Responding to Loss with Courage and Compassion

A Thanksgiving meditation for leaders in a troubled time

Thanksgiving 2024

RESPONDING TO LOSS WITH COURAGE AND COMPASSION

A Thanksgiving meditation for leaders in a troubled time

Greg Thomas

We all have experienced loss. We have all felt the blues. We’ve all suffered. This shared reality, heightened by the uncertainty millions feel about the next four years, presents an opportunity for mature leadership.

Mature leaders lean into loss rather than ignoring, suppressing, or denying it. Loss breaks our heart, forces us to go within to confront our shadows and fears, our denials, our guilt, our wounds. To arise from the ashes of grief and loss with new understandings and renewed dedication requires inner strength. It takes inner maturity to gain wisdom and perspective from the blues of loss.

Mature leadership embodies strength of character and emotional depth. Mature leaders confront loss and harness empathy and compassion, especially in times of crisis, when fear and anxiety rise to a fever pitch.

When leaders allow their hearts to stay broken open, they’re able to recognize that the suffering they encounter every day among their employees, colleagues, and investors is universal. . . All loss threatens the love, safety, and belonging of even those who hold power.

—Jerry Colonna

The Power of Vulnerability

Author Brené Brown is famous for her work on vulnerability and courage. Her enrichment of the discourse on emotional maturity opened the way for my receptivity to the work of executive and leadership coach Jerry Colonna. His book Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up was one of my favorite leadership titles five years ago.

Colonna’s professional achievement in the mid-1990s at the early-stage investment program Flatiron Partners in New York City, followed by the trappings of success at the private equity arm of JPMorgan Chase, was belied by inner turmoil derived from the lingering effect of a troubled childhood. While reading, I was astonished by his candor, rendered in beautiful prose and abiding insights into the human condition. His journey inward, painful and difficult, became a narrative of a gentle warrior, who came out on the other side of grief and loss to help other leaders on their journeys to resilience and equanimity.

Near the end of the book, Colonna makes a key distinction between false grit and true grit. False grit is brittle, a delusive tendency to act as if you don’t feel pain when you get hit, which leads to stubborn behaviors in denial of inner, interpersonal and, often, outer reality. True grit, rather, “acknowledges the potential of failure, embraces the fear of disappointment, and rallies the team to reach and try, regardless of the potential of loss.”

That’s mature leadership informed by the blues.

Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many—This is not prophecy, but description.

—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Political Dimension

Regular readers of my newsletter, Tune In To Leadership, will recall that I’ve riffed on how in jazz as well as contemporary organizational practice, shared and distributed leadership is a more agile and resilient approach than the old command-and-control model. Another aspect of distributed leadership is sharing and distributing losses.

In the model of Adaptive Leadership pioneered by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky of the Harvard Kennedy School, resistance to significant changes within organizations occurs not due to fear of change per se, but because of fear of loss. Loss has a political dimension that mature leaders confront. “When change involves real or potential loss, people hold on to what they have and resist the change.”

A key to leadership, then, is the diagnostic capacity to find out the kinds of losses at stake in a changing situation, from life and loved ones to jobs, wealth, status, relevance, community, loyalty, identity, and competence. Adaptive leadership almost always puts you in the business of assessing, managing, distributing, and providing contexts for losses that move people through those losses to a new place.

Ronald A. Heifetz, Marty Linsky, and Alexander Grashow, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World, pp. 22-23

Far From Easy, But Necessary

The emotional intelligence and thoughtful, visionary political engagement required by mature leaders isn’t easy. Yet considering the demands of our time, the uncertainty and dangers of our political moment, and the tsunami of personal, social, and economic losses many have experienced since the pandemic, the burdens and rewards of leadership must be embraced by ready, willing, and able men and women who enact and illuminate courage.

Now’s the time for mature leaders to step up to the challenge and potential within the blues of loss.

For those who celebrate it, my wife Jewel and I wish each and every one of you a Happy Thanksgiving.

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Greg Thomas is CEO of the Jazz Leadership Project, a firm that uses the principles and practices of jazz music to enhance leadership success and team excellence in organizations such as JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, Center for Policing Equity, TD Bank, and Google. He is Co-Director of the Omni-American Future Project and Co-Editor of The Omni-American Review. In October 2021, he co-produced the two-day broadcast, "Combating Racism and Antisemitism Together: Shaping an Omni-American Future," which may be viewed here and here. He blogs at Tune In To Leadership, where a version of this essay originally appeared. He co-authored Reimagining American Identity with his partner, Jewel Kinch-Thomas, and Amiel Handelsman. He is currently working on his memoir, The Making of An Omni-American: My Journey from Race to Culture to Cosmos. He has published previously in the Journal of Free Black Thought here, here, here, here, and most recently, here.