Leading HR After Personal Loss
Melissa Lock · Chief of Culture and Talent Development · Schurz Communications, regional media organization with nearly 1,000 employees
Summary
- Melissa Lock lost her 19-year-old son, Tabor, in a car accident in 2023. She managed culture at a nearly 1,000-person organization. She thought grief support was tactical. It is not.
- Grief brain is real. Traumatic loss disrupts memory, slows word fluency, and impairs decision-making. It is neurology, not weakness, and it persists for months.
- Grief is a hot cup of liquid you carry everywhere. You cannot put it down. Triggers spill it, and that is not instability. It is evidence of love.
- Permission-based culture beats policy-based culture. Employees need to hear that hard days are allowed. Policy tells them what the floor is. Permission tells them they can use it.
- Relationships built before loss are the foundation of everything. You cannot build them in the ten-minute call when someone tells you about a death.
Who This Episode Is For
HR leaders, culture teams, and managers who want to understand grief from inside a profound personal loss. It covers what genuine care looks like, and why policy alone is not enough.
What You'll Learn in This Episode
- Why losing a child is categorically different from other losses and what that means for how managers respond.
- What grief brain is, why it persists for months, and how to recognize it before it becomes a performance issue.
- How the hot cup of grief metaphor reframes what continuous support actually looks like.
- Why permission is more powerful than policy and what granting it sounds like in real conversations.
- Why "let me know if you need anything" puts the burden on the wrong person, and what to do instead.
- How investing in relationships every day creates the foundation leaders need when loss arrives.
Key Takeaways
Losing a Child Is Not Like Losing Anyone Else
Melissa had lost her mother and grandparents before Tabor died. She thought she knew grief. Losing her son was different in kind, not just degree. The pain was physical. She thought she was having a heart attack when she received the news.
- The loss of a child is categorically different. It physically hurts in a way most people have not experienced.
- Grieving parents often feel like they cannot breathe. The shock is total even when death was expected.
- This does not mean other losses are small. But child loss requires a different depth of response and care.
- Many grieving parents fear most that their child will be forgotten. Saying the name out loud addresses that fear directly.
- Understanding this depth helps managers match their response to what the employee is actually carrying.
Grief Brain Is a Neurological Response, Not a Performance Issue
Melissa is a neurologist by training. After losing Tabor, she experienced grief brain and then researched it. Traumatic loss changes neural connections, disrupts memory, slows processing speed, and reduces word fluency. She did not fully recognize the pattern in herself until eight months after his death.
- Grief brain is neurology, not weakness. It affects memory, attention, decision-making, and the ability to process information quickly.
- Grief shows up at work through slowed speech, difficulty focusing, and memory lapses that can look like disengagement.
- Word fluency decreases. Employees may speak more slowly and struggle to retrieve words they know well.
- This persists for months. Melissa did not recognize the full impact in herself until eight months after Tabor's death.
- Managers who understand grief brain can respond with accommodation and adjusted expectations instead of performance management.
Grief Lives in a Cup You Carry Everywhere
Melissa's metaphor: grief is a giant cup of hot liquid you cannot put down. Some days you have insulation. Some days you do not. When you move forward, into work, into a family event, you risk spilling it. When someone causes the grief to spill, that is not a problem. It is proof of love.
- Grief does not end when someone returns to work. It travels with them into every meeting and every conversation.
- Triggers are unpredictable: a song, someone asking how many children you have, a milestone you were supposed to share.
- The degree of response varies. Sometimes it is a brief stinger. Sometimes it overflows completely.
- Emotional response is not instability. It is evidence of connection and love, and it should be honored rather than avoided.
- The fear beneath many of the hardest days is that the person who died will be forgotten. Saying the name addresses that.
Permission Outperforms Policy for Grieving Employees
Before Tabor's death, Melissa thought grief support was tactical: paperwork, time off, funeral planning. After, she understood that grief is too fluid for policy to contain. Employees need permission: to have a hard day, to step back from a meeting, to say this is a Tabor day without justifying it.
- Grief does not fit in a checklist or stay inside standard bereavement leave categories.
- Employees need to hear it is okay to not be okay. That rarely comes from a policy document.
- Permission also covers flexibility: working from home, stepping out of meetings, adjusting expectations during hard stretches.
- The timing of grief is unpredictable. Melissa needed more support on the one-year anniversary than in the first week.
- Managers who build permission into everyday culture make it easier for employees to use it when they need it most.
Relationships Built Before Loss Make the Difference
Melissa's core principle: invest in relationships every day, long before anything tragic happens. When loss comes, the manager who already knows the person can show up in a real way. You cannot build that relationship after the news arrives.
- Relationships are not built after loss. They need to exist before it so they can hold when everything else collapses.
- One level deeper in everyday questions builds more than routine check-ins: "What was the best part of your weekend?" creates a different conversation than "How was it?"
- Remember what people tell you and bring it back later. That shows you were actually listening.
- Saying the right thing in a hard moment is easier when you already know the person. Generic responses read as hollow.
- Supporting a grieving employee well starts in every ordinary conversation. Doing something specific, dinner on Tuesday, covering a meeting, registers as real care.
About Melissa Lock
- Chief of Culture and Talent Development at Schurz Communications, a regional media organization with nearly 1,000 employees in northern Indiana.
- Lost her 19-year-old son, Tabor, a nursing student and wrestler at the University of Indianapolis, in a car accident in June 2023.
- Neurologist by training, which shaped her firsthand understanding of how traumatic loss changes the brain and affects behavior at work.
- Co-hosts The Notice, a leadership and technology podcast, with more than 30 episodes.
- Honors Tabor through A Day to Be Great, a volunteer initiative supporting food rescue and food banks.
Connect with Melissa on LinkedIn →
Frequently Asked Questions
What is grief brain and how does it affect employees at work?
Grief brain is a neurological response to traumatic loss. Neural connections change, memory is disrupted, processing speed slows, and word fluency drops. These are symptoms of loss, not character flaws. Melissa Lock recognized the full pattern in herself eight months after losing her son. Managers who understand this can respond with accommodation rather than performance management.
Why is losing a child different from other types of loss?
The loss of a child is categorically different. It physically hurts. Melissa felt like she was having a heart attack when she got the news about Tabor. Colleagues need to understand this loss is unlike any other. Calibrating support requires recognizing that depth first.
What does permission-based culture mean in a grief context?
It means employees feel safe naming a hard day without having to explain or justify it. Policy defines the floor. Permission is what employees actually use. Managers who signal that permission is real and follow through build trust that holds during the hardest moments. It sounds like: your job is secure, you can step back today, we have you covered.
Why is "let me know if you need anything" unhelpful for grieving employees?
It puts the burden on the person least able to carry it. Grieving employees are already managing decision fatigue, disrupted cognition, and logistics they never planned for. Asking them to form a request is too much. Offer something specific: "I'm bringing dinner Tuesday at 6." That requires a yes or no, not a plan.
How can managers build relationships that prepare them to support loss?
By investing every day, before loss happens. Ask one level deeper: "What was the best part of your weekend?" Then remember what they say and bring it back. When crisis comes, the relationship is already there. You can show up meaningfully because you already know the person.
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