TED@BCG 2020

Read The Script:

About three years ago, I lost my daughter. She was sexually assaulted and murdered. She was my only child and was just 19. 

As the shock wore off and the all-consuming grief took over, I lost all meaning and purpose in life.  Then, my daughter spoke to me.  She asked me to keep living. If I am not around, she will have one less heart to continue to live in. 

With that, my partner Susan and I started our desperate climb out of that deep hole of trauma and loss. In that journey back to the land of the ‘living with grief’, we unexpectedly found a rather unlikely but very helpful ally.

My Work. 

At first, I wasn’t even sure if I should go back to work. I had a lot of self-doubt – as a senior executive, I am responsible for thousands of employees and billions of dollars. After all the trauma, is my mind still sharp and creative enough for the job? Can I still relate to people? Can I get past the resentment and regret I felt about all that time I spent working instead of being with my daughter? Is it fair to leave Susan home alone dealing with her grief and pain? 

At the end, I made the decision to go back to work. And I am very glad I did. 

We all experience grief and loss in our lives. For most of us, that means, at some point, getting up and going back to work while living with the grief. On those days, we will continue to carry the incredible burden of sadness, but also a hope that work itself can restore us that much-needed feeling of purpose. 

For me, work started out as a productive distraction, but evolved to being truly therapeutic and meaningful in so many ways.

And, my return to work proved to be a good thing for the company as well. I know I am not indispensable, but retaining my expertise proved to be beneficial, and my return helped the teams avoid disruptions and distractions. When you lose the most precious thing in your life, you gain a lot of humility and a very different perspective free of egos and agendas – and I am a better co-worker and a leader because of that. 

For all the good that came from it though, my ‘re-entry’ into work was far from easy. The biggest challenge was having to separate my personal and professional lives completely. You know… ok to cry all you want early in the morning, but slap a smile on the face promptly at 8 and act as if everything is the same as before until the work day is over. Living in two very different worlds at the same time, and all the hiding and pretending that went with it – it was exhausting and made me feel very alone.

Over time, I worked through these struggles, and I gained the confidence and the acceptance to bring my whole self to work, and as a direct result of that, find joy again in it. During that hard journey back to work, I learned the power of having a ‘culture of empathy’ in the workplace. Not sympathy, not compassion – but empathy. I came to believe that a workplace where empathy is a core part of the culture is a joyful and productive workplace, one that inspires a great deal of loyalty. 

I believe there are three specific things a company can do to create and nurture a culture of empathy in the workplace in general and support a grieving employee like myself in particular: One is to have administrative policies that let an employee deal with their loss in peace without worrying about logistics. Second –  provide return-to-work therapy to the employee as an integral part of the health benefits package. Third – provide training for all employees on how to support each other – “empathy training” as I call it. 

In the first category of policies to help deal with a loss – the most important policy is regarding time off. It’s true that there’s no expiration date to grief and time cannot undo a loss – But time away from work helped me figure out how daily life can coexist with grief. We don’t want a grieving employee to have to cobble together vacation days, sick days, unpaid leave, and whatever else. A formal time-off policy that also allows the employee to come back to the same role they had before the time-off will make a real difference. Personally, I was so grateful to come back to my old role, the familiar work and people providing a lot of comfort.  

The second category of help companies can provide is return-to-work therapy. Therapy helped me muster the courage needed to bring my whole self to work and merge those two parallel worlds I was straddling. A couple of years ago, I spent a weekend scattering my daughter’s ashes in the Pacific – it was a horrific time.  When I returned to work that following Monday, one of the first meetings was to arbitrate a very passionate debate on – office wallpaper!! I needed therapy to figure out how to be considerate of others’ normal lives when my own life is so very different.  Therapy helped me give myself permission to be vulnerable even if vulnerability is not often seen as a strength in the corporate world. When seemingly unrelated and trivial things triggered deep feelings of sadness right in the middle of the work day, therapy helped me deal with them. And, when painful anniversaries and events try to hijack the day – like when I got a call at work from the Texas rangers regarding an arrest in my child’s death, – therapy helped me stay productive while still remaining true to the unique realities of my life. 

During the course of the return to work therapy, I realized that many of those learnings would have been very helpful for me all along in my work life, independent of my loss. And that realization brings me to the final category of things companies can do: provide empathy training to the employees. I know it sounds odd, but empathy can be a learned behavior. For some, showing empathy comes naturally –  a colleague came to see me a while ago – I had this electronic photo frame on my desk rotating through pictures of my daughter – as she was leaving, she simply said – “Tilak, when you are ready, I would love for you tell me the story behind each of those pictures”. She didn’t ignore my sadness, she didn’t dwell on it – she simply gave me permission to be myself and made a real human connection. That was her version of empathy, of which there are many. 

But not everybody is a natural with empathy. And traditional work cultures don’t always emphasize empathy. I remember one person said “I can’t believe you made it back to work – I don’t think I could have done it” –boy, did that make me feel awful – Is my love for my child not deep? Another person took it upon themselves to be my spokesperson guiding other folks on how and when to interact with me – all without my knowledge or consent. A few folks just maintained absolutely stoic and deafening silence – that in some ways trivialized my loss. Some spent a ton of water cooler time speculating if I would be any good at all at work coming back from such a devastating loss – time that would have been better spent figuring out how to help me instead. And then there was that moment where I had to console someone very distraught, and they said to me “I understand your loss. My dog died last year”. 

Empathy training can help avoid the inherent awkwardness in dealing with loss. It can give people the confidence to bring their whole self to work, and others the awareness to accept them for who they are – and together be better for it. Empathy training can help people acknowledge that a co-worker is a different person after a life-changing loss, and just ask the simple and direct question “What would you like me to do differently to help you?”. 

There will come a day when I finally see my little girl again. And as she always did, she is going to make fun of me for working so much. But she knew she was always the number one priority, and she will be thankful that work helped Dad live a purposeful life after she was gone. 

It is such an incredible relief that the loss I experienced is not as common – a child dying ahead of the parent is absolutely the most nightmarish and unnatural thing to happen – but loss in itself is not uncommon. When done right, returning to work can help us survive loss and grief. And, companies can help do it right by fostering a culture of empathy in the workplace. It is not a burden or a lot of effort or expense, and creating a workplace with a culture of empathy will prove to be one of the best investments a company can make. 

Thank You. 

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