George Kohlrieser: Leading Through Grief
Unresolved grief is sapping energy and leadership capacity - and could even be damaging your health, along with the health of your organization.
Some data to consider from the McKinsey Quarterly:
It’s estimated that around 1/3 of the leading executives around the world are impacted by unresolved grief
Unresolved grief is estimated to be costing US organizations in the ballpark of $75 Billion a year
Much of this cost is due to us not having the skills to identify, accept and take the necessary steps to integrate grief into our lives.
George Kohlrieser is a distinguished business professor, psychologist, hostage negotiator and award winning author - with his most recent book “Care to Dare” - being listed as one of the best business books of 2013.
George is also the Founder and Director of the "High Performance Leadership program" at IMD in Switzerland - arguably the leading executive education school in the world - where The Financial Times has ranked IMD as the #2 Executive Education program in the world - and #1 MBA program worldwide.
After training more than 7,000 of the world’s top executives, George has witnessed the impacts of unresolved grief - including how it can make leaders cold hearted, emotionally detached and unable to bond and inspire people.
On the contrary, George is very clear that when grief is addressed in healthy and deliberate ways, that it can be transformed into inspiration and creativity.
Thank you for being part of re-humanizing our workplaces.
Love, Jono
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George [Excerpt]: We had a CEO of Swisscom here in Switzerland who was taking Swisscom to all levels of success, and he got a new board chairman who was so micromanaging. His leadership was a bullying, domineering kind of attitude, and it put the CEO in a box. He described it as a cage, and when he was upset, he wouldn't say to people, he wouldn't label it. He would just get on his bicycle and ride. And build a wall around his heart. After four months, he took a rope and killed himself. That did not need to happen. You see, they were a hostage to themselves, to their pain, to their grief. And what we really have to do is make leaders aware that when they are in stress, they have to be aware that behind that is in all probability. Grief.
Jono [Intro]: Thanks for joining me today and welcome to this podcast. A podcast that's dedicated to exploring the threads of what I like to call beautiful leadership. In particular, I'd like to welcome you to this, the fourth episode in the Medicine of Grief Season. The season where we're exploring how grief can be a gateway to transforming our lives and our leadership, and even our culture. Today's conversation is of particular interest for anyone who's working as an executive or in a leadership role, because today we're gonna be exploring how grief plays such a huge impact in how we show up as leaders, whether we are actually aware of it or not.
And here's some interesting data. Did you know that it's estimated that around one third of the leading executives around the world are impacted by what's called unresolved grief. Yeah, that's one third. It's also noted that unresolved grief is estimated to be costing US organizations in the ballpark of 75 billion a year. Yeah, that's 75 billion with a B. And much of this cost is really due to us not having the skills, the skills to identify, accept, and take the necessary steps to integrate grief into our lives. So you might be asking, what does this mean for me? Well, it probably means that it's very likely that you or many of your colleagues are struggling from unresolved grief and that it's actually sapping your energy and your leadership capacity. And could even be damaging your health along with the health of your organization.
And that's why I'm thrilled to be having this conversation today with one of the world leaders in incorporating grief work into executive education. Our guest today is George Kohlrieser. George is a distinguished business professor. He's a psychologist. He's a hostage negotiator, and an award-winning author with his most recent book, Care to Dare being listed as one of the best business books of 2013. George is also the founder and the director of the High Performance Leadership Program at IMD in Switzerland. Arguably the leading executive education school in the world where the Financial Times has even ranked IMD as the number two executive education program in the world and the number one MBA program worldwide. And what's most fascinating about George's work is his focus on what he calls the “hidden perils of unresolved grief”.
You see, he has trained more than 7,000 of the world's top executives, and George has witnessed firsthand the impacts of unresolved grief, including how it makes leaders cold-hearted, emotionally detached, and unable to bond and truly inspire people. And on the contrary, George is very clear that when grief is addressed, In healthy and deliberate ways, this grief can transform into inspiration and creativity. Now, this is far from theoretical work for George. In 1992, the unthinkable happened, when George lost his dear son Douglas. And today George has transformed this immense loss into a creative force dedicating his life in honor to his son Douglas, living a life of joy and adventure with his other children and helping executives around the world to reach their highest potential. And as you'll soon hear, George is a wonderful example of someone living and teaching us to rediscover the joy of life after loss. I hope you enjoy this conversation with George Kohlrieser. And if you or your organization are interested in grief programs for leaders, feel free to reach out at jonofishernow.com. Thank you so much for listening. It means so much to have you here today.
Jono [Interview Commences]: Welcome, George. Welcome to the show.
George: Thank you. I'm happy to be here, Jono. Yeah,
Jono: I, I watched your Ted talk, last night before going to bed, and I was really touched by the, particularly by the end of your talk, as you mentioned, your son Douglas,
George: Right.
Jono: And particularly around your work being dedicated to him. Now and, I feel like I couldn't really begin the conversation without acknowledging Douglas. Yeah. And the motivation that you have to do the work that you're doing today.
George: Thank you. I appreciate that.
Jono: And George, the way I came across you, was through the article you wrote in, McKinsey Quarterly. And I have to confess to feeling relief, actually reading your article, there was a quality of having very rarely heard anyone in executive education talking about grief. And I'm curious to know. How you came to writing this and how you came to identifying the importance of addressing grief in leadership.
George: Well, thank you very much. And you're right. Emotion and especially the motions around grief are a no-no in executive education and in organizations in general. Actually, grief has been part of my work as a psychologist from the early eighties when I was in, had the opportunity to work with Elizabeth Kubler Ross, and Elizabeth was a dear teacher, dear friend, a colleague, and I saw very early in police psychology in hostage negotiation that loss was the motivator for what people did that was so destructive.
And so it became clear that this grief became part of stress reactions. And as I moved through my own personal journey and the death of my son Douglas that you referred to, it became clear to me that this was something in executive education that had to be addressed. So when I first started 25 years ago at IMD, the business school here in Lausanne, Switzerland, I developed a program that had the experience of emotion and the coming back to emotion for the participants who are senior leaders. And so almost from the very beginning, we introduced this segment. What happened to you and what were the losses that influenced you as a leader?
