Change and grief

Usually grief is associated with someone dying or dealing with the end of a long term relationship. Elisabeth Kubler Ross’ book On death and dying (1969) is well known and her ideas have been extensively applied to work around managing change in organisations

When a change is proposed, the reaction of many people is not dissimilar from a grieving process. But what are people grieving for?

In my view – what people are missing is the future they thought they were going to have and the certainty that they had around their place in that future.

This suggests that managing change is very much an emotional process as well as everything else.

As a leader, how will you handle that emotion? What ‘rites of passage’ will be needed to help everyone ‘move on’?