MANAGEMENT COUNSEL: LAW OFFICE 101 By: Cathy Shuck East Tennessee Children’s Hospital
A FRIEND INDEED: HOW TO SUPPORT A GRIEVING CO-WORKER Two articles in last month’s DICTA offered insights on how to support yourself when you are dealing with grief. But how do you support someone else who is grieving? Most people must return to work shortly after a loss, even though they are still in the early stages of grief. Offering support to a grieving co-worker can be awkward at best and difficult at worst. In an excellent recent article in the Harvard Business Review,1 author Sabina Nawaz offers insights into how to support a grieving co-worker. Although every situation is different, Nawaz offers tips to help get over the awkwardness and reach out in a way that is meaningful. Nawaz groups the ways we can support someone who is grieving into two broad categories: Being and Doing. “Doing” is something that comes naturally to most lawyers. We organize meal deliveries, we cover motion hearings and meetings, and we make donations. Concrete actions come naturally to us. And they are certainly helpful ways to support someone experiencing a loss. For example, when my father was killed in a car crash several years ago, one of the attorneys at my firm worked with my assistant to cover everything on my calendar for the week. I made one phone call to let her know what had happened, and she took care of the rest. That act of Doing helped me to get through the initial shock and deal with my family responsibilities, without having to worry about missing deadlines or returning client calls. In my experience, the key to “Doing” in a helpful way is to relieve the person in need of having make specific requests or decisions, especially after a sudden death or other loss. If you know your co-worker needs something, just take care of it. “Being” can be harder for lawyers, but it is an equally important way to offer support. Being means simply being present and available to someone who is grieving. Here are some suggestions: Less is more: Reach out to let the person know you are thinking of them, but don’t do it in a way that requires an action or even a response from the person who is grieving. Just say, “I’m thinking of you,” or “I’m holding you in my thoughts,” or let them know that you’re praying for them. A short note, email, or voicemail lets the person know you care without requiring them to do anything. As anyone who has experienced a loss knows, it can be overwhelming just to deal with yourself and your family, let alone dealing with anyone else. Just “Be” for a moment: If you are offering support in person, say something and then sit quietly for a few moments. Maybe the person will say “thank you” and move on, or maybe the person needs to cry, or tell a story, or share a memory. Just allowing space for the person to respond to you – in whatever way works for them in that moment—can be helpful. If the person wants to talk, listen: Sometimes the person will just want to focus on work or on the task at hand, but sometimes the person will want to talk. Grief, it has often been observed, does not move in a straight line and the “right” time to offer something can be hard to predict. So if you can, just be available. I will be forever grateful to a law school classmate who happened to ask me about my mother one day several weeks after her death, and then stood patiently in the hallway
listening to me talk about her for over an hour. For whatever reason, it was extraordinarily helpful to me, in that moment, to have someone listen. Don’t force it, but be aware of listening opportunities if they occur. Don’t try to fix it: As lawyers, we are in the advice business. So it is very tempting to tell someone who is grieving what they should do, or what worked for you, or about the experience of someone you know. But grief isn’t something you can fix. If the person asks for help or advice, by all means offer it. But don’t burden the person with “help” that they may not want. If you need to fix something, fix dinner. Don’t ignore the loss: People often avoid acknowledging a loss because they are afraid of saying the wrong thing. While it is true that some sentiments are more helpful than others, simply acknowledging the person’s loss is almost always preferable to ignoring it. If you don’t know what to say, just say “I’m sorry about your loss.” And don’t think you are “reminding” the person of their loss. You don’t forget that you have lost a parent, a spouse, a child, or anyone important to you. You eventually regain your ability to function, but you never forget. As Maya Angelou said, “[a]t the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.”2 Show your grieving co-worker that you care; that will be enough. 1 Sabina Nawaz, How to Offer Support to a Grieving Colleague, HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW, April 3, 2017. 2 This quote has been attributed to numerous sources, see, e.g. http://quoteinvestigator. com/2014/04/06/they-feel (visited 9/10/17), but I like the version attributed to Maya Angelou, which one of my co-workers keeps taped above her desk.
About this column: “The cobbler’s children have no shoes.” This old expression refers to the fact that a busy cobbler will be so busy making shoes for his customers that he has no time to make some for his own children. This syndrome can also apply to lawyers who are so busy providing good service to their clients that they neglect management issues in their own offices. The goal of this column is to provide timely information on management issues. If you have an idea for a future column, please contact Cathy Shuck at 541-8835.
October 2017
DICTA
13