Suzanne Jabour - The Hidden Cost of Grief in the Workplace (Part 2)

The first job of a leader is to define reality.

And the reality is this: grief is present in every workplace.

In Part 2 of Danny’s conversation with grief expert Suzanne Jabour, they move from theory to practice — exploring what it actually looks like for leaders to acknowledge grief, create emotional safety, and build resilient cultures.

This episode challenges the outdated belief that professionalism means emotional detachment. Instead, it makes the case that courage, vulnerability, and self-regulation are modern leadership essentials.

Key Takeaways:

• Grief is always present. Loss from restructures, pivots, missed goals, and change impacts teams — even when no one names it.
• Hidden grief carries a financial and human cost. Turnover, presenteeism, disengagement, and burnout often stem from unacknowledged emotion.
• Stoicism is not strength. Strong leadership today requires vulnerability, self-regulation, and emotional courage.
• Acknowledgment reduces drama. Naming emotions briefly and directly creates psychological safety and allows teams to move forward productively.
• Small shifts build culture. A simple check-in at the start of meetings can normalize emotional awareness without derailing performance.

Resources & Mentions:

Guest: Suzanne Jabour

• Website: https://www.suzannejabour.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzanne-jabour/

Host: Danny Ceballos – Unleashed Consulting
https://unleashedconsult.com/

Connect with host Danny Ceballos:

• Website: https://unleashedconsult.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannyceballos/

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The Best Boss Whisperer is a leadership podcast for individuals who want to lead effectively without burning out or becoming the bottleneck that stifles their team’s decisions, momentum, and productivity.

© 2026 Danny Ceballos / Unleashed Consulting

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the Best Boss Whisperer. The first job of a leader is to define reality. And here's the uncomfortable reality. Your team is carrying more unprocessed emotion than you think. In this episode, Suzanne Jabour and I go deeper. We talk about the myth of the stoic leader. We talk about emotional inventory. And we talk about how five honest minutes can eliminate hours of hidden drama. Here's your three whispers to listen for. The first one is stoicism is not strength. Number two is unacknowledged emotion becomes culture. And number three, naming a feeling reduces its power. All right, let's get to it. Super excited today. We are continuing on a conversation with my good new friend and colleague, Suzanne Jaboor. We're going to continue with that conversation and we're going to move on to why is it important for leaders and managers to acknowledge grief and what can we do with it?

SPEAKER_02 1:01

It's important for a bunch of reasons. They really fall into two categories. One is financial, one is people-driven. The latest figures I could find price the cost of hidden grief in the workplace at about $125 billion annually in the US. The cost is in lost productivity, it's in turnover, it's in extended leaves, it's in all of those kinds of things. So those people are really struggling. And they're struggling because in the workplace there's no support. There's a lack of ability to have a conversation. There's some specific, easy things we can do to help them. And if we can start to talk about that bigger pool of grief, you know, that really gives us a rich place to practice these conversations and to start building our muscle, you know, adding to our toolbox and our mindsets and our, you know, comfort with being uncomfortable, that then allows us when those big losses of a loved one happen, or there's something really catastrophic that happens in your community or your business, you have a little more comfort. You have a little bit of an ability to pull some words out that maybe you've tried before that aren't those cliches and platitudes that we all instinctively know don't work anymore. We need to be building a new way to talk about this because our way of not talking about it, which is most of our go-to right now, doesn't work.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so I've worked with leaders before that are so wonderfully empathetic that the work doesn't even get done. So where is there a line and how how do we define the reality?

SPEAKER_02 2:33

You know, to talk to the folks who still are feeling like there's this expectation that they are that kind of stoic, professional, you know, um, it's the best word that's coming to me is hard. And I know we don't intend for us to feel hard, but to me, that's what that approach feels like now. I don't want to work for someone for whom I'm just a cog in their machine. That doesn't appeal to me. So, to the people who feel like their job as the boss is to be stoic, to be strong, to be um supportive, like in that go-getter kind of way, I just would encourage you to experiment a little bit and see how maybe having a tiny bit of vulnerability and a tiny bit of deeper honesty about what's true shifts things. Because it shifts things for the better. And when you make that shift and you allow other people to make that shift, what happens is you have now this really robust culture of safety, of understanding, of connectedness. And that's what allows us to then exponentially build.

