Leading While Grieving: A Hard Lesson in Presence
By: Gayathri Shukla, December 17, 2025 (This article was originally published on our LinkedIn newsletter.)
In October, I gave a TEDx talk about AI — authentic interaction — in the age of artificial intelligence. A clever play on words, perhaps, but more than that, it was a talk about presence: about what cannot be automated, optimized, or sped up in a world increasingly shaped by performance, productivity, and scale. I spoke about our human capacity to bear witness to one another — and what we lose when speed and output become the dominant measures of value.
A few weeks later, I found myself living inside the tension of that message.
My family navigated an unexpected ICU admission for my mother-in-law, Shobhana Shukla, followed by planning her funeral. In her final moments, she was surrounded by family — stories shared, songs sung, hands held as she passed away peacefully, while our own hearts broke open.
I later shared my gratitude for the colleagues, friends, and family who stepped in with flexibility, food, flowers, and messages of sympathy. I will always remember those kind gestures.
And alongside that gratitude, something else surfaced within me that I am just learning to name – a quiet pressure to continue. To keep pace. To meet expectations that didn’t disappear just because life and death had taken centre stage.
That gap — between the values we name and the conditions we actually operate within — has stayed with me. Because leading while grieving has taught me how thin the margin really is.
I’ve been learning what it feels like to hold a community, a project, and a set of commitments while also carrying loss, fatigue, and emotions I hadn’t planned for. There were moments when I tried to protect everyone at once — people who needed clarity, people who stepped in to help, and work I care deeply about — while my own capacity quietly eroded.
In that state, I noticed how easily leaders default to smoothing things over. Absorbing tension rather than naming it. Responding with grace even when something inside knows a boundary has been crossed.
And that’s the part we rarely say out loud: work doesn’t slow down when grief arrives.
We often respond by doubling down on individual solutions — resilience, mindfulness, self-regulation.
All useful tools. And entirely insufficient.
Presence cannot be sustained without slack. Slack cannot be sustained without permission. And most systems are not designed to offer that permission when it matters most to the human condition.
If we are serious about leadership, wellbeing, and belonging, we have to ask harder questions — not just of individuals, but of systems:
- What happens to values under sustained pressure?
- Who absorbs the cost when care is required but capacity is fixed?
- Whose exhaustion becomes invisible — and whose is normalized?
As we move through the holiday season, many people around us are carrying visible and invisible weight. I don’t have tidy answers or conclusions. What I do have is a wish — that we make a little more room for one another. That we pause before asking for “just one more thing.” And that we remember presence isn’t something people should have to privately subsidize.
If you’re navigating your own season of grief or uncertainty, I wish for you what I wish for myself – moments of care, however small, imperfect, or fleeting they may be.