Whenever change occurs, there’s a process of grief originally identified by Elizabeth Kubler Ross. In spite of the fact that a person can rather quickly logically/rationalize their way through a change, anyone who has ever gone through a divorce knows that the emotional side of healing takes much longer and doesn’t follow a very cleanly defined process for any two different people.
The only change I’ve made to the original five stages of grief as published by Ms. Ross is that I changed the word “Depression” to “Sadness” as I find that clinical depression is not necessarily a stage in grief (unless one gets stuck in “Sadness”).
A leader understands that both himself/herself and his/her followers will need to both be given room to move through the stages of grief – avoiding the tendency to react to them while they’re in any one of the stages.
What a leader does watch for is any of his/her followers getting “stuck” in any of the stages where they remain for more than a couple of weeks without any movement forward in the cycle. That’s when intervention might be necessitated in order help the individual reframe the situation for a more productive reaction.
Categories: Response To Change
Magic Club Leadership Resources 