What If the Performance Problem Is Actually a Grief Problem?
When a team goes through layoffs, restructuring, or a leadership shift, the human brain registers this as an ending. Not a transition. Not an adjustment. An ending. And while leaders often expect their people to absorb it quickly, logical awareness doesn't override emotional registration. The brain reads the disruption as instability and it responds accordingly: our higher-order functions begin to go offline, and what's left is a nervous system oriented toward survival, not performance.
And I don't mean this metaphorically.
Research by Naomi Eisenberger at UCLA found that social pain such as exclusion, rejection, or relational loss, activates the same neural regions as physical pain. Specifically the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula. In other words, The brain doesn't file "I was laid off" in a different category than "I was hurt." It processes both as threats to survival. Which means when we restructure a team and expect people to absorb it over a weekend and show up Monday ready to execute, we are asking the brain to sprint on a sprained ankle.
Research on stress and attachment shows that after significant loss events, sleep is disturbed, attention narrows, and executive function temporarily declines. In high-performing environments, these biological responses are routinely misread. Reduced focus becomes "disengagement." Irritability becomes "attitude." Caution becomes "lack of resilience."
And then we act surprised when performance declines further.
Every culture that has ever navigated loss built a container for it —Organizations are the only institution that skipped that chapter.
When attachment bonds experience this kind of rupture, the brain and body don't instantly adapt, and the speed of recovery is not simply a matter of mindset or grit. This is where the instinct to "keep moving" can quietly backfire. George Bonanno's longitudinal research on loss and resilience challenges the assumption that suppressing grief accelerates recovery. His work found that the people who fared best over time were not those who moved on fastest, but those who were able to oscillate. These people could acknowledge the pain while also maintaining forward function. Resilience, in his framework, isn't the absence of grief. It's the flexibility to hold both. For teams, this has direct implications: discouraging employees from naming what they've lost may actually be lengthening the recovery arc, not shortening it.
This maps closely to what grief researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut describe in the Dual Process Model: the idea that healthy adaptation to loss isn't linear, but involves moving back and forth between confronting the loss and orienting toward restoration. Neither pole alone is sufficient. It's the movement between them that builds capacity. Resilience, then, isn't the absence of grief. It's the flexibility to hold both — and organizations that don't create space for that oscillation aren't accelerating recovery. They're interrupting it.
Recovery is supported by two well-established factors: social connection and coherent meaning-making. Teams that are able to acknowledge what has ended, speak honestly about it, and strengthen relational bonds tend to stabilize more effectively than teams that suppress the rupture and accelerate performance pressure. This is not a radical idea. Infact, humans have always known it. Shiva. The Irish wake. The Māori tangi. Every culture that has ever navigated loss built a container for it — a sanctioned pause, a gathering of community, a moment of collective acknowledgment before asking anyone to move forward. Organizations are the only institution that skipped that chapter.
The cost of misreading a grief response as a performance problem isn't just human. It's organizational. You intervene on the wrong thing, you apply pressure where you need to apply support, and you extend the very instability you're trying to resolve. Before you label it a performance issue, ask whether you're measuring someone who is still metabolizing an ending and whether your response to that is making it harder or easier for them to find their way back.