And what opened up was the fact that there were so many of those executives who had hidden grief, and for the first time in their life they would put words to it. And it became part of helping them come back to an open heart. What is the Crucible? As Warren Bennis and I had the support of so many great leaders, not just Elizabeth Kubler Ross, but especially Warren Bennis, who wrote in his work on The Crucibles as being the foundation to building the character of a leader. And the crucible is that pain point in your life. And if you don't grieve it, you don't express it. It's gonna come back to haunt you in a negative way. So that was where it actually started, way back in 2000, when I did the first prototype for this high performance leadership program. And it's amazing.
We offer it around 15 times a year, and now 60 to 65 people, executives in each program. It's filled almost a year in advance with a waiting list. It's what Dan Goleman, the emotional intelligence guy, calls the nearest thing that he's seen to really being able to train people to be truly emotionally intelligent, becoming open-hearted, emotionally available, and being able to really bond. That's the short version.
Jono: Yeah. And I, you know, I think what also struck me and strikes me even as you described the program, you know, is that this would be different if it was coming from just someone interested in grief, but you're talking about one of the, the leading executive education programs in the world. Yeah. where the leading.. leaders are coming to be trained and And you are starting at this point. Yeah, at this point of grief.
George: In the beginning it was really a problem because people would be shocked. They didn't know what was gonna happen. So we had to really focus on psychological safety on why this is important. Probably in those early days, 80 to 85% of people came because they found it on the website. Now 90% of people come because somebody tells them, you should go to this program. It's transformative. And so they come knowing something special is gonna happen. They don't always know that somebody is going to be crying openly and so forth, but they know something special is gonna happen.
And here's the thing. We see so many executives who have either never cried, or they've stopped crying. They've become coldhearted, detached, disconnected to themselves. And so we actually do grief in an open forum, 60 people or 66 people as we have this week, being able to address a simple grief, and by that I mean not a complex, but one where somebody has died or somebody is going to die or somebody is sick, or some alienation. Like today we had somebody whose brother from India died during Covid. He couldn't get there to see his brother to say goodbye. In a group of 66, somebody played the role of his brother and he said to his brother what he would've said had he been in that hospital room before he died, and then he changed seats and he became his brother. And his brother says, I know you feel guilty. You didn't come. It's best you didn't come. You do not have to feel guilty. I forgive you for not being there. And he breaks down just crying, fully relieved from the pain in his heart that he regretted not going to see his brother, and then switching back and then finally saying goodbye. A real goodbye with lots of tears, lots of expression of emotion, and then making a decision to let that brother die and to go to the joy of life.
Because with grief, and I know you know, this part of yourself often dies, some part gets buried. So what we want the executives to do is to learn to go back. Feel the joy of life come back to a full experience of life and to join the world of the living and not be caught in between. And when everybody sees this, you have to be pretty cold-hearted not to feel some tears. So it just opens the emotions. And the goal is really to get this emotional availability, not to artificially create it, but to authentically come back to what's in your heart.
Jono: I'm struck when you mentioned the open forum nature of this, you know, grief is often a private matter in our culture, right? You know, it's, we, we do it privately. can you talk a little bit about the nature of being in a group?
George: Well, As I'm sure many or most of your listeners know and yourself, you cannot grieve alone. It's a social process. You have to do this in a clan, in a family, in a tribe, in a group. So from the beginning, which the program starts on Monday, we begin to build this psychological safety. They're in an intact coaching group. They don't know one another, but by Tuesday when we do this session, they have gotten to know each other. They begin to feel psychologically safe, and they have already been talking about things they may not have been talking about. So the psychological safety becomes very, very important. And this idea that grief is not a disease. You, you're gonna get me all upset here because the psychiatric community, God bless them for all their work.
The psychological community, bless them for all their work. But it was a mistake to make grief a disease. It is not a disease from the beginning of mankind. Grieving happened in social systems, in a family, in a clan, in a tribe. Yes, with complex grief, you may have to see a therapist, you may have to do unusual things. But for the basic labeling of pain, the pain points in life, the crucibles, we have to bring that back to it's a human function. And as a leader, as a leader, you have to be able to have that conversation, not forced, not as a psychologist, but as one human being to another human being. And for many leaders, Grief is a no-no. Pain is a no-no. It's avoided. So there is a, I describe it as a kind of bootcamp. This is not something they will go back and do themselves to say, okay, who wants to grieve who? But to be able to understand how to have the words to describe it, how to be able to talk about it when people wanna do so. And there are many leaders who are open to people coming, but they don't know what to do when people start talking about their pain. Does that make sense?
Jono: It does, it does. I'm, I'm kind of picturing myself in this group, and I'm curious to know what you observe in people in the, you know, as they go through this process, you know, probably from resistance and not maybe wanting to go there. But then as you noted, starting to experience this psychological safety. I'm just curious, could you share what, what you notice happens for these people?
George: Probably well over 50% are engineers, right? Which is a real challenge. God love all the engineers out there, but they're not the most, feeling oriented people, let's put it that way. Finance and finance or lawyers. So that what happens is there's a kind of moment of shellshock to understand what is in them, and we don't have people leave the room. It's very rare. We have people who are in these safe, psychological, safe groups with an executive coach, an experienced coach who knows how to do grief work and how to be able to support that person. And nobody's forced. It's all done by choice. And they're, there is that slow movement towards, yeah, yeah, this is right. There's something true about this. It's not socially done very often and for many people from many different cultures, and we have 31 cultures there this week. It's unusual to do this. So we often take into account the cultural aspect as well. But by the end of the week, the transformations are quite profound. And the most common statement is “this has been transformative. I didn't believe it would happen when I came. I didn't know what was gonna happen really, but it happened”.
