By Charles Dhanaraj and George Kohlrieser from McKinsey.com

Chances are, there’s a hidden attendee on your team’s Zoom meetings right now—a shadowy presence that’s holding back one or more of your colleagues, fostering self-doubt, causing them to dwell on failure, barriers, and everything that can go wrong. It’s sapping their energy and leadership capacity, and could even be damaging their health, along with the health of your organization.

If it’s not happening to a colleague, it might be happening to you.

This force is unresolved grief, and research suggests it costs companies billions of dollars a year in lost productivity and performance. Our own multiyear research effort finds that unresolved grief is a pervasive, overlooked leadership derailer that affects perhaps one-third of senior executives at one time or another…Yet when addressed, grief can be a creative force that turns loss into inspiration.