Resources
Grief Leadership FAQ
Things you might be wondering about.
The Concept
What is grief leadership?
Grief leadership is an emerging discipline at the intersection of grief and leadership. It equips leaders to recognize how loss shapes people, teams, and organizations, so they can respond in a way that serves both their culture and their performance. People still need to perform well. The company still needs to make money, and everyone still has bills to pay. Grief leadership holds both. The central idea is simple: grief is part of life, and therefore part of our work. Every organization will encounter death, caregiving, illness, divorce, disruption. “The question isn’t whether grief will show up at work. The question is whether leaders are prepared when it does.” Grief Leadership is also the title of my book, written for the person who is not grieving but suddenly needs to know how to help someone who is.
Is “grief leadership” about leading while grieving, or leading people who are grieving?
Both. I lived both at the same time. I was co-founder and CEO of a wealth management firm, and a small firm, so I was also in charge of HR. When my dad and my son were murdered, if someone was going to help me, it was going to be me helping myself. I wore a CEO hat sometimes and a griever hat other times, and I had to coach my own team on when they could talk about their children around me. Within a year, other CEOs started pulling me aside to ask how to handle a grieving employee. So grief leadership covers both sides: the leader who is grieving, and the leader responsible for someone who is. The skills overlap more than you would think. Both start with capacity, honesty, and presence.
What counts as grief at work? Is it only death?
No. I talk about life disruptions, because grief is much bigger than a funeral. Death, yes. But also divorce. A diagnosis. Caring for a parent with Alzheimer’s, which is grieving someone still alive, with no bereavement leave attached to it. Miscarriage. Pet loss. A child’s diagnosis is a grief event too: your employee whose son was just diagnosed with type 1 diabetes is disrupted, even though no one died. Even happy events can disrupt, like a house move, a wedding, or sending a child off to college. The common thread is that the rug gets pulled out and the person shows up to work different. And here is the part leaders miss: others may rank a loss as small. The person living it does not.
How is grief leadership different from what our EAP already provides?
Your EAP counsels the grieving person. Grief leadership trains everyone around them. Those are different jobs, and you need both. Here is the disconnect: someone comes back from a life disruption, HR hands them six free counseling sessions, and everyone hopes for the best. Six sessions are not enough, and hoping is not a plan. I know the gap personally. My own tragedy made international news, and my EAP never called me. What a griever needs from work is not a handoff. It is a lifeline. I call it the umbilical cord: the manager, the supervisor, the team staying connected and part of the healing process, rather than sending someone away. Grief leadership partners with your EAP. It does not replace it, and it never asks the manager to become a counselor.
Is grief leadership an HR program or a leadership skill?
It is a leadership skill. HR is a valued partner, but you cannot hand this to HR alone, because a grief event never stays inside one department. It belongs to the team, the adjacent teams, sometimes the clients. Everyone who interfaces with the grieving person needs to know what to do. That is why all of my education points at the manager, the supervisor, and the care team, never at the griever. We are not asking the hurting person to make a change or to tell everyone what they need. They do not know what they need. The manager is the one who sees the person every day, plans their workload, and sets the tone the team follows. That makes this a leadership capability, practiced where the work actually happens.
Is grief leadership a certification, a book, a methodology, or a company?
Three of the four, so let me untangle it. Grief Leadership is my book, a small guidebook a manager can read on a plane, with standalone chapters you can grab when you need one in the next couple of days. Grief leadership is also the discipline the book names: the methodology I have built over years through Workplace Healing, which includes the Human Recovery Plan, the ABLE conversation (Ask, Believe, Listen, Encourage), and manager workshops. Think of it the way you think of your disaster recovery plan. Every business has one for its systems. This is the human recovery plan, for your people. And Workplace Healing Inc. is the company I co-founded to carry that work. There is no certification. If that changes, you will hear it from me first.
Why Grief Leadership Matters
Why should a business care about grief? Isn’t grief a personal matter?
Grief is personal. It just refuses to stay home. Grief is part of life, and therefore part of our work; your employees bring their whole lives through the door every morning, and every organization will encounter death, caregiving, illness, and divorce. For a long time the working assumption was that people could leave their grief in the parking lot. COVID ended that. The entire world got a taste of the rug being pulled out at once, and we stopped pretending. Here is the business reality: an employee whose loss goes unacknowledged disengages, and often leaves, taking all the money, time, and relationships you invested in them. Acknowledgment costs almost nothing and builds real loyalty. So yes, grief is personal. How your company responds to it is entirely professional.