Jono: Mm-hmm. You mentioned in the article one of the, the, the, the kind of keys to working through grief is an awareness of grief, and I think a lot of people have the notion that it's only really tied to drastic events, you know, maybe a death or a severe illness. Could you talk a little bit more about the breadth, the breadth of depth of grief?
George: That's a very good point. Grief can is an internal reaction to an interpretation and experience of an event, what looks like traumatic outside post-traumatic stress, an event outside, that's terrible. You can connect it to grief, but there are many feelings of grief loss over things that are not externally necessarily obvious as a trauma. So when we think of grief, we have to think of stress, and we have to think of loss. What are the losses and triggers in life? All kind of triggers, fit triggers about rejection, about blame, about shame. All the world of post-traumatic stress, all of these are connected to grief. Below them is grief, and we have to remember that grief is not just crying. Grief can be rage, can be anger, it can be feared. Deep fear. So that most people have not learned how to label and identify grief.
For example, we had a CEO of Swisscom here in Switzerland who was taking Swisscom to all levels of success, and he got a new board chairman who was so micromanaging. His leadership was a bullying, domineering kind of attitude. And it put the CEO in a box, he described it as a cage. And when he was upset, he wouldn't say to people, he wouldn't label it. He would just get on his bicycle and ride and build a wall around his heart. After four months, he took a rope and killed himself. Now, this is horrible because he couldn't identify the hidden grief.
Four months later, the CFO of Zurich Financial, very similar thing except a very intact family, the CEO of that, that CFO pushed into early retirement after 18 months of guilt, depression took a rope and kill himself. There's three examples of people who could not identify and be aware that they were grieving, much less act on it that did not need to happen. You see, they were a hostage to themselves, to their pain, to their grief. And what we really have to do is make leaders aware that when they are in stress, they have to be aware that behind that is in all probability, grief, and in the business world, behavioral economics is well known. And this research already won the Nobel Economics Prize in 1992.
For the identification that humans are fundamentally feeling beings before thinking beings. We happen to think and we're fundamentally feeling. And what they identified is loss. Loss is more powerful in decision making than benefit. And so we see in organizations, people always wanting to talk about benefit. And here's what our product is, here's what our service is. But they miss the point about pain points, how to have a connection to put words to that.
Jono: Hmm. What do you think when people hear this, you know, when people hear the importance of grief. But I, you know, I, I'm, I'm putting myself in the shoes of like, other leaders that I, encounter. Yeah. And who would go, you know, we don't really have time for this. You know, like, I, I get the, you know, I can kind of somewhat hear the importance of it, but we're here to do business. We're here to get results. George, you know, like I, I love the idea of processing grief and walking through it. You know, I, I'm just kind of, but what, putting myself in
George: The, but what with results, I'm here to get a result. What exactly. All this grief business, this emotion, what does it have to do with getting results?
Jono: Yeah. And you know, you know, like I'm from Australia, Australians can be very pragmatic.
George: Oh, we know. We have, we have people who come from Australia.
Jono: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this kind of like, get, let's, let's get on with it, George.
George: Okay.
Jono: Let's get on with it.
George: You know, the answer is pretty simple. Do you wanna be successful? Do you want to get the best results you can get? And the answer is Yes, I do. And that means you have to have a fully engaged team, a hundred percent high performing, no underperformance behavior. And that means that people have to be able to feel good. And we know from all the studies on engagement, 80% of people in the US and pretty much the same in Europe, are not engaged. They find their boss toxic or they find themselves disconnected, they don't feel cared about. So if you want to have your best performance, your best result, the only pathway is through people. And by that, you have to be able to show caring.
And when Gallup does these studies, 40 years now, they always conclude at the end, the best reason to produce happiness in an organization is to have a manager who cares. A manager, who cares. And so we teach this caring, daring process, secure base leadership. So how am I caring and how am I daring? You bring the best out of your people and when they have a grievance, when they are, they suffer from a failure and it's rampant. In organizations, grief is rampant. Just take mergers and acquisitions, take failures to get a promotion, loss of a loved or a boss, et cetera, these are all grievances. Feeling humiliated, feeling shame. The things that leaders say and do produce so much grievance and disconnection. That's why we have to understand big griefs.
But the majority, as Elizabeth Kubler Ross always said, of grief is not just death. It's the little cuts. It's the little pains that happen along the way. So it's a pathway. It's a pathway to emotional availability. The leaders have to be caring. And how many times have we heard, I have a toxic boss, I have a bullying boss, I have a too cold, a boss, a hardhearted boss. And so they cannot show the caring through the emotional availability to inspire people. And that's what being able to go through the grief and get an open heart again. The goal is for high performance. We want people to get a good result through people. Mm-hmm. Does that make sense?
Jono: Yeah, it does. It makes so much sense. You know, and I've, I've had the privilege, George, of being in, grief rituals, so to speak, with people, you know, with group, with groups. And I've always been struck by how soft and joyous people come out of these experiences. You know, experiences that may seem kind of haunting or daunting to kind of go into. And yet when they come out after having just had the opportunity to be witnessed. And for other people to witness or to witness others, there is this relief to go, oh gosh, I'm not alone. Like this is, there are other people who are experiencing this too. And the permission to be a human, you know, as opposed to living in a culture that can keep everything so private.
Francis: Yeah.
Jono: And when everything's so private you can kind of think am I the only one? Yeah. You know, experiencing these feelings. And the other thing I loved about your article was you also mentioned the positive experiences of life and how they also can trigger grief. You know, these kind of moving to new cities or having a baby or. You know, that often can also be overlooked. You know this, but isn't this all great for you? You've moved to the new city, you've got a new baby, and yet.
George: It's a grief. It's right, it's clear. Is potentially there. Yeah. Oh, I'm triggered by so many things that you are saying. This idea of the social nature of grief is so important. Doing it with people, with a tribe, with a family, and the crying. Just the crying itself makes you lighter to you. Well, I know, you know, but all your listeners, grief is weighing on your heart. It's weighing on your muscles, it's weighing on different organs in your body. We know that trauma, which is always connected to grief, makes people go into depression. Go into addictions or go into physical illness. This is Dr. Gabor Mate’s work, and so we have to know what is it below that to get that emotion of loss to come out.
