When a colleague you leaned on leaves

On Monday morning his mug is still standing on the shelf in the kitchenette — the one with the chipped rim that nobody else was allowed to use. At ten, without thinking, you turn towards his desk to ask “coffee?”. The desk is empty; only a cable is left on it. When you email him about that invoice he could always untangle, you get an automatic reply: this address is no longer in use.

He left on Friday. There was a cake, a few words from the manager, a card everyone signed. He hugged you and said “we’ll see each other”. Now it’s Monday and nobody is talking about the fact that he isn’t here. Work goes on. And you feel as if someone has pulled away the chair you were just about to sit on.

This post is about a colleague leaving — one you leaned on. Nobody died, nobody left you in your private life, so it seems you have no right to be sad. But seen systemically, something big has happened: someone who carried more than was visible has dropped out of your everyday system. And the system will now hand what he carried to somebody else — often without anyone saying so.

A loss without a ritual

At the end of the 1980s the American grief researcher Kenneth Doka introduced the term disenfranchised grief. He used it to describe sorrow over losses that the people around us don’t recognise as losses — so there is no ritual for them, no sympathy and no time. I wrote about how this looks after a miscarriage, a divorce or losing a job in The grief nobody acknowledges. A colleague leaving is another such loss, perhaps the quietest of all. Officially, you haven’t lost anything. Your contract is the same, your job is the same. There is just someone missing.

And yet relationships at work are not a side issue. In 2010 Julianne Holt-Lunstad and two colleagues published a meta-analysis of 148 studies with more than 300,000 participants and found that people with stronger social ties had about a 50 per cent greater likelihood of survival over the follow-up period than those with weaker ones. The research didn’t measure relationships with colleagues specifically, but for many adults colleagues are the people they spend the most waking hours with each week. When one of them leaves, the social net grows thinner — even if nobody writes it down.

A leaving cake is a ritual, but a ritual for the person who leaves. It helps them close a chapter. For those who stay, there is no ritual. On Friday we say goodbye; on Monday we are expected to work as if nothing had changed. What a good goodbye means from the side of the person leaving I described in Your last day: how to say goodbye to a team that meant something to you. Here I am interested in the other side of the door.

What you were really leaning on

When people describe a colleague who has left, they first say what he did: “He ran purchasing.” “She had all the foreign clients.” Only when you ask what that person meant to them does a different list open up. A colleague you lean on rarely plays just one role. Usually they carry several at once, and most of them are written down nowhere.

Perhaps he was the one who knew where everything was, and you could ask him without feeling ashamed that you should already know. Perhaps he was a buffer between you and your manager — he understood the manager’s moods and translated them for you before you walked into one. Perhaps he was the voice that said “I agree with her” when you spoke up in a meeting. Perhaps he was the only one who really saw how much work you put into a project. Or perhaps he was simply your yardstick: when something felt strange, you looked at him across the office and knew from his face whether it was strange only to you.

When he leaves, you don’t miss one person. You miss a whole set of small supports you didn’t even know you were using. That is also why the feeling after a departure is so diffuse. You don’t know exactly what hurts. You only know the day is heavier.

A system can’t bear an empty place

In systemic therapy we see a family as a whole that is always looking for balance — you can find a short explanation in the knowledge base under the family as a system. When someone leaves a family, say when the eldest child moves out, the roles are redistributed. The child who stayed at home suddenly becomes the one who mediates between the parents, though they never did that before. Nobody asked them. The place was empty and the system filled it.

At work it is the same, except that for part of the redistribution we have official procedures. The manager divides up the tasks, perhaps advertises a new post. Whatever was written down gets a new owner. Whatever wasn’t written down finds an owner on its own. Most often it lands on the person who is the most responsible, the most adaptable or the closest to the empty place. A few weeks later you realise that now you are the one calming the manager, you are explaining to newcomers where things are, you are backing others in meetings. You are doing two people’s work, half of it invisible. Why this so often happens to the most dependable people I wrote about in Why it is the most responsible and reliable people who burn out.