SPEAKER_01 3:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:41

Because we're more in tune with each other. We're more in tune with what's real.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:46

Because that stoic facade is a facade. None of us are stoic, right? That's what we need people to step into. Not that I've put on this facade of, you know, closedness of like everything is fine, because everything's not fine.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

Love it, love it, love it. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that, how that could look? So I know you and I talked a little bit about a tool that you, I think you developed called the grief inventory. Can you talk a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_02 4:14

Yeah. So it's a great place to start because you have had to do all of that pivoting. So what you do is you start there and just make a list of all of the losses. And it will bring up some of the, as you're doing the inventory, of course, it brings back some of the feelings that you had at the time. That's inevitable, and healthy. And then we want to look at like how does all of that make us feel today? Because what we want to be responsive to is what's in the space now. We can't change all that stuff we had to do or that happened. We might look at it and be grateful. We might look at it and see mistakes. We were gonna look at it and we're gonna feel all kinds of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

Yes, right.

SPEAKER_02 4:51

That's okay.

SPEAKER_01 4:52

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 4:52

But we want to look at that from where we are now. When we look at what we had to do, are there things we had forgotten about that we didn't even acknowledge in the moment because we were moving so fast? We want to find those. We want to find the things that kind of got subsumed under bigger things.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Right?

SPEAKER_02 5:12

So you're learning from each other and building connection about what happened. And then you're also learning as a leader what struck people, and then you know going forward what might strike them the next time. Right? Oh, that didn't really hit me that hard, but that really hit you. So I need to be conscious as a leader that those kinds of things really hit you and make sure that I'm giving you the space to be hit by them and keep going. Right. But you can't keep going and not acknowledge it because that's where it becomes malignant. It's because we're not acknowledging it, talking about it and letting it flow through. We're all putting it in our backpack of unexpressed, unacknowledged stuff. And that backpack right now is bursting at the seams. We're seeing it. We're lashing out at each other in every way possible. And that's a lot of unprocessed junk. So we have to start small. We're not gonna start with the grief inventory. We're gonna start with this thing went wrong.

SPEAKER_01 6:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 6:10

I have some feelings about that. I feel frustrated and excited for what's possible coming out of it. Do you feel anything that you want to share? Great if you, okay if you do, okay if you don't, and we care. Like we can start with those baby steps.

SPEAKER_00 6:25

So, what would you let's say either you or the leader, if they're doing that on their own, when do they say, maybe this is the self-regulation piece of this is, you know, when is okay, that's enough. It's time to take our hand off the hot stove of grief and move on.

SPEAKER_02 6:42

Yeah, it's such an interesting question. And it's a it's a separate question if we're talking about supporting someone who's grieving the loss of a loved one. That's a whole different conversation. When we're talking about the grief and the losses that happen in the workplace that aren't related to people, it's about acknowledging it and moving on.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

Yes. Okay, thank you.

SPEAKER_02 7:01

You acknowledge it and move on.

SPEAKER_01 7:03

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 7:03

You know, we launched this product, it didn't go the way we wanted. Yes. We're gonna pivot and regroup. We have that debrief meeting, right? We're all we've all said in lots of those. If we start that meeting with five minutes, is plenty, two is probably enough. Of this thing happened, it didn't go the way we wanted. I'm feeling all kinds of things about that. I want to express those because I know that that's healthy. And I'm gonna share them with you. If you want to share with us as well, that's great. And if you don't, that's okay. Whatever feels safe. But for me, I feel safe saying that I'm so frustrated that this didn't go the way that we want, that our hard work and all of our efforts didn't explode the way we wanted them to. And I care about you all. You're all so important to this company and valued members of this team. And I don't want anyone to feel insecure about their position because this product didn't go the way we wanted. Because what I need you now to do is acknowledge how you feel, whether you're comfortable saying it or not, and bring your very best work to what we're gonna do next.

SPEAKER_00 8:01

I love it. Love it, love it, love it. And that's it.