Now the second point, don't we think everybody would like to be happy? Why in the world would somebody not want to be joyful if we consider joy and love? One of the four fundamental emotions. Not everybody wants to be joyful and or love. Why? Because it's going to end. It's not permanent. So I already start what is called anticipatory grief. I have the joy of moving to a new city, but that joy will not last because it will come to an end. You see, we have to learn to accept the loss, the separation of every bond. Everything leads to some separation in the short term or the long term. So some people don't, they don't bond, they don't connect, they don't feel joy because it's gonna go away.
Jono: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'm reminded of, I don't know if you're familiar with, Francis Weller's work. He talks about these five gates of grief and the first one being everything we love, we will lose.
George: Yeah.
Jono: And you know, I'm also reminded as you talk George, about, you know, in my life, you know, there was some kind of early, early grief experiences and. You know, I was young at that time and even things, I go into a boarding school, at a very young age, and I quickly learned to kind of be at arm's length to these feelings. You know, and, but it's interesting. Most of my life had started to look like resilience. You know, like, oh, you're, you're so resilient. You can, you've got this ability to endure and keep going. And yet, in my more recent years, you know, grief has kind of caught up to me Yeah. In a way and kind of gone, I, I want to be at the party. I want to be in relation, I wanna be in relationship with you. You know? And…
George: That strong, independent loner was really masking pain underneath. How old were you when you went to a boarding school?
Jono: I was 12. When I was 12.
George: I was 13. We share a common experience. I went from a strong, intact Catholic family to become, instead you to be a priest in a Catholic seminary. You remember the home sickness when you went, when you left? Oh, it was, it was painful. Yeah. And to suddenly be thrown into environment with 280 other kids who were all in high school, I had to struggle to survive. It was traumatic. And it took me years afterwards to realize how it created early emancipation. I became too independent, too early, so I had to go back and learn how to face the pain. And that meant not just sadness, but anger, fear, and all the other things that happened. Boarding schools are just one example of what happens when people have a break in the bond and go through a loss.
Jono: Mm. Yeah. It's interesting too because in this country, in Australia, you know, so many of our politicians, uh, come from this kind of boarding school environment, you know, and I, and I think it's, it's just an interesting reflection on what kind of, what kind of leadership kind of holds the country, you know, which often can feel aloof and a little cold and a little impersonal. Yeah. Not by intention, not by anyone wanting to do that, but just by way of having experienced a lot of these deep emotions and not having a...
George: You and I think in the UK also, the whole origin of grief in, in the modern research era began with John Bowlby, with his attachment theory coming out of the UK, and he observed already after the Second World War, babies were dying in these bacteria free hospitals, and yet on the battlefield they had lived or they are still living. And the difference was having a caretaker that they could bond to. A consistent caretaker and that the baby felt nurtured, bonded. And when the separation happened too early, then you would have this detachment. So he began to describe grief as something very early in the child, and certainly as the child grows up. So we see this whole cycle. How do we attach, how do we bond? How do we go through separation? Then how do we go through the grief to come back and reattach again?
The brain hates pain, but you have to be able to go through pain, be willing to feel it. And there's an old saying in grief therapy, you have to feel it to heal it. Huh? And to be able then to rebond again. Reconnect. And we see, for example, people who are married or live with the same partner for over 40 years. 80% are dead or terminally ill within 18 months. Now that's grief. We call it all kinds of things. Cancer, disease, heart disease and so forth. And we have to understand that there are people who are able to say goodbye to a spouse after 40, 50, 70 years and rebond again. The problem is those who do not rebond, those who go into a detachment and in these deep states of loneliness, and the deep loneliness is so destructive to the whole different organs and, and muscle systems and parts of the body, and it produces this special stress, which is manifested in grief, hidden grief.
Jono: You mentioned the detachment that can happen. I think there was a part in your article where you talked about leaders. Failing to recognize that they carry these burdens, you know, and I can really relate to that. There was so much of in my life where I would, I, if you'd asked me, you know, 10 years ago, I'd say, George, I'm not really, grief isn't really there. You know, because it felt a long way away. I'm curious, is that part of the awareness? And I think the other piece you mentioned in the article was about a third of, I think it was about 7,000 executives you've worked with over, over 20 years. About a third of them are experiencing this or have experienced this. And these are big numbers.
Francis: Yeah.
Jono: And yet a lot of those people, including myself, would probably go Well, I, I, I don't know what you're, talk like I'm, I'm fine over here George. You know
George: What is this grief? Yeah, I'm fine. Yeah. So the way you know it is three major ways Depression. Depression is mistreated. Again, it's the medical, psychiatric, psychological community naming depression as a disease, an illness. Of course the brain changes. Of course there's all kind of chemical changes, but what is the emotion below the depression? Dr. Gabor Mate’ who is really the leading researcher in this whole arena right now, is pointing out how we don't help people get to the underlying emotion, the grief addiction. When you see executives addicted, and I don't just mean drugs or alcohol. Addicted to work, addicted to golf, addicted to their phones, addicted to social media. I mean, addictions are all over the place, and the best definition is short-term relief or benefit with long-term negative outcomes so that people use all kind of substitutes to being able to enjoy the experience of life and especially relationships. So they turn to addictions. And then the most common is disease and illness. There is no question now that behind, well, Dr. Mate’ says all illness and, and disease, is some stress, trauma and underlying grief.
