What Leaders/Managers Can Learn from Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Leaders and managers are often the ones tasked with delivering hard news, a layoff, a diagnosis of failure, a team member's departure, while everyone around them expects composure and speed. Caitlin Doughty's Smoke Gets in Your Eyes describes a funeral industry built to move bodies out of sight quickly, so families never have to sit with discomfort. Workplaces do something similar with organizational pain: bad news gets managed through HR scripts and closed-door meetings designed to minimize exposure rather than build understanding. The book's insight, that direct proximity produces more honest outcomes than sanitized handling, is a direct challenge to how most leaders are trained to manage difficult moments.
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
The instinct to move pain out of sight fast
Just as the funeral industry is built to remove a body from view before anyone has to look too long, many organizations are built to remove hard conversations from view, routing them through paperwork and scripted language. This trains managers to see distress as something to process quickly rather than witness honestly.
A manager who defaults to a templated announcement or a rushed one-on-one during a layoff or a team crisis teaches the team that pain is something to be managed away, not acknowledged.
Before your next difficult conversation, sit for two minutes without a script and decide what you actually want the other person to hear directly from you.
Presence changes how people carry hard news
Doughty found that families who stayed close to a death, who saw and touched what was real, grieved more honestly than families who let strangers handle everything. Employees going through a layoff, a demotion, or a team dissolution respond the same way to a leader who stays present through the discomfort instead of delegating it entirely.
Leaders often protect themselves from discomfort by having someone else deliver bad news, then appearing afterward to manage the fallout instead of the moment itself.
This week, deliver one piece of difficult feedback or news yourself, in person, without forwarding it to HR or a deputy first.
Your institution's incentives are not your team's incentives
Doughty shows how funeral homes can quietly steer grieving families toward decisions that serve the business more than the family. Corporate processes, severance formulas, performance review timing, exit interviews, often serve legal and reputational interests first. A leader who assumes company process automatically serves the employee's dignity is not asking hard enough questions.
Leaders defer entirely to HR or legal language during a hard transition, assuming it reflects fairness rather than institutional self-protection.
Before your next termination or reorganization conversation, ask HR or legal directly what the process protects and whether anything more humane is still allowed.
Memento mori as a leadership habit
Doughty frames regular contact with mortality, memento mori, as a habit that reorders daily priorities rather than a morbid fixation. For a leader, that discipline might mean periodically asking whether this quarter's urgency reflects lasting priorities or just organizational noise. Leaders who keep a clear sense of what actually matters tend to spend less energy protecting appearances and more on decisions that hold up over time, for their teams and for themselves.
Staying present through a hard conversation can conflict directly with an institution's incentive to manage risk through formal process. A leader who goes fully off script to be honest may expose the company, or themselves, to real legal or political consequences. The way through is not choosing one side permanently, but knowing which parts of a difficult moment genuinely require institutional process and which parts only need your honest presence.
Name one thing, honestly
- Where have you let process substitute for a conversation you should have had yourself? - Whose distress have you managed rather than witnessed this year? - What would change in your leadership if you assumed your team notices every avoidance?
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
Before your next termination or reorganization conversation, ask HR or legal directly what the process protects and whether anything more humane is still allowed.