This isn’t necessarily bad. Sometimes a new place in the system is a chance to show something that used to be in the shadows. It is only bad if it happens without your decision. So the first step is simple: notice which of his roles you have quietly begun to take on.

A triangle that lost one side

Murray Bowen described how tension between two people is often relieved by bringing in a third. That is how a triangle forms. When two people are in conflict, one complains to a third. When things are cold between a child and a father, the mother carries the messages. Triangles are not necessarily pathological. They are one of the ways systems carry tension.

Working relationships are full of triangles too. Perhaps every day you complained to your colleague about the manager, and that was enough to get you through. Perhaps he carried messages between you and a difficult colleague from another department. When he leaves, the triangle collapses and you suddenly stand directly in front of the person with whom things were always tense — without the third who used to dilute the tension.

That is why, after a colleague leaves, your relationship with the manager or someone else may suddenly get worse, even though nothing new has happened between you. The shape of the system has changed. Alliances can change too: who you will now ask for coffee, who you will sit with in meetings, which camp people will count you in. I wrote more about how a team splits into camps in Office coalitions.

Why you are also a little angry with him

Sadness at a colleague’s departure rarely comes alone. It is often joined by something you feel ashamed of: anger. He left you. He went when things were hardest. It’s easy for him, he got out. And right after the anger comes guilt, because of course you wish him a better job — he’s a friend.

Both feelings can exist at the same time. We call this ambivalence — and with any significant loss it is more the rule than the exception. The trouble starts when you push one of the feelings away. If you don’t allow yourself anger, you often turn it against yourself (“why am I still here?”) or against the people who stayed. If you don’t allow yourself sadness, you stay angry and wonder why it bothers you so much when your former colleague posts a photo from his new workplace.

A conversation about it might sound like this (composed, not a real person):

“I know I should be happy for him. He really did get a better job.”
“And what do you feel when you say that?”
“That he left me alone with this chaos. Which is stupid, he wasn’t obliged to stay.”
“He wasn’t obliged. But you’ve still been left without someone.”
“… Yes. Without the only person who ever told me I wasn’t overreacting.”

The heart of it is in that last sentence. The anger wasn’t really about his decision. It was about losing something that he took for granted and that was precious to you.

When one leaves, the others start wondering

It is no accident that one departure is soon followed by another. As early as 1986, David Krackhardt and Lyman Porter described how departures from organisations spread like a snowball: those more likely to leave were people who held a similar position in the network of relationships to those who had left before them. Later, Will Felps and colleagues showed that whether someone hands in their notice is also influenced by how embedded their colleagues are in the job and whether those colleagues are looking for work elsewhere. Departures, in other words, are contagious.

Systemically, this makes sense. When someone leaves, they show it can be done. When someone similar to you goes, you ask yourself why you are still here. And when the support that made the job bearable disappears, the job is suddenly less bearable.

That question deserves serious thought, not a quick decision. In the first weeks after an important colleague leaves, a decision to leave yourself is often not really a decision about the job but an attempt to avoid grief — to choose a new beginning instead of the emptiness by his desk. If in two or three months you still think the same, that is probably important information. If not, it may have been grief looking for a way out.

How to grieve at work

There is no room for crying at work, so grief there usually doesn’t look like grief. It looks like distraction, irritability, tiredness or a sudden reluctance towards work you used to enjoy. It often comes in waves: two days are fine, and then something small — his signature on an old document, a joke he would have got — hits you as if he left yesterday.

The researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut described a model in which healthy grieving doesn’t move in a straight line through stages but oscillates between two orientations. In one we turn towards the loss: we miss, we remember, we are sad or angry. In the other we turn towards restoration: we build new habits, new relationships and new roles. The model was developed for bereavement, but its basic idea is useful for smaller losses too. Why the stages of grief are not as orderly as people often think I explained in The stages of grief are a myth.