Jono: You talked about an example, I think of an executive in the article. I think it was a gentleman by the name of Bill. Yeah. Bill, an executive who had lost his child. Can, could you just bring to life that story? I think that might help, help people to
George: This is, this is just one of many, he was some 20 years, 25 years before in working in his yard, and he had a six year old daughter who he had taught to ride the bicycle. She was riding the bicycle. On the sidewalk while he was working in the grass in the yard, and she lost control of the bike and the bicycle went in front of a bus and she was hit. He saw it happen out of the side of his eyes. He ran to her. She died in his arm. She was bleeding profusely. He had blood all over. They got her to the hospital, but it was too late. He said to himself, I killed my daughter. I should never have taught her to ride that bicycle. She would still be alive if I had done that. I'm a terrible father for all these 25 years. He went through two marriages, went through all kind of depression, alcoholism, losing two jobs, unable to hold a job, just really collapsing. And he didn't recognize that he was grieving this whole time.
So in this process, he became aware and he said, I would like to, I would like to do that grief. And he volunteered in front of 60 people. Somebody, one of the women played his daughter. He took her hands, looked at her, and he just broke down crying. He said, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I killed you. And he did the catharsis, expressed his emotion. Then I had him change and be his daughter. The daughter now him, says to Bill, “daddy, you were a good father. Those were the six best years of my life. You didn't kill me. Thank you for teaching me how to ride that bicycle. I am so sorry that I died earlier. It makes me unhappy that you are so unhappy.” And he just broke down crying as the daughter, how she loved him, and how she felt so sad that he was suffering so much. He switched and went back to himself and he said, oh my God, I've destroyed my life because I thought I killed you. And he switched back. She said, “no, you didn't kill me. I thank you for teaching me how to ride that bicycle.” I want you, as Elizabeth Kubler Ross said, and I prompted a little bit what you honor me by my death. If you are uninspired, use my death to be inspired. He switched back for the first time, really, really said goodbye, and took some time to go through that process again. A lot of crying and being able then to turn and go to the world of joy. I followed him now for some seven years.
He has held on to that joy and he does like I do with my son. I do what I do after all these years. He died in 1993 in an accident. I use what I do as part of being inspired and honoring the death of my son. He still honors his daughter and does, what he does, and he now's got a wonderful job, been promoted twice. And a similar thing we had to here a woman, Irina, whose daughter and daughters were kidnapped and killed by the father. He went on to commit suicide. How do you say goodbye to two six year old twin daughters. And she went through that process. Deep grief rage. The rage in this woman was more than I've seen even in huge men. And she's come back to the joy of life. This was six years ago. Also, she will say, “I still think of them most days, every day, actually. But I don't get locked into grief. I am living my life to honor them.” And she went on to start a program called Missing Children of Switzerland, connected to the whole worldwide system of helping kidnapped and sexually abused, children and children in slavery. See, this is how you use loss rather than be a victim to inspire and honor their life, Elizabeth Kubler Ross always said, “you don't honor somebody who passes before you by suffering or being a victim. You honor them by being inspired.”
Jono: Beautiful. So beautiful. George.
George: I am so blessed to have hundreds and hundreds of examples of people who can do this. I'm also very sad that there's even more who don't do it, who live as victims who live in depression, in addiction, in physical illness, in negative states. They don't see the beauty of life. They don't see the adventure of life, grief blocks that, it blocks the perception and terrible things happen. We don't know why there's religious reasons, many, but the fact is we owe it to ourselves and the people around us that we love, that we experience the beauty of life, the joy of life, and the majority of people don't truly enjoy fully, life.
Jono: I'm so touched by your longing, I guess, for so many other people to have exposure to this kind of work in their lives. You know, I feel kind of privileged and blessed to have been in kind of therapeutic environments, you know, to be in like personal therapy or be in these grief rituals. And, and yet there was also something, and I share this by way of, because it was surprising to me, you know, I turned 50 last year
George: Oh, you're young. You're just halfway through, not even halfway through your life.
Jono: Spring Chicken George. Yeah. And, you know, we were the, some old school friends, were, we, we were planning on going on a 50th celebration together. So we went to Thailand, to celebrate our 50th. And prior to that, you know, the years preceding that had been really difficult for me. There'd been a lot of grief kind of building up in my life. And, and I said to one of my friends before going, I said, you know, I don't know if I can really come, you know, I feel like I'm gonna be such a downer on the trip, you know, because of how much I'm feeling at the moment. And my friend said to me, who I'm very close with, he said, you know, I couldn't think of anything better than to be with you as you cry and weep, over what's going on for you? You know, and I was so surprised by the response. And then there were two others who I, who I dearly love as well as brothers and friends. And, and yet I hadn't told them. And I remember, remember it was probably the first or the second morning, we sat around just to talk. And very quickly tears started to emerge for me. You know, and I tell you, George, it was one of the most powerful and meaningful experiences of my life to be with these, you know, all very capable guys, you know, who've all got their careers and done very well in their, in their own rights. And yet here they were holding me. in my grief. But then also what happened then the reciprocal sharing and then the. And it, and, and we just bonded in ways that we've never bonded before. You know? And yet here I was thinking, ah, do I really, yeah. Do I really let them know what's actually going on for me? Yeah. You know, but it opened up this whole other depth of relationship. Like we are, we are the, the tightest and, at, at such a depth of our relationship.
George: Now it sealed the boundary.
Jono: Oh my goodness me.
George: So this is how you go through that cycle. Attachment bond, new separation, grieving we often hear in the program, I feel closer to people here than people in my own life, or I have shared with people here who were two days ago. Strangers more than I share in my own life. And here's the other thing that reminds me, that we often get the comment. From engineers or financial. This is therapy. This, we came for business training, not leader leadership training. We didn't come for for therapy. But this is not therapy. It's therapeutic. Yes. But we have to take grieving and a social group out of this whole context that it's therapy. Therapeutic, yes. But being in love is therapeutic. Having a friend is therapeutic. And when you cried, did they touch your shoulder or reach out to hug you?
Jono: Oh yeah.
George: That's the healing part. That's why it has to be done in social. This is evolutionary, psychology that we cry as a way of reaching out to be touched, to be held. We often feel when people cry, we wanna put the hand on their shoulder or we want to take them into their arms. When the baby cries, the mother comes and hold them or hold them, or the father comes. Crying is so fundamental. If you cannot cry, you will probably die prematurely. It's that clear in the research. Hmm. And you felt lighter after you shed those tears, right?