SPEAKER_02 8:03

And then we move on.

SPEAKER_00 8:04

Perfect.

SPEAKER_02 8:05

It's about acknowledging it and then moving on. Because what that happens is then we create a culture where it's okay to just say, I'm really frustrated today.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 8:15

I'm so annoyed with this thing that's happening with my computer, with you know, whatever it is, with this customer that I had to deal with, with this client that canceled, with this product that didn't go the way we wanted, with this appointment that fell through, with this conference that fell apart, whatever it is. And I'm so excited about this thing that came together. And because we also don't really celebrate a very healthy way either. Especially, I think women are worse. Men are much better at acknowledging when they've done great things than women are. There's a whole bunch of reasons for that. That's a different episode. But we don't celebrate very well either. So you can make it the norm that when the meeting starts, we have a check-in.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Yeah, I love that. Right?

SPEAKER_02 8:56

We do it in schools, we do it with kids, we do it with in our family. We can do it in our workplace because we're with those people more than we're with anybody else.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 9:05

That's where we spend our time. And to pretend that we don't have emotions about that is part of what's holding us down. It's feeling heavy. It's feeling, you know, when I talk to HR professionals, they sometimes can't name it, which is fine. Most of us can't name grief. We can't find it. Hopefully, this is helping you to be able to see it a little bit better. But they'll describe it as being there's like this heaviness and this like muckiness in the space. That's unacknowledged emotions. That's what that muckiness is. It's unacknowledged emotion. So if you can find a way to just acknowledge it, that will start to lift, that will start to shift it. And then, yes, down the road, you can do a grief inventory, you can do deeper exercises, set up some policies, set up some working groups. Like there's all kinds of ways people can set this up. But it all starts with simple acknowledgement.

SPEAKER_00 9:54

Awesome.

SPEAKER_02 9:55

Name it and move on.

SPEAKER_00 9:57

Yeah. Um, and I I and I just want to, I know we're gonna run out of time here, but I want to make sure folks know, and I think you'll say the same thing, you know, it we're not great about naming emotions. No. Even though there's a cabillion emotions that we could name. We're just a so to it, like you said, to look for you called an emotion wheel.

SPEAKER_02 10:16

Yeah, feeling wheel, emotion wheel.

SPEAKER_00 10:18

I have something called grok cards. Folks check it out, and you can see, and it's great because there's all these cards with all these different emotions. You can literally just throw them on the on the on the table.

SPEAKER_02 10:31

Oh, I love that. And everyone pick one.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 10:34

Which one's touching, which one's reaching you today, right? And that's really important just in our last seconds, because I know we want to keep our time so good, you know, so people are paying attention are able to listen this long. It's really important to get beyond the mad, sad, glad trifecta. We need to get to the deeper, it's frustration, it's disappointment, it's despair, it's joy, it's exuberance, it's you know, pride, whatever it is. Mad, sad, glad's not deep enough.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

That's the Facebook emoji argument, right? Yeah, that's not gonna work for yeah, real life.

SPEAKER_02 11:07

No.

SPEAKER_00 11:07

Suzanne, thank you so much. Is there anything else that you want to kind of leave us with? I'll give you the last, the last minute. What what are your last messages?

SPEAKER_02 11:14

Yeah, I what I would leave leaders with is we need you. We need you to step in. We need you to step up. If it's uncomfortable for you, we need you to be uncomfortable. We need these conversations and we need these safe spaces, and it has to come from the leaders.

SPEAKER_00 11:31

Awesome. Yeah, love it, love it, love it. All right, everybody. Thank you so much, Suzanne.

SPEAKER_02 11:36

Thank you. So great to talk with you.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

You too. I know. Let's end here. Now, whisper number one was avoiding emotion doesn't make it disappear. It makes it louder. Now, whisper number two is leaders don't create safety by being hard. They create safety by being steady. And whisper number three, a five-minute check-in can save five months of disengagement. So if this conversation resonates, don't just nod. Try it. In your next meeting, name one honest emotion and watch what shifts. This is Danny Savirs with the best boss whisperer. Small whispers and big breakthroughs. I'll see you next time.