Leading Through Disruptive Life Events at Work: What Managers Need to Know
Liesel Mertes · Founder · Handle With Care, workplace grief and crisis consultant
Summary
- Disruptive life events range from death to diagnosis, caregiving, divorce, and addiction. The strain typically begins long before any leave is requested and continues long after employees return.
- Most workplaces rely on a short leave policy and silence. Neither matches the reality of how grief affects concentration, memory, and decision-making for months at a time.
- Good manager response requires full presence, grounding language, and concrete offers. Open-ended invitations to ask for help put the burden back on the person least equipped to carry it.
- When companies handle these moments well, employees describe them as living their values. When they do not, employees leave within a year.
Who This Episode Is For
People managers, HR leaders, and executives who want practical tools for supporting employees through disruptive life events. Covers what these events cost organizations, where support breaks down, and what a prepared manager does differently from one left to improvise.
What You'll Learn in This Episode
- Why disruptive life events affect employee performance for months and why early, concrete support matters more than policy.
- What good manager response sounds like in practice, including the specific language that opens the conversation rather than closing it down.
Key Takeaways
What Disruptive Life Events Actually Do to Employees at Work
Liesel Mertes founded Handle With Care after losing her daughter Mercy at eight days old. She saw how unprepared workplaces were for grief and built a consulting practice to change that. Her training is grounded in what she observed missing when it mattered most.
- Disruptive life events are broader than death. Terminal diagnosis, caregiving crises, miscarriage, divorce, and addiction all qualify. The common thread is that they consume emotional and cognitive resources the employee cannot redirect away from work.
- The strain usually starts before the formal event. PTO, focus, and emotional capacity are already depleted by the time leave is requested. Managers who wait for the event to pass before engaging have already missed the window where support would have had the most impact.
- Grief does not end when the employee returns. Concentration, memory, decision-making, and social energy are all affected for months. Expecting performance to normalize quickly is a set-up for both the employee and the manager.
Why the Default Workplace Response Falls Short
The most common workplace response to a disruptive life event is a leave policy and silence. Liesel describes a pattern she has seen across industries: the manager avoids the conversation for fear of saying the wrong thing. The employee reads that silence as abandonment. The relationship is damaged before either person intended it.
- A 3-5 day policy assumes grief operates on a calendar. It does not. Most companies offer a short leave window and then expect a return to normal. That expectation does not match how loss actually works.
- Vague offers feel supportive but put the burden back on the employee. Take all the time you need is not a plan. It asks someone with depleted cognitive resources to manage their own support without guidance.
- Cliches and silver linings cause harm. They signal that the manager is uncomfortable and wants the conversation over. The employee registers their experience as an inconvenience.
- Colleagues are watching. How a grieving teammate is treated sends a message to the entire team about whether the company's stated values are real. The cost of a poor response extends beyond the individual.
What Prepared Managers Do Differently
Liesel trains managers with real language and specific offers because improvising under emotional pressure rarely goes well. The goal is not a perfect conversation. It is a manager who shows up ready to receive rather than to fix.
- Give full attention. No multitasking, no checking the phone. The manager's presence is itself a signal that this moment matters.
- Use grounding language when unsure: I am not sure what to say, but I am here and I appreciate you telling me. That sentence does not require answers. It opens the conversation and communicates that the manager is not running from the topic.
- Make concrete offers rather than open-ended ones. Move a non-essential meeting. Reassign part of a project. Set a specific follow-up: let us reconnect in 48 hours. Specificity removes the burden from the employee.
- The language that lands well during grief does not require eloquence. It requires a manager who has decided that acknowledgment is the goal and prepared for that before walking in.
- Ask about communication preferences before sharing anything with the team. Mark key dates in your calendar: one month out, holidays, anniversaries. Check in before the employee has to ask.
How Strong Leaders Build the Conditions for Good Support
Liesel draws a clear line between a manager doing their best and a leader creating the conditions where managers are equipped. Individual responses matter. Whether they are consistent or accidental depends on what leadership has built.
- Leaders who publicly validate that disruptive events affect work give managers permission to act and employees permission to ask. That public stance changes what is possible in the culture.
- Modeling vulnerability shifts the environment. When senior leaders share their own experience with loss, they create permission for everyone below them to do the same.
- Manager training that includes real scripts and scenarios produces different behavior than training built around policy. Managers who are left to improvise default to avoidance.
- Frame support as part of business performance and values, not a soft skills optional. Turnover is expensive. Disengagement is expensive. Thoughtful manager behavior during a crisis is an investment with a measurable return.
The Business Case Is Not Separate from the Human One
Liesel does not separate the human argument from the business argument. She uses both because both are true. The underlying reality is the same: employees who feel abandoned during a crisis leave, and replacing them costs far more than supporting them.
- Without sustained support, employees often leave within a year. Unacknowledged grief, reduced capacity, and a felt sense that the company did not show up combine into preventable turnover.
- What happens in the weeks after an employee returns shapes their relationship with the organization as much as the initial conversation. The follow-through is where trust is built or quietly lost.
- When workplaces handle grief well, employees describe the company as living its values. That kind of loyalty does not come from a benefits package. It comes from being seen during the hardest season.
About Liesel Mertes
- Founder of Handle With Care, a consulting practice that equips managers and leaders to support employees through disruptive life events at work. Events covered include death, diagnosis, caregiving, divorce, and addiction.
- Founded the practice after losing her daughter Mercy at eight days old and seeing how unprepared workplaces are for grief and crisis. Her training is built from that experience and years of research and application.
- Delivers workshops, manager training, and online courses for organizations. Works in partnership with Bereave to ensure employees know their company means it when it talks about support.
Connect with Liesel on LinkedIn →
Frequently Asked Questions
What counts as a disruptive life event at work?
Any event that significantly disrupts an employee's emotional, cognitive, or physical capacity. This includes death and bereavement, terminal diagnosis, caregiving responsibilities, miscarriage, divorce, and addiction. What they share is that they consume resources the employee cannot redirect away from work, often for months after the initial event.
Why do managers avoid talking to employees who are grieving?
Fear of saying the wrong thing. Most managers have never been trained in grief support and default to avoidance. The silence that follows typically causes more damage than an imperfect conversation would have. Employees read silence as abandonment, not as caution.
What should a manager say when an employee shares difficult news?
Start simple. I am not sure what to say, but I am here and I appreciate you telling me. That sentence communicates presence without requiring answers. Concrete offers follow: move a meeting, reassign part of a project, set a specific follow-up time. Specificity matters more than the right words.
How long do disruptive life events affect employee performance?
For months, and often longer. Grief affects concentration, memory, decision-making, and social energy well past any leave period. Managers who expect performance to normalize quickly after return are setting up a performance problem where a support conversation would have been more effective.
Why do employees leave jobs after experiencing a loss?
Because they feel abandoned. Unacknowledged grief, depleted capacity, and a sense that the company did not show up combine into preventable turnover. Employees do not leave the loss. They leave the silence that followed it.
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