Jono: Oh my gosh. Yeah. God, there was there, George, there was so much joy on this trip.
George: Grief is a weight. Oh, and think of what it does to your heart. Yeah. And you go to a doctor and you get this medication for your heart. And that the doctor has to learn to ask what kind of stress are you going through? What kinda losses have you had or what's happened in your life that you are the way you are now?
Jono: Hmm. Yeah. And it, and it also has this ability to sharpen, you know, the preciousness of what we do have Yeah. In our lives. Like, you know, my value and appreciation for them as friends, where we were actually located, everything became heightened and appreciated in ways that wasn't there before. Yeah. You know, there's, there's something really precious that happens when we can open up like that. Yeah.
George: So this is my mission in life, in part to help resolve conflicts, but especially to help deeper grief. So I've started with my son and a group of very experienced coaches, Kohlrieser Leadership Institute, KLI and our goal is to understand hidden grief, to be aware, to accept, and then to act and heal it, and to carry into organizations this whole model of caring and daring. The sad story is that there are many men, especially men, who do not know how to show caring. They do not, they consider it weakness to show caring. They consider it weakness to be vulnerable, to be able to be emotionally available, and they have to learn that that is the strength of their masculinity, not a weakness.
It can happen with women as well, but women are more prone to be able to show that caring, and this is not found to be genetically based. That in fact, with epigenetics, we know that this is all about learned experiences, mindset eventually, or the environment that you grew up in. Think of the poverty that so many kids live in, that's trauma that's affecting them. And not to mention all the abuse, emotional abuse. A child expresses what they need and a parent punishes them by withdrawing their affection Externally, it looks normal. But internally it's experienced as a trauma.
Jono: George, you, you mentioned that I think the, I think the cost you put on, you know, for those, for the engineers and the lawyers and such that are listening, you know, I think you put a cost on US organizations. I think it was something like 75 billion a year. Yeah. That, that, that's kind of estimated, yeah. That the impact the grief is having on an organization. That figure alone was like enough to get my attention too. You know..
George: That should send chills up every one of the leaders out there, listening managers out there and understand the impact.
Jono: Mm-hmm. Can you talk a little bit about obstacles? You know, I'm, I'm thinking about people who are now in an organization, and this is resonating for them. You know, this conversation, and I'm imagining too that organizations at this point aren't that well equipped to handle this, or leaders themselves aren't necessarily that well equipped. And just what do you just, could you speak a little bit to the, just the obstacles that are there that are current in an organization, just to even name them. Like what's, what's actually holding back this, this ability to recognize and process grief.
George: I think it is connected to the culture of the organization, the culture the organization is in. The detachment that happens in those environments comes from the family. How would you, how did you experience yourself in the family? Could you show your emotions? Could you express anger? Could you express fears and have it not be belittled or depressed and understanding that you don't have to go to a therapist to heal grief. Sometimes yes, you do if it's complex, but something as simple as sitting and talking in an open-hearted fashion with someone about how you feel and the other person listening and not judging or criticizing, and the Stanford Letter Writing Project, comes out of Stanford Medical School. We use now every session we ask people or give them the opportunity to write to someone who has died or someone in their life now who will be leaving soon, or someone they have not forgiven, or somebody that, that they have pain. What, what? Or people that are grateful, write it, send them a letter.
I can't tell you, just the idea of writing can help relieve that grief. So the barriers are so socially locked in, but you have to be able to know through self-awareness, through knowledge about what is the way to live a joyful, healthy life, and then be able to find some way to know you are under stress. I think the first question to always ask you am, am I happy in my life? Happiness is not gonna be permanent. Am I stressed in my life? And what is the stressor and what is the loss behind it? And what we recommend in our program is that they do with their kids, with their spouses, with people around them, parents who are older, a lifeline. What are the five major pain points? Crucibles as Warren Bennis called them? What are the five major positives? And then talk about it. Parents don't understand the inner trauma of their kids, and often the parents wanna defend rather than just listening to what that pain is. I can't tell you how many times it can be renewed.
Jono: You know, I love this, this Stanford Letter Writing Process. It seems like it's such a safe process. It's such a, you know, like I've been in experiences too where, where there's been a writing component where you are writing the, you know, probably very, in a very similar way. And then you actually get the opportunity to actually verbally share it with someone. With the one request. With the one request that the only response is Thank you.
George: Yeah. No judgment, right?
Jono: No, no need for commentary, no need for anything. And just that very act of being able to verbally share and have someone hear and say, thank you, profound.
Francis: Yeah.
Jono: You know, and also it's a simple practice, you know? And that's, that's really also what I love about that. Do you think also there's a fear of, you know, what if I'm vulnerable in front of my team, you know, like, are they gonna think that?
George: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. This is, you know, the person, for example, who stands up and says goodbye to their brother like today, or says goodbye to their daughter or a parent who's sick, who's gonna be dying, what they would say to them, what is really wrong with expressing that in a group other than shame? It's about shame of emotions instead of the mindset. This is healing, this is relieving. I'm sharing a gift, and we have all the people who are touched and it'll be 95 to 98% of people who have tears watching or going through this to share what they experience as a gift, and they learn from it. So what is the shame of showing emotions, but it's social rejection.
So if I'm a manager or I'm an employee and I'm frustrated over a failure and I express that anger or that sadness, it's the shame of how the other person is not caring. They're judgmental. And that usually is a trigger that goes back to what happened with parents, grandparents, or teachers. We don't know how traumatic many kids experience first, second, third, fourth, fifth grade, because they had a very destructive teacher. And they're wonderful teachers, but they're also very mean teachers.
Jono: What about the fear that if I am gonna share, you know, sorrows or grief, that people might think that I'm kind of losing it, you know, I'm losing it and I may, you know, my job, maybe in jeopardy if people think, Hey, what's, you know, what's wrong with John o or George? What's, you know, is there is, you know, like I think that could also be a concern for people if they actually really share what's going on.
