This post is part of the “Where Leadership Gets Hard” series—based on over 25 years of coaching leaders through real problems. No theory, just what I’ve seen work.
In most organizations, there’s an unspoken rule about what belongs at work and what doesn’t. Performance, projects, and deadlines belong. Grief, diagnosis, divorce, illness, and fear don’t. You leave those at home.
It’s a tidy arrangement. It’s also a fiction.
Over three decades of coaching, I’ve walked alongside leaders navigating their parents’ death, their child’s progressive illness, their spouse’s mental health crisis, their own serious injury, adoptions that fell through, immigration processes that dragged on for years, and marriages that were quietly coming apart. None of these things stayed home. All of them shaped, in real time, how these leaders led.
You can pretend otherwise. It doesn’t work.
What One Coachee Showed Me
A department manager I worked with had lost his mother the year before. He had barely paused for the grief — he had too much work, a struggling project, a team that needed him. He kept moving and, at one point, he had recently forgotten to eat for several days in a row. Not knowing why.
I knew why. So did he, eventually. The grief hadn’t gone anywhere. It had just gone underground, and it was running his body without his permission.
The organization around him had no idea. To them, he was a high performer who seemed a little tired. To me, in the sessions, he was a man in slow-motion crisis, trying to lead through something he hadn’t been allowed to feel.
What Leaders Need
I’m not arguing that you should drag your whole personal life into every work meeting. That would be exhausting for everyone. What I’m arguing is something more modest: leaders need at least one structured space where the personal can be acknowledged as part of the professional picture, not apart from it.
For some leaders, that space is a coach, for some, it’s a therapist, or it’s a spouse who understands the work. It can be a trusted mentor or a peer group. The specific form matters less than the fact that it exists.
Without that space, the personal leaks into the professional in less useful ways. It becomes a short fuse with a direct report. The decision was made in exhaustion. The absence from a key meeting. The burnout six months later. The resignation that blindsides everyone.
For Leaders Navigating Something Hard Right Now
If you’re reading this while carrying something heavy — a sick parent, a child in crisis, a marriage under strain, a health scare — a few things worth remembering.
- You are not weaker for the weight you’re carrying. You are a full human being living through a real thing. That is not a performance issue.
- You need at least one person in your life who knows what’s actually happening. If that person is not at work, fine. But someone, somewhere, needs to know.
- The work will probably still get done. It may not get done as well as you’d like for a while. That’s okay. This season will not last forever, and the organization that can’t give you grace for one hard chapter is not the organization that was going to grow you for the long run.
- When you come out the other side, you’ll lead differently. Deeper. More patient. More attuned. The hard chapters don’t just cost you. They shape you.
What are you carrying right now that nobody at work knows about — and do you have at least one space where it’s allowed to exist?
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