him a ride back to town.
I mean, I could be misreading this, but it seems like I, without really knowing what I was doing, put together a really tightly gelled team that jumps at the opportunity to help each other out. And in the process, I guess I got to be a part of that even after I left.
I think there's a fundamental divide between people. Some see the workplace and the people in it as an integral part of their life. Others see it as a place they spend 40 hours a week that enables them to live their actual life. Neither are wrong and I think a lot depends on the type of company you work for. For me personally there's nothing intimate or sanctified about my relationship with my boss.
But I do agree with your general point. Being someone's boss can have a large impact on their life. I'd reach for terms like responsible, ethical, or kind.
People put on a polite friendly face at work, but that doesn’t mean they’re your intimate friends. Sometimes, but I think it’s not so common as you’re implying.
And once you have to do that it might be prudent to let it become a part of your identity. It is after all something that you have to do for half of your waking time outside of weekends and vacations.
So give them time off to grieve.
Once you say that “they need you [the manager] in a time of crisis” you are putting the tragedy in a work-related context. The crux of the issue is the tragedy that happened. Not how the supposed leader responds to it.
The worker bees can get space to grieve alone or among their peers.
Sometimes all that’s needed is for the manager to not be a giant fucking dick.
My aunt passed away a few years ago, and I took a few days off work to go to her funeral (a few hundred miles away).
When I mentioned that I was going to take a few days bereavement leave, my manager at the time responded by rules lawyering whether the death of an aunt qualified under the company’s bereavement policy (it did). He otherwise said all the right things, but that’s what I remember nearly 10 years later.
I came in on a Saturday to let the team know of his passing, and to work. We had scheduled a weekend hackathon—if I recall, this had been my idea originally.
My boss, very sincerely concerned, asked me, “why are you here? You can go home.” I told him there’s no where else I’d rather be. That wasn’t only because he was such a great boss, but that was a large contributing factor. He kindly, gently said he understood and that I should stay and contribute whatever felt comfortable and leave whenever that felt like what I needed. That didn’t make mourning feel any less difficult, but it made me feel like I was right that work was where I needed to be that day.
My point is not that this is the form all leadership should take. It’s true that giving people time off to mourn is almost definitely the best default. But there is a compassionate kind of leadership that can be this welcoming and compassionate comforting.
I think a lot of people still don't realize that everyone deals with emotions differently, even though they've been told that a lot in the last few decades, and perhaps a lot longer.
And yes, I agree that a lot of people have trouble recognizing different ways people process emotions. It’s been a persistent thing in my life, I’m well over in the differently column for a lot of people (ADHD/autistic).
If he had merely offered to let me go home—or, worse for me, insisted—I would agree that it wasn’t particularly noteworthy as far as compassion goes.
Thank you for your humane response to Pete's death, for creating room for the team to grieve and official acknowledgement that it was no longer business as usual. This is one of those moments that leadership really matters. There's more to being a leader than shipping a volume of features, you are also an important figure in the lives of your team and they need you in a time of crisis.