George: Yeah. Well here, here's the thing on that, it's over flooding of emotion. I think that's the real risk When you do flooding, you can't control your anger or you can't control your fear or you can't control the tears flooding. And so you have to have a personality structure and ego that can hold the emotion and then also release it and know what the boundaries are. So this does not give permission to people just to spit out or vomit emotions. It's done with a goal in mind. It's done in a way in which it involves the safety of others as well. So if someone has been sexually abused and suddenly they are triggered by something and they scream out in a group meeting, well, you don't know what it's like to have pain because I've been sexually abused. It says that's inappropriate. It has to fit the context and it has to be done in a way that is healing, not just vomiting emotions.
Jono: Mm-hmm. And I think what it probably also, you know, when you were talking earlier about the psychological safety You know, for the, if leaders are creating that, That, that quality of safety, then it just creates so much more permission for people to also come forward in more authentic ways. Would that be…
George: A little hint is for leaders to ask, how do you feel? Not how do you think, how are you feeling this morning and done in an authentic way or at the beginning of a meeting to take time to go around and let people express how they feel and not just ritualistic say, okay, I'm okay, I'm, I'm, I'm fine. But to generally authentically say what they are actually feeling. And here's the thing, if you want people to be engaged, they have to be in a positive state. A positive state means they have to feel good. And if they're not feeling good, what can be done to change that? You can change your state. You don't have to be locked into a negative state like your friends who convinced you to go along. You were in sort of this fear state and not feeling good, not being, being sort of concerned, but they encouraged you. And then once you got there, you changed your state.
See, we can change our state more than we ever thought we could. You don't have to stay in a bad mood. You don't have to stay in a negative mood. And here's what's so interesting. You know, how long emotions last? How long does an emotion actually last? Nine to 12 seconds? And you say, well, what has that going on? When I'm angry for an hour a day, a week, a month, or I'm sad for an hour a day, a week or a month, or, I'm always anxious, I'm always worrying. It's the brain, it's the mindset that's as ruminating, the actual physiological reaction lasts a relatively short time, nine to 12 seconds, or some other research that says it's up to, 60 seconds. But just take it that we can get the physiological part of that emotion mixed in with our thinking, and then it becomes rumination. So you become mm-hmm. Angry for days or weeks or months. And we have to learn how to deal with the emotion and settle, keep the rumination as a separate issue to solve.
Jono: Mm-hmm. You know, I'm also really loving the question, not. How are you thinking or how are you doing, but how are you feeling?
George: Yeah.
Jono: You know, I've been fortunate to be in companies where, you know, this kind of check-in process before a meeting occurs where it's very similar to that and it's not permission to go on and on, but it's just a, you know, 30 seconds or so, this is how I'm feeling. And, it also just has this ability to know where people are at. Very quickly. Yeah. You know, like someone says, I didn't sleep well last night. My baby was up. You know, Oh okay, great. Next person. Yeah, I'm really tired. And, and it's this wonderful way of actually reading the room, understanding where people are at, and also when that person speaks, you kind of also know where they're coming from at that time, you know..
George: And, and sometimes, not always, but when they say, well, I was up all night with the baby, and then you follow up, well, what do you need now? What do you need to get into a positive state? How can, how can I help you? How can we help you? And very often you hear 'em say, it's okay. I just, expressing this gives me some relief or gives, brings, brings me to a different state.
Jono: You know, what strikes me, George, when you speak and you know, and is that, you know, how much time we spend in organizations, how much time we spend at work, you know, and the potential for organizations to be healing places. You know, I think so often we think of the work where we, you know, we leave our humanity at home and off to work we go, and yet the way you're speaking about this, I just see this potential for, and, and not, doesn't have to be in such dramatic ways, I think, but just that work becomes a place where I'm welcome as a human being and as a result I get to really fulfill my potential at work, and really fulfill my creativity and my passion. And, you know, just through these very small, nearly acupuncture moves.
George: You're, you're, you're saying that with such love and such emotional availability because it's true. How much time do we spend at work and how much of it is with meaning and purpose, and how much of it is where we really find it adds to our life rather than taking away. We have companies who are sending as many as 150 of their top managers to come to an HPL program to learn caring and daring. Now, when you get the CEO, the board, the top 150 who are projecting this culture of caring and daring. It spreads down through the organization and the result of this, it's Van Norden Holland, they're, they're having great success based on this.
So that we have to be able to understand how to build exactly what you're saying. The rehumanization of organizations. The original organizations always came out of family business, out of family models. But we don't live with organizations that are structured around family. We treat organizations as if they have a life of their own, not a family. But it's wonderful when a CEO, top managers say, this is our family. We treat each other as a family. We're human beings. And at KLI, this is one of our missions to bring this caring and daring philosophy to as many organizations as possible. And it's not, it's, it's in one way, very simple once you understand it, but the resistance can be very high.
Jono: Yeah. I mean, at some level it's a strange thing to even be talking about, you know, like, like when it's, when it's so fundamental to being human. You know, loss and, and grief. And, and yet we've kind of somehow found ourselves culturally in a place where we've cornered ourselves. You know? And I really, I've, I just so value the work that you do in George.
George: Well, thank you. And it's, and can I say something about it's getting worse because of social media and because of iPhones and the whole movement towards technology, there's a lot of opportunities, in A.I., there's a lot of opportunities in technology and digital world. I'm not against it. I'm really supported, but it has to be managed because it can dehumanize to the extent that people become so addicted to their iPhones and social media, they no longer are able to talk to people, and we have to have our young people entering the workforce be able to deal with people and so many come out of their families unhappy, unable to resolve conflict, unable to express their desires, unable to constructively make concessions and be interdependent. That is all fundamental to a powerful workforce that's gonna produce great results.
