Managing the bereaved

I didn’t expect having to stay neutral as my team suffered.

I didn’t expect having to stay neutral as my team suffered. Add that to my list of unscheduled management lessons.

Someone learns about a cancer diagnosis in their immediate family.  Someone gets denied entry into the country they’ve called home, where their partner awaits. Someone’s working through a tough, tough breakup. The cases continue.

At the same time, you have to figure out if their projects are going to ship or not. If the outcomes they were owning are going to happen or not.

We talk about boundaries like they’re these black and white things. Draw a line around someone’s circumstances. Deal with what’s relevant, and ignore the rest. Right? But life’s not that co-operative. You carry common influences and biases across your experiences. A tough time at work or home shows up in obvious ways. You learn things about problems and relationships on both sides. I’ve found that we work with membranes more than boundaries. Osmosis happens.

I tend to get attached to the people around me. I find it easy to see the stories unfold in the people around me. Their growth, their struggles, their wins - at work, at home. It’s immersive to observe. And there are cases that I personally empathize with - is it ok to pull from that? You get a lot of access to the details as a manager. Learning to balance them is key. 

The first time a report went through a personal disaster, I helped them fill out forms to go on extended leave. Terms like the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), bereavement, Paid Family Leave came streaming in. Right next to the familiar stuff - what product we’re building, which user we’re solving for. I’d heard about these in trainings, but it felt awkward using those words! And it got awful when we had to fit the report’s harrowing experience into this structure. 

There were tears during the meeting. I had a “quarterly business review” next, and it was all business, all bullet points. 

I ended that day crying and watching Inside Out. I wondered how the the individual was holding up. I didn’t think my feelings had feelings, but apparently they did.

The next day I wrote down my responsibilities as a manager. Part from self-preservation, part from trying to figure out what to do. There was a lot of crap in there, but the line “Be an advocate” stuck out. Advocates push for good outcomes on behalf of who they support. As a manager I support our business and the individual. A colleague filled in the rest of what I needed to hear, in “Care, but not too much”. Care enough to see what matters, but not so much that you’re paralyzed. 

We worked through It. The personal outcomes in that case were terrible. Life didn’t go their way. But I like to think that we supported them to the best of our means and ability. And after going through several more of these since, the best professional actions don’t guarantee personal results. 

You learn to organize your emotions in ways are decent, inquisitive, and necessarily, productive. You’re going to bring up what’s getting done and not. You’re going to trade their time off - like any other resource. And you’re going to need to be an attentive listener and problem solver for their issues. An advocate, on both ends. 

This is a therapy journal. It’s good to get it out of my mind and onto paper. It’s vulnerable to put it out there. But I can think of a few functional points for managers.

1. Decide what kind of manager you want to be. How are you going to respond to the individual? What’s your listening style?  How are you going to represent their case to the rest of the org? How do you keep the other chains moving? 

2. Learn what kind of manager your organization expects you to be. Are you in an org where tough cases get handed off to HR, with the expectation that you can re-engage when they’ve OK-ed it? Is HR partner even able to support this case? I’ve seen both extremes. 

3. What does executive buy-in look like? I’ve seen a lot happen because executives in your org and in HR functions display empathy in additon to having power. The relationships you’ve built with them prior pay off in circumstances like these. 

4. If you plan to manage for a while, read up on HR and immigration regulations. They’re bureaucracy when you don’t need them, and they turn into the determinants of a report’s way of life.

Be an advocate. Care the right amount. Define your personal style in doing so. Continue being accountable for your results. Be able to look at yourself in the mirror. It’s the job.