George Kohlrieser, *High Performance Leadership in Strategy-Execution*

1. Know yourself, deal with grief. Try to see the meaning—and even the benefit—of grief. If you don’t, you’ll make life miserable for yourself and others.
2. It’s easy to hold yourself hostage by accepting your own limiting beliefs or the labels others place on you.
3. Loss is a major driver of behavior, even more so than gain.
4. Emotions aren’t meant to be held onto.
5. Never stop learning.
6. For some people, the future is nothing more than a memory of the past. You can rewrite it and rewire your brain.
7. Emotional blackmail caused by negative “self-talk” or by others can undermine creativity, performance, motivation, and self-esteem.
8. Look for signs that you’ve been “held hostage,” such as blaming others, being overly defensive, or feeling trapped or like a victim.
9. Take responsibility for your actions and refuse to become a victim of circumstances.

Let’s take a closer look at Principle 1.a.:

Know yourself; deal with grief. Try to see the meaning—and even the benefit—of grief. If you don’t, you’ll make life miserable for yourself and others.

“Grief is the process of being able to come back and reconnect. We need grief. It’s part of the human experience. Grief progresses through a number of stages:

1. Denial
2. Emotions: anger, fear, sadness—they’re all part of letting go
3. Mental acceptance, the shift in mindset
4. Emotional acceptance
5. Reaffirmation, reconnection, or connection with a new objective
6. Forgiveness
7. Gratitude
   
   

Gratitude means returning to the experience of the joy of life, or—in the case of work—to the joy of work. People who don’t enjoy their work are disconnected, unengaged; they’re in a negative state. What is the sorrow that fuels this? What is the loss? They are victims and have lost the joy of work. There are people who lose their jobs and never get over it. They feel criticized or betrayed and can’t move past it. That is a dangerous situation.

And then there are people who are passionate. They love their work. They find joy in their work. They have been able to move past their losses.
Every leader must be able to go through the grieving process following a loss. Only then can they return to the full joy of work and the full enjoyment of life. That is why loss and understanding the cycle of attachment are such crucial aspects of leadership. The key question is, how do you, as a leader, navigate this process, and how do you help others? This brings us back to Drucker’s definition: that as a leader, you must help people on their leadership journey, rather than simply using them as robots that produce results for you.

As a leader, the first thing you need to do is recognize whether you’re carrying sadness with you. Many people carry sadness without realizing it. They are held hostage by their sadness. It affects them in one way or another. Sadness affects your energy and your attachment behavior. Second, learning to be comfortable talking about human pain is important—to be able to talk about loss in words that feel right to you.

Leaders must first and foremost learn what the pain point is. What can we learn from hostage negotiations? Build a connection and listen to discover what loss lies behind the pain. What is the pain point? Most leaders feel uncomfortable talking about pain points. This brings us back to grief and how our brains work. “Some people base their decisions as much as 80% on the losses they’ve suffered in the past, the losses they’ll incur, or the losses they’re currently experiencing.” — George Kohlrieser, PhD, IMD Lausanne