Jono: In closing, George, I think what's also interesting about you that I want other people to know because I can, I can imagine a listener going, yeah, that's all good and fine for George. You know, he is in Switzerland, he's at the best, one of the best business schools, et cetera, he hasn't really, he hasn't really been through the hard stuff and. And yet I am also aware of your professional background in the hostage negotiation world. Just in closing, could you maybe just bring a little bit of, of, of, of that experience in, to give people more context to you as well, and that this, you know, because I get tired, I get tired of this notion that these are soft, soft skills and Yeah. We can do those later. You know, like, I think it's just like, come on, we're at a point now where we need to be over that. And I, yeah. Could you just talk a little bit about that?
George: Well, I..
Jono: And just how that also relates to your world Yeah. As well.
George: I, yeah. I'm out of graduate school. I got my PhD in mediation. That was my goal, but I ended up having an opportunity to work for a police department and a community mental health center. And in doing this work in domestic violence, that was the goal. I suddenly was exposed to being in a hostage situation where they asked me to negotiate for the hostage taker. It ended up, we were in physical contact and I ended up being held hostage four times over my career, and I'm happy to be alive. Here's the connection.
No hostage taking ever happens without grief, before it, loss. I mean, when you see these mass murderings, you see all of these violent things, in hostage taking and separate from hostage taking. You know, grief is behind it. So what the hostage taker has to do is form a bond with the hostage taker, even if they don't like the person, even if they're psychotic, then hear the pain point, the motivation. What is the grief? What's the grievance? What's the pain point? To understand the motivation, you listen, listen, listen. And then you make concessions. The process of asking questions, giving choice. You don't tell a hostage taker to come out or will send the SWAT team in. You give choice. What do you think the success rate is of hostage negotiation and hostage negotiators as measured by Interpol here in Europe and by the FBI in the US? What do you think the success rate is? Zero to a hundred percent.
Jono: Let me go for, let me go for 70%.
George: It's actually 95%.
Jono: 95.
George: 95%. The 5% what doesn't work are people who want, who don't want to live, they don't want anything. They want to commit suicide by cop, what is called. But you see this is that fundamental human process of connecting to the pain of another human being. And when we train hostage negotiators and I got into this in the seventies, right at the very beginning, training teams all over and working with the FBI in New York and other places that were, were really creating these hostage negotiation teams. When you have that ability to connect to the pain, something happens. That's why in our training with hostage negotiators, we tend to use having them talk to somebody as suicidal and do a role play or do some to see how caring they can be in their empathy and how also to be tough. This whole television thing of the SWAT team going in and solving this hostage situation, that's a myth. Hostage negotiations are solved by relationship. By bonding, by understanding pain points. And so I teach this. I've worked in hostage negotiation arenas for 40 years, with departments over here in Europe as well as in the US.
And then the next step is what does it mean to be a psychological hostage? So physical hostage is one thing. I have a gun to my head or a scissors to my throat that's happened to me. but you can be a psychological hostage to a boss, to a colleague, to a situation, to you name it, what's possible in family life, to spouses, to kids, neighbors, et cetera. And you can also be a hostage to yourself if you are filled with grief, regret, shame, all of these thousands of internal negative states. You are a hostage to yourself. The same techniques that we use in hostage negotiation with physical hostage taking work also in psychological hostage checking. So anybody who goes through a course with me, they learn how to negotiate hostages and they especially learn how to be never be a hostage to themselves or anyone else. There's this brief version.
Jono: Yeah. I love it. I love it. And there's, there's, I, I can feel the, the kind of, the freedom and the liberation in, in, in what you are offering. George…
George: I hope you feel my passion. I really am passionate about people finding the joy of their life, living the beauty of life, living the adventure of life. And it's so sad to see people who don't do that, who are victims, who are suffering unnecessarily because they cannot get over the griefs of their past, of the present, or even worse anticipated grief, which is a nightmare. You anticipate the grief that never even happened yet.
Jono: Well, it's, I think it's, I think what you're also pointing to is the great paradox of the relationship between pain and joy and how, how to, when we actually turn towards what's painful in our life, we actually open the door for the opportunity for joy and aliveness and creativity. And I so want to honor you and the work that you're doing. I really mean it, George, that I don't. I haven't seen this before. I haven't seen executive education really address this. I've seen kind of more, it's just more on the surface kind of stuff. And I think what you are pioneering and what you're offering, is just such a wonderful thing. So I just wanna really honor you and the work that you're doing.
George: Thank you, Jono. Yeah. I'd like to add one more thing, please. After my son finished his pre-med and before he entered medical school, I asked him what gift he would like and he said, “dad, I would like to travel with you alone without work, and I would like to go to Australia, New Zealand.” I spent one of the best times of my life with him in on the Gold Coast. We went to Adelaide, we went all around Australia and then we went to New Zealand.
Jono: This was Douglas.
George: This was Douglas. And then he stayed on and he went around and saw more before he came back to start medical school. So I have a very fond place in my heart for Australia and I hope to get back there at some point in the future cuz I work with a number of Australians who come to Singapore and companies who are sending their executives because of Covid to Europe or to Singapore.
Jono: Mm-hmm. Well, thank you so much for your time, George. Is there anything else you'd like to say in closing that we haven't touched today?
George: Yes, thank you Jono. I really enjoyed this dialogue. And I want to compliment you on your effort and all that you are doing to bring awareness of grief into the world.
Jono: Thank you, George.
Jono [Episode Wrap up]: Thanks so much for listening. It means the world to have your support. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing on Apple or Spotify. That way you'll be notified when a new episode is ready. It would also mean a lot if you would take the time to write a review about this podcast. This way more people can discover and participate in this work. And if you feel like this episode could benefit someone else, please share it with them, whether that's a friend or family member or even on your social channels. Finally, If you are interested in participating in grief rituals, or any other of my programs, feel free to head on over to jonofishernow.com where you can sign up to my newsletter and you'll receive seasonal invitations and episodes as they are released. And please always remember that although the hour is late, we can always make beauty. We can always make beauty. Sending love to you and your loved ones.
About the Guest
George Kohlrieser
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