What Leaders and Managers Can Learn from Finding Meaning
Marcus ran the Tuesday operations meeting the same way he had for eleven years, except now he started it differently. Two years after losing his mentor, the man who'd promoted him twice, he'd begun opening with a single question: "What's one thing worth protecting this week?" It wasn't in any training manual. He'd started asking it, almost by accident, the way his mentor used to ask it of him. His team didn't know where the habit came from, and he didn't explain it. He noticed, though, that meetings ran calmer since he'd started, that people spoke up sooner about problems instead of burying them. He wasn't trying to keep his mentor alive through a management technique. He'd simply kept a piece of how the man led, because it worked, and because it still felt like his.
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
Recovering Isn't Redeeming the Loss
Some leaders come to believe that because their team ultimately grew stronger after a loss, the loss itself must have served some purpose. That belief can quietly become part of how they talk about the team's history. Finding meaning doesn't require or support that conclusion; a team's resilience afterward says nothing about whether the loss was worth anything at all.
A leader tells a new hire the loss "taught the team what really matters," implying the loss was a net positive for the organization.
When telling the team's history, describe what changed without describing the loss itself as a cause worth having.
Your Meaning Isn't on the Org Chart's Timeline
Well-meaning HR partners, boards, and peers often suggest a leader should be "back to normal" by a certain point. Whatever meaning a leader eventually finds arrives on its own internal schedule, not one set by return-to-work policy or a peer's account of their own faster recovery.
A leader forces themselves to sound resolved in a leadership offsite because enough time has "officially" passed since the loss.
Separate what you say publicly about your readiness from what you privately still feel, and give yourself permission for those to differ.
Watch for the Quiet Shifts in How You Lead
Meaning for a leader rarely arrives as one transformative insight. It shows up as a new habit in a weekly meeting, more patience with a struggling employee, or a renewed closeness with a colleague you'd drifted from. These small, cumulative shifts are usually more reliable signs of meaning than any single moment of clarity.
A leader keeps waiting for a defining "aha" and overlooks the smaller changes in how they already manage people.
Ask a trusted colleague what they've noticed change in your leadership style since the loss, and simply listen.
Keeping Their Influence Without Freezing the Team
Leaders sometimes worry that changing a departed mentor's or colleague's processes means dishonoring them, so they leave systems untouched long after they've stopped serving the team. A continuing bond doesn't require preservation of every method; a leader can keep the relationship's influence alive in how they treat people, coach juniors, or handle conflict, while still updating the systems that person originally built and left behind.
The instinct to keep a mentor's practices exactly as they were can conflict with the reality that meaning often shows up as changed priorities. A leader honoring someone's memory too literally may resist small adaptations that would actually reflect what they learned from that person, mistaking preservation for connection.
Name one thing, honestly
What is one habit in how you lead now that you inherited, consciously or not, from someone you lost?
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
Ask a trusted colleague what they've noticed change in your leadership style since the loss, and simply listen.