What does unsupported grief actually cost an organization?
Start with turnover, because it is the number that gets attention: employees who have a life disruption and receive no acknowledgment are significantly more likely to leave. Every one of them walks out with the money, time, and relationships you invested. Then there is absenteeism, and its quieter twin, presenteeism: the person is in the chair, but the brain is not. I lived that one. I came back with foggy brain, found black holes in my memory, and had to ask a coworker to walk me through a spreadsheet I had built myself. That fog produces errors, missed details, and lost productivity for months, not days. The bitter part is how cheap prevention is. Acknowledgment can be as simple as “I’m so sorry this happened.”
How does grief affect an employee’s performance and thinking?
Grief fog is not a metaphor. It is a real neurological event. Your brain has to compute that a person woven into your life is simply gone, and part of it keeps struggling to understand why they are not showing up, even while another part knows exactly what happened. Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor’s research on the grieving brain describes what I lived. I was a wealth management CEO who loved calculus, and after the murders I could not do math. In the middle of a client meeting I could not operate a worksheet I had helped build, and I had to ask a colleague to finish the meeting. “I didn’t come back 100% and I came back different.” Expect changed capacity, memory gaps, and exhaustion. Plan for them, and you keep the employee.
How long does grief affect someone at work?
Far longer than any leave policy. A griever can be foggy-brained for six to eighteen months. Meanwhile the typical bereavement policy runs a few days. Here is the pattern I see over and over, and lived myself: the person rushes back quickly, seems to be coping, and then crashes somewhere around six weeks, right when everyone around them has decided they must be fine. That is usually when support has already stopped. It is exactly when support is needed most. This is why grief leadership is a long runway, not a casserole week. Check-ins and ABLE conversations need to continue for months, and a good leader keeps an eye on the calendar too. An anniversary or a birthday can knock someone flat a year later. That is normal. Plan for it.
What happens when managers do nothing?
Let me tell you the story that started my company. At a holiday party in 2017, a bank president asked me when his grieving executive would be “back.” I asked what he had said or done for her. Nothing, he told me. He did not want to hurt her. That is the problem. You cannot hurt a griever by remembering. She will never forget her husband died; there is no way on this green earth I will ever forget that my dad and son are not living. What silence actually communicates is that no one cares. The employee shows up, gets greeted with nothing but work talk, and concludes the workplace has no room for what happened to them. Grievers who get no acknowledgment are significantly more likely to leave. Doing nothing is a decision. It is just the worst available one.
What are the most common mistakes managers make with a grieving employee?
The biggest mistake is saying nothing at all, out of fear of saying the wrong thing. The second is the phrase everyone believes is kind: “take as long as you need.” It sounds generous. What it actually does is dump the whole job on a person whose head is not on straight, as if they should go fix themselves and come back at 100%. You cannot fix death. I got that line myself, and five or six weeks later the same firm asked when they would have me back at 100%. I was floored. Third, the cliches: “he’s in a better place,” anything that starts with “at least,” “everything happens for a reason.” Every one of those minimizes the loss. What works instead is simple. Acknowledge what happened, ask what their capacity is today, and make everything around them as soft as you can.
Why doesn’t standard bereavement leave solve this?
Because bereavement leave covers the funeral, not the grief. Most policies offer three to five days. That is enough time to bury someone. It is nowhere near enough time to absorb that they are gone, and grief does not keep business hours. The fog can last six to eighteen months, and the hardest stretch often arrives around six weeks after the loss, long after the leave has ended and everyone has moved on. So the leave is not the solution. It is the opening scene. What actually retains the employee is what happens when they walk back in: a real conversation about capacity, a soft landing instead of a full workload, and a manager who keeps checking in for months. A policy gives people days off. Grief leadership gives them a way back.
What’s the risk of getting this wrong?
You lose the person twice. First you lose their engagement, then you lose them. An employee whose grief goes unacknowledged is significantly more likely to leave their employment and, as I put it, “go have their story somewhere else”. Think about what that means. The story of the worst season of their life, and how their employer responded to it, gets told at their next company, at dinner parties, in exit interviews, for years. Even the ones who stay are at risk. When someone comes back and gets greeted with nothing but work talk, they feel uncared for, and they are quietly driven out the door, or into doing the minimum. Grief is one of the few moments when an employer’s true character is on full display. People remember exactly what you did with it.
Why is this a leadership issue rather than an HR issue?
