Unseen and Unspoken: Grief and Burnout Among Today’s Leaders

Why Organizational Change Leaves a Deeper Impact Than We Admit

By Dr. Jennifer Harden

Originally published on Medium on July 16, 2025. Updated website edition September 29, 2026.

Organizational change has a schedule. A restructuring is announced. Roles are reassigned. A department closes. A new strategy takes effect.

The people living through those changes rarely have such a clear timeline for adjusting.

A leader can understand why a decision was necessary and still feel the loss it creates. They may support the new direction while missing a team they spent years building. They may accept a new role while questioning where their experience, influence, or sense of purpose now fits.

Those reactions deserve attention. When we ask leaders to guide others through change, we also need to consider what the change asks them to carry.

What has changed, and what has been lost?

A revised organizational chart shows who reports to whom. It cannot show every relationship, expectation, or sense of belonging disrupted along the way.

Consider a director whose department is merged with another. On paper, the director remains employed and has meaningful responsibilities. Yet the team they developed is dispersed, familiar partnerships are gone, and decisions they once made now require someone else’s approval.

From the outside, the transition may appear successful. From the director’s perspective, there is much more to work through.

That example is illustrative, but the question behind it is practical: what might a leader be grieving even when the organization sees progress?

Naming a loss does not mean rejecting change. It gives people a more accurate starting point for understanding their response to it.

Listening to leaders’ experiences

My doctoral research explored the lived experiences of 10 leaders with work-related unresolved grief. Their accounts brought attention to the emotional and physical strain of workplace loss, gaps in organizational support, changes in professional identity, and varied ways of coping.

This was a qualitative study intended to understand participants’ experiences. It does not establish how common those experiences are across all leaders, or prove that grief causes burnout. It does, however, invite us to ask questions that a project status report may never capture.

What did this transition mean to the person responsible for leading it? What support was available? What remained unresolved after the organization moved forward?

Making room for grief without assuming every struggle is grief

Leadership strain can have many sources. Workload, unclear expectations, conflict, limited resources, and prolonged uncertainty all deserve consideration.

Grief and burnout should not be treated as interchangeable explanations. A leader’s exhaustion does not, by itself, tell us what they have experienced or what support they need.

Rather than assigning a label, we can begin with a conversation. Ask what has become harder, what the person misses, and what would help them do their work sustainably. Listen for the difference between a practical obstacle that needs fixing and a loss that needs acknowledgment. Sometimes both are present.

Support needs to be specific

An invitation to “reach out if you need anything” can be difficult to use when a leader does not know what help is available or whether asking will affect how others view them.

Organizations can make support more concrete by offering a private conversation, reviewing responsibilities after a transition, or creating time for leaders to reflect together. These are starting points to consider alongside the person’s needs and the organization’s circumstances.

Useful questions include:

• What part of this change has been most difficult for you?

• Which responsibilities or expectations need clarification?

• What support would make the next few weeks more manageable?

The conversation should also clarify who will hear the information and what follow-through is possible. Leaders should be able to choose how much they disclose.

Acknowledgment matters, but it cannot substitute for addressing a workload or working condition that continues to cause strain.

A question for leaders themselves

If you are navigating change, consider a question that leaves room for an honest answer:

What am I carrying from this transition that I have not yet had room to acknowledge?

You might name a relationship, a role, an expectation, or a version of your professional future. You may also discover that your most immediate need is rest, clearer boundaries, or a conversation about responsibilities.

You do not have to resolve everything at once. Identifying one concern can help you choose a next step and decide whose support would be useful.

Continuing the conversation

These questions are central to my book, Leading Through Organizational Grief: What Leaders Carry During Organizational Change, published by Harden Leadership Press.

The book introduces the Leadership Grief Response Model™, a compass for reflection across four shifts: suppression toward acknowledgment, self-sufficiency toward seeking support, surviving toward sustainable leadership, and guarded toward grounded leadership. These shifts are nonlinear, rather than a prescribed sequence or timetable.

My aim is to help leaders and organizations develop language for experiences that can otherwise remain difficult to discuss, and to consider more thoughtful ways of responding.

As you think about your own organization, ask: have we made room to understand what our leaders are carrying, or have we only asked whether the work is getting done?

Purchase the paperback on Amazon.

To discuss consulting or speaking, email contact@drjenniferharden.com.

This expanded draft builds on the original Medium article.

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