What Leaders/Managers Can Learn from Advice for Future Corpses
Managers are trained to handle almost everything through process, a policy for leave, a script for hard conversations, a form for benefits. Sallie Tisdale, a longtime palliative and hospice nurse, argues in Advice for Future Corpses that plain, unsentimental knowledge about dying is itself an act of care, something no policy alone provides. Leaders will eventually sit across from an employee whose parent is dying, or face their own family's decline while still running a team. The instinct to manage the situation with a form and a sympathy card leaves people unsupported. Tisdale's clarity gives leaders language for what policy cannot cover.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Reading the real signal, not the deadline
A dying person's body follows a general, recognizable pattern, less appetite, less energy, systems slowing over time. For a manager, understanding that pattern in a general way helps you interpret an employee's sudden distraction or absence as something ordinary and human, not a performance problem to fix with more oversight.
Managers default to treating a distracted employee as a productivity issue, scheduling a check-in about output instead of asking what is actually happening at home.
This week, replace one status check-in with a direct, private question, how are things outside work, and actually leave room for the answer.
Caregiving is labor your org chart does not show
An employee caring for a dying parent or partner is doing a second, unpaid job on top of the one you assigned them. That work is physical, logistical, and exhausting, and it does not respect sprint deadlines or quarterly targets, no matter how motivated the person is.
Managers praise employees who never mention what they are carrying, which quietly punishes honesty and pushes caregiving further into hiding.
This week, redistribute one piece of a caregiving employee's workload openly, so covering for someone is normal practice, not a favor done in secret.
You do not need to know hospital systems, just ask better questions
Hospitals, hospice programs, and advance directives each run on their own logic and paperwork, and most employees have never navigated them before. You are not expected to be an expert, but you can model the habit of asking direct questions instead of guessing.
Leaders assume HR handles all of this, so they never ask an employee what specific support, not sympathy, would actually help right now.
This week, ask one employee going through this directly what kind of flexibility would help, rather than offering a generic gesture.
Presence changes what kind of leader you are
This clarity is not only for crisis moments, it reshapes daily leadership. Leaders who understand what dying and caregiving actually involve tend to build teams with more honesty and less performative toughness, because they stop expecting people to hide what is happening in their lives. That shift toward presence over appearance changes meetings, deadlines, and how people trust you, long before anyone on the team is facing an ending.
The caregiving cluster asks you to give an employee real slack, while the institutional pressure of running a team asks you to keep deliverables on track regardless of who is struggling. Leaders often resolve this by quietly overloading everyone else, which just spreads the strain instead of absorbing it. A better approach names the tradeoff openly with the whole team, adjusting scope and timelines rather than pretending capacity has not changed.
Name one thing, honestly
- When someone on your team is struggling privately, what signals would you actually notice? - Have you ever hidden your own caregiving or grief at work to seem unaffected, and what did that cost you? - What would change on your team if talking about mortality were not treated as unprofessional?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
This week, ask one employee going through this directly what kind of flexibility would help, rather than offering a generic gesture.