Because when a life disruption hits, the crisis does not report to HR. It lands on a team. It touches the person’s manager, their teammates, the adjacent departments, sometimes the clients. Leaders who try to compartmentalize it, to contain the explosion inside one department, forget that they cannot control feelings. HR matters, and HR should be in the room. But HR professionals are stretched impossibly thin, and they are not the ones sitting next to the grieving person every day. The manager is. The manager sets the workload, sees the capacity dip, and models for the whole team whether it is safe to acknowledge what happened. That is why all of my education points at leaders and managers. HR can administer a policy. Only a leader can walk a person back to work.
Who's Behind Grief Leadership
Who is Mindy Corporon?
Mindy Corporon is a speaker, author, and former CEO who teaches leaders what to do when grief walks into the workplace. She began her career as an office assistant at a brokerage firm, worked her way up through wealth management, and in 2007 co-founded Boyer & Corporon Wealth Management, where she served as CEO. On April 13, 2014, her father and her 14-year-old son were murdered in a hate crime at the Jewish Community Center in Overland Park, Kansas. Mindy led her firm through the years that followed, then left wealth management in 2018 to build what became her life’s work: the nonprofit SevenDays, which teaches kindness to overcome hate; Workplace Healing Inc.; the memoir Healing a Shattered Soul; and her new book, Grief Leadership. She serves as vice president of strategic development for Love Always and speaks nationally on grief, resilience, and leading through trauma.
What happened to Mindy’s family?
On April 13, 2014, Palm Sunday, my father, Dr. William Corporon, drove my 14-year-old son, Reat Underwood, to a singing audition at the Jewish Community Center in Overland Park, Kansas. In the parking lot, a white supremacist shot and killed them both. He then drove to Village Shalom, a nearby retirement community and murdered Terri LaManno, who is always part of our story. I arrived minutes later and found them. I share this here so the story can be ours to tell, and because my dad and Reat were so much more than what happened to them. My father was a small-town family doctor who loved being Popeye to his grandchildren. Reat was a brilliant, charming, compassionate Boy Scout. He loved to be on a stage, performing and singing. Reat sang to me in our kitchen that morning. Everything on this page exists because of them.
What is Workplace Healing Inc.?
Workplace Healing Inc. is the company I co-founded with Lisa Cooper in 2018 to solve the problem I lived: leaders do not know what to say or do when someone on their team has a life disruption. Our mission is to educate employers about onboarding an employee back to work after a grief event, because a griever who gets ignored is significantly more likely to leave and go have their story somewhere else. Over six and a half years we built workshops, research, and a software platform called the Human Recovery Plan. That software is dormant today; the company remains open, I am its majority shareholder, and I work with my board on finding the right home for what we built. “What we built is important and valuable and it’s going to find the right home.” In the meantime, the methodology lives on in my speaking and in Grief Leadership.
What is the book Grief Leadership about?
Grief Leadership is for the person at work who is not grieving but needs to know, quickly, how to help someone who is: the employer, the manager, the coworker. It treats grief leadership as an emerging discipline at the intersection of grief and leadership, equipping leaders to recognize how loss shapes people, teams, and organizations. The core idea: grief is part of life and therefore part of work. “The question isn’t whether grief will show up at work. The question is whether leaders are prepared when it does.” It is built as a guidebook. Each chapter stands alone, so you can read only the chapter you need, whether that is suicide loss or pet loss, and the whole book reads in under an hour. It draws on my lived experience and on research from Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor, Dr. George Kohlrieser, and Dr. Brene Brown.
When does Grief Leadership come out, and where can I get it?
Grief Leadership releases January 12, 2027, with pre-orders opening November 18, 2026. You will be able to order it from the major online booksellers, and signed copies and book details will always live on my website, mindycorporon.com. If you want the book for your leadership team or your organization, reach out through the contact page; bulk and event orders are available. Join the mailing list and we will tell you the moment pre-orders open.
How is Grief Leadership different from Healing a Shattered Soul?
They are two different books for two different moments. Healing a Shattered Soul is my memoir: the full story of April 13, 2014, our family, our faith, and how we learned to keep living. I called it Healing because a griever is never completely healed; healing is ongoing. I wrote it for grievers and for the people who love them, hoping they find their own inspiration and courageous kindness in it. Grief Leadership is a management book. It is not focused on my story, though my experience runs through it. It is a practical guidebook for the employer, manager, or coworker who needs to help a grieving person at work, built from the research and everything we learned at Workplace Healing. Read the memoir to understand grief from the inside. Read Grief Leadership to lead someone through it.
What qualifies Mindy to teach this?
