Grief as a Teacher: How Losing Two People I Loved Is Reshaping the Way I Mentor, Lead, and Implement Workday
How grief transformed my approach to leadership, mentorship, and creating truly human-centered workplaces.
Loss has a way of rearranging the furniture in your mind. Two people close to me died recently, and the grief has been both sharp and strangely clarifying. It has forced me to slow down, to listen differently, and to rethink what it means to show up as a leader—not just in life, but in the work I do every day across Workday Talent & Performance, Learning, People Experience, and Peakon Employee Voice.
Grief is not something we talk about openly in corporate spaces. We talk about “capacity,” “bandwidth,” and “resourcing,” but rarely about the emotional realities that shape how people show up. Yet losing these two people has taught me more about leadership, mentorship, and psychological safety than any certification, methodology, or project plan ever could.
And it is changing the way I lead.
Grief Has Made Me a More Present Mentor
When you lose someone, you start paying attention to the things you used to rush past—the pauses, the hesitations, the moments when someone says “I’m fine,” but their voice betrays them.
As a mentor, I have always cared deeply about the people I support. But grief has sharpened that instinct. It has made me:
- Listen for what is not being said
- Ask better questions
- Slow down enough to notice when someone is carrying more than their workload
In my work as a Senior Partner and Area Lead, I mentor consultants across levels—people navigating complex implementations, demanding clients, and the pressure to perform. My losses have taught me that mentorship is not just about developing skills. It is about creating space for people to be human.
Sometimes, the most powerful thing a mentor can do is say, “You do not have to hold all of this alone.”
Grief Has Deepened My Commitment to Psychological Safety
Psychological safety is not a buzzword to me. It is the foundation of every healthy team, every successful implementation, and every meaningful human interaction.
Losing two people I loved reminded me that everyone is carrying something—grief, fear, stress, uncertainty—and most of it is invisible. In Workday implementations, especially in Talent & Performance and Peakon Employee Voice, we talk about continuous listening, feedback cultures, and human-centered design. But psychological safety is what makes those systems actually work.
Grief has made me more intentional about:
- Normalizing vulnerability
- Creating environments where people can speak up without fear
- Modeling honesty about my own limits
- Recognizing when someone needs support, not scrutiny
Psychological safety is not soft. It is strategic. It is what allows teams to innovate, escalate issues early, and deliver high-quality solutions without burning out.
And it starts with leaders who are willing to be human.
How This Shows Up in Workday Implementations
Workday is, at its core, a system built around people—their growth, their learning, their performance, and their voice. My grief has changed the way I approach implementations across the products I lead:
1. Talent & Performance
I design performance processes that honor the whole person, not just their output. My recent losses have reinforced the importance of:
- Compassionate performance conversations
- Realistic goal-setting
- Development plans that consider life outside of work
Performance is not just about metrics. It is about humanity.
2. Workday Learning
Learning is deeply emotional. People learn best when they feel safe, supported, and seen. Grief has made me more attuned to the emotional experience of learning—especially during change-heavy implementations.
3. People Experience (PEX)
PEX is where empathy meets design. My grief has made me more committed to building experiences that reduce friction, increase clarity, and support employees during moments that matter—including the difficult ones.
4. Peakon Employee Voice
Peakon is built on continuous listening. Losing two people has made me even more passionate about helping organizations use Peakon not just to measure engagement, but to understand the emotional undercurrents of their workforce.
When people feel safe to speak up, organizations do not just perform better—they become more humane.
Grief Has Made Me a More Human Leader
Leadership is not about perfection. It is about presence.
My losses have taught me to:
- Lead with more empathy
- Mentor with more patience
- Design with more humanity
- Listen with more intention
- Build teams where people feel safe to be themselves
I have always believed in human-centered design, continuous listening, and compassionate leadership. But grief has moved those beliefs from my head into my bones.
It has made me a better leader not despite the pain, but because of what the pain has taught me.
I am sharing this because grief is universal, but we often treat it like a private defect instead of a shared human experience. I am sharing it because leaders need to model what it looks like to be human at work. And I am sharing it because the work we do—implementing systems that shape people’s careers, development, and well-being—is too important to do without heart.
If we want to build workplaces where people thrive, we have to start by acknowledging the full spectrum of what it means to be human.
Even the parts that hurt.