For a colleague’s departure this means two things. First, you are allowed to remember — to say out loud “I miss him”, to bring back a story about him over coffee, to laugh at one of his old jokes. Teams that keep silent about a colleague who has left, as if he had never been there, often make it harder for themselves to do exactly what would help. Second, you are allowed to move on. New people and new habits are not a betrayal. Grieving, briefly explained in the knowledge base under grieving, is not loyalty to an empty chair.

What happens to the friendship

“We’ll see each other” is something almost everyone says when they leave. Sometimes it’s true. Often, though, it turns out the relationship lived mainly on a shared context: the same meetings, the same manager, the same jokes about the same printer. Once the shared context is gone, the conversations thin out. The first coffee is still lively, the second a little less, the third never happens.

That isn’t a betrayal, nor proof that the friendship wasn’t real. It is a feature of relationships that grew out of circumstances. Some survive the move into a new context, others don’t. If the relationship matters to you, you can test it: invite him to something that has nothing to do with work, and notice what you talk about when there are no shared topics left. If the conversation is still alive, you have a friend. If not, you had a good colleague — which is also a great deal.

Exercise: an inventory of what left

The exercise takes about twenty minutes. It is best done within the first month after the departure.

1. Write his name at the top of a sheet of paper and below it list everything he did in your working day — including small things: coffee at ten, the Monday joke, “call him, he knows”.
2. Next to each item, mark who does it now: someone officially, me (without anyone asking) or nobody.
3. For the “nobody” items, ask yourself which one you truly miss and where you might find it at least partly — with another colleague, outside work or in yourself.
4. For the “me” items, decide which you want to keep and which you will hand back to the system. For those you hand back, note who you will talk to about it — most often your manager.
5. Make a small private ritual. Write him a message about what he meant to you at work. You don’t have to send it. But if you want to, send it — people rarely receive messages like that and remember them for a long time.

The exercise won’t remove the emptiness. But it will make it visible, and what is visible can be dealt with. An emptiness without a name tends to turn into tiredness you can’t trace back to anything.

When it isn’t (only) about the colleague

I would like to be precise, too, about what this post doesn’t cover.

If your colleague died, that is a different loss, with a different weight and a different course. A pen-and-paper exercise is not enough then. When grief needs more support I described in When loss needs professional help.

If he left because he was pushed out — because he was let go in a way that seems unjust to you, or because someone systematically squeezed him out — fear and a sense of injustice join the sadness. Then you too are a witness to something that concerns the whole team. If you suspect workplace bullying, the right places to turn are a trade union or the Labour Inspectorate of the Republic of Slovenia. I can’t give you legal advice.

If your reaction is much bigger than the relationship, it is worth looking deeper. Sometimes a colleague leaving opens an old wound: a parent who left, a brother who moved away and never called again, a friend who disappeared without a word. Then you are grieving not only for the colleague but also for something older. In relational family therapy, in which I am training, Christian Gostečnik describes how the emotional patterns of early relationships repeat in later ones — including in how we experience goodbyes. If several losses pile up at once, When everything comes at once may help.

Sometimes you feel relief. That is legitimate too. Not every colleague you leaned on was necessarily good for you. Sometimes the support also meant dependence, and when it disappeared you could finally grow.

And finally: if sleeplessness, low mood or anxiety last for several weeks and don’t settle, your first port of call is your GP. Sadness after a loss is normal. But not everything you feel is necessarily just sadness.

What to remember

• A colleague leaving is a loss without a ritual — officially nothing happened, so the sadness often goes unspoken.
• A colleague rarely carries only their own tasks. They also take undescribed roles with them: buffer, ally, witness, yardstick.
• The system fills the empty place on its own — often with you, without anyone asking. Notice what you have quietly started taking on.
• Anger and sadness can exist at the same time. Ambivalence in loss is the rule, not a mistake.
• Grieving moves between loss and restoration. You are allowed to remember and you are allowed to move on.