I lived both sides of this at once. When my dad and son were murdered, I was the co-founder and CEO of a wealth management firm, and because we were a small firm, I was also HR. If someone was going to help me, it was going to be me helping myself. “My life was shattered by grief. And I had to come back to work and wear the grief hat and the CEO hat.” I have been an entrepreneur my whole career and have led people since college. Within a year of the tragedy, other CEOs started pulling me aside: I have an employee who lost her husband and she is not really back. What do I do? Nobody had trained leaders for this. My qualification is lived experience plus leadership experience, studied, tested, and turned into practice. I am not a therapist, and this is not therapy. It is leadership.
How the Methodology Works
How does the Human Recovery Platform work in practice?
Start with the 2 a.m. phone call. You manage Sarah, and you learn her child has just died. You have to talk to her within hours, and you are thinking: what am I going to say? What am I going to do? The Human Recovery Plan gives you a plan for exactly that moment, and for the weeks after. Before day one, you learn what not to say and what to say. Day one, you have an ABLE conversation: Ask, Believe, Listen, Encourage. Early days, you provide lunch for Sarah and her team, and you use her answers to the capacity question to hand off projects so nothing silently piles up. The team helps build the plan; do not ignore them. And throughout, “we give permission to have a head- and heart-based conversation at the same time”, because a griever still wants to be valued at work. This runs for months, not days.
What does a manager actually learn?
Two moves: recognize the state your grieving employee is in, then act well inside it. In practice that means a handful of concrete skills. Do not ask how they are feeling; ask how much capacity they have for work today, because your employee does want to work. Engage them quickly and give them space to talk about their person; if you avoid it, you may lose them. Then “acknowledge, acknowledge, acknowledge” through ABLE conversations: Ask, Believe, Listen, Encourage. You also get a starter script for the hardest moment: I don’t know what to say, and I’m not sure what to do, but I care about you and I’m sorry this happened. And you learn what to retire, starting with “take as long as you need,” which sounds generous but quietly hands the grieving person the entire burden.
Do managers need any background in psychology or counseling to use this?
No. If you can be present, you can do this. What I have learned is that “the griever needs some presence. They need someone to listen to them, they need someone who’s willing to show up.” Perfect words are not required, and the fear of saying the wrong thing is exactly what this training removes. I once had a manager of about 30 in a workshop who had never lost anyone, not even a pet, ask how she could possibly lead with empathy. The answer: empathy is a practice, not a credential. You practice putting yourself in their shoes, you skip “at least,” and you acknowledge what happened, which alone helps someone take the next step. You are never asked to treat grief. Know your lane: be present, support, and encourage professional help, whether that is your EAP, a counselor, or 988 in a crisis.
How long does it take to learn?
Less time than you think, because grief usually gives you no notice. The workshop form of this material runs 90 minutes, distilled from what began as a half-day program. My book Grief Leadership was deliberately built for speed: a boss can be handed it on the way to the airport and read the whole thing in 45 minutes to an hour, or read one standalone chapter, say the one on suicide loss, in the minutes before a hard conversation. So the first moves are learnable in an afternoon. The depth comes later, through the months of ABLE conversations and check-ins where the skill turns into instinct.
What if the grieving person is the leader?
That was me, so this question sits at the center of everything I teach. I ran a company while grieving, wearing the CEO hat some hours and the griever hat others. What worked was grieving on purpose. For a full year, “I would go to the Wesley Chapel at Church of the Resurrection and cry from seven to 8:30” on Thursday mornings, then get to the office at 9:30. When a client meeting got too painful, I excused myself, sobbed in the bathroom, and came back. I taught my team when they could talk about their kids around me. So: schedule your grieving instead of hoping it waits. Ask yourself the same capacity question you would ask an employee, and believe your own answer, even when the answer is that your role has to change, as mine eventually did. Get real support around you. Your team is watching how you carry it, and that is leadership too.
For Managers: In the Moment
How do I support a grieving employee?
Three things. First, don’t ask how they’re feeling. Ask instead, “how much capacity do you have today?” Your employee wants to work; they just can’t tell you they’re at thirty minutes unless you ask. Second, engage them quickly, even after a very significant loss. Reach out right away, with a phone call to their home, and say you’re sorry this happened and you’re here to help. If you give them no opportunity to speak about it with you, you might lose them. Third, acknowledge, acknowledge, acknowledge, with what I call an ABLE conversation: Ask good questions, Believe the answers, Listen, and Encourage. You cannot fix their grief. Nobody can. What you can do is make everything around them as soft as possible while they find their way back.
What should I say to a grieving employee?
Start with the sentence most managers are afraid to say: “I don’t know what to say, I’m not exactly sure what to do, but I care about you and I’m sorry this happened.” That’s it. That’s the opener. You don’t need perfect words; your griever needs presence, someone to listen, someone willing to show up. Then learn the loved one’s name before the conversation and use it. Say “I am so sorry Robert lost his life,” not “your loss.” Hearing the name tells us our person is remembered. And when you’re ready to go deeper, schedule fifteen minutes and ask for a favorite memory. There may be tears. Keep Kleenex handy. The tears mean you’re helping, not hurting.
What should I never say to someone who is grieving?
Never say “they’re in a better place,” unless the griever says it first. Never say “God needed another angel.” People said that about my son, and no, He did not. Never start a sentence with “at least” — “at least he had a long life,” “at least you have another child.” “At least” ranks a loss the griever does not rank. Skip “everything happens for a reason.” And the one managers love: “take as long as you need.” It sounds generous, but it hands a person whose head is not on straight the whole responsibility for fixing themselves and coming back 100 percent. If you’re stuck, “I’m sorry” always works. So does saying nothing and simply staying in the room. Let people be sad without guilt. Sad is correct right now.
How do I support a coworker who is grieving?
Have an ABLE conversation: Ask good questions, Believe the answers, Listen, and Encourage. Believe matters more than people think. After trauma, a person speaks raw from the heart, and believing them is empowering. Sometimes your coworker doesn’t need anything fixed; they need someone to listen. Hold the conversation privately but inside the workplace, so they reconnect to the space, and bring in HR if a one-on-one feels uncomfortable. Then do small, physical things. Take them for a walk; fresh air and presence heal whether you talk or stay quiet. Ask if you can bring up memories, then use their person’s name. And if emotion is not your gift, take a job anyway: get the lunch, put the flower on the desk. Everyone on a team has a role in the recovery, or defined as the re-entry to work.
What do I say when someone loses a parent?
I start honestly: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry that this happened.” Then I tell the truth about what’s coming, because “it is a long journey and it is not linear in any way.” There will be ups and downs, and that’s normal, not failure. I lost my own father, so I know the specific weight of this one; losing a parent is often ranked as the “expected” grief, and it still knocks people flat. Two things I offer someone new in this grief: find one or two things you’d be doing because of your parent and do them on their behalf. I eat sauerkraut and sausage because my dad loved them. You may cry through it for months; keep going, and it becomes pleasurable. And be quick to say yes when people offer help.
How much time off should a grieving employee take?
The honest answer: return when it feels right, not when someone else wants you back. Most people don’t get that luxury, which is why the employer’s job is a soft landing rather than a deadline. My own experience: “I didn’t go into the office for any kind of work at all for about three weeks.” Then I checked email for 30 or 40 minutes at a time, testing the waters. That gradual re-entry matters, because many people rush back immediately and then crash around six weeks later, right when everyone assumes they’re fine. If FMLA is available, know it doesn’t have to be taken all at once; stretched out, it becomes real flexibility for the weeks when grief actually hits. The conversation to keep having is not “when are you back,” it’s “how much capacity do you have today?”
This is general information, not legal or medical advice.
How do I handle work performance issues when the cause is grief?
Plan around capacity instead of disciplining around output. Grief fog is a real neurological event. At six weeks I couldn’t do the math in a spreadsheet I had built myself, and fog can last six to eighteen months. So ask the question directly: what is your capacity right now? If the answer is 30 minutes, plan exactly 30 minutes and respect it. In that half hour a foggy, motivated person can laser focus, explain their projects, and formally hand things off so the team owns the load. Give them a few tasks a day. My company did that for me, and it was exactly right; I wanted work for normalcy, but I’d have been a detriment if allowed to do too much. Hold your business need and your humanity at the same time. That’s the job.
When and how do I check in after the employee comes back?
Keep checking in far longer than feels necessary, because grief doesn’t run on the leave calendar. Day one is a conversation and a soft landing, but the crash often comes around six weeks, when the casseroles stop and everyone else’s world restarts. I cratered at six months and would have loved someone to say, “I bet you’re sad all over again.” So keep the ABLE conversations going for months: ask, believe, listen, encourage. Check capacity in the moment, not just weekly, because capacity ebbs within a single day. And put the dates on your calendar. The anniversary, the birthday, the holidays. I watched a supervisor unknowingly schedule a work trip on the anniversary of a spouse’s death and watch that employee crumble. A manager who remembers the date is a manager the employee never forgets.