What We Can Learn From Kübler-Ross About Leading Through Distress

The Price of Waiting Too Long to Act

Tamika Curry, Ph.D., Founder and CEO, Morse Regent

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced a framework in 1969 that fundamentally changed how we understand human beings in crisis. That framework, known as the Kübler-Ross stages of grief, describes the emotional process people move through when confronting loss. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It was drawn from her clinical observations of terminally ill patients and was never meant to be linear or prescriptive. It was meant to give language to something that had previously been invisible. To say, what you are feeling has a name, and you are not alone in it.

The Kübler-Ross stages of grief is a framework that stays at the forefront of my mind when I try to understand how people move through loss or a difficult transition. Lately I have been thinking about it a great deal as it relates to organizational challenges. Hear me out.

Because of my work with organizations navigating financial and operational challenges, I have watched leadership teams move through something that looks remarkably similar to those same stages. And what I have observed, both as a healthcare provider and as a turnaround advisor, is that the emotional process is real, it is understandable, and when it is not recognized and addressed it becomes one of the most costly forces in an organization’s decline.

There is no shortage of change management frameworks. These frameworks do important work. They give organizations a structured process for managing the external dimensions of change, the communications, the training, the stakeholder alignment, the timeline. What they tend to address less directly is the internal emotional experience of the people inside the change. The human beings who built what is now being dismantled or restructured. The leaders who are being asked to make decisions about something they love while they are still in the process of grieving it. That is where Kübler-Ross becomes relevant, not as a substitute for change management but as the layer underneath it that determines whether any of it actually works.

The stages of grief can be a gift when you recognize them. They become a liability when you do not. Because the financial position of an organization does not pause while leadership moves through denial at its own pace.

What the Stages Look Like Inside a Struggling Organization

Denial in an organization does not always look like ignorance. Often it looks like intelligence. It is something I have heard repeatedly in leadership conversations when the topic turns to financial challenges. All nonprofits are struggling right now. All organizations are dealing with this. And while there may be truth in that at a sector level it is also one of the most common ways denial shows up in a leadership conversation. It redirects attention away from the specific situation that actually needs examining. It sounds like this is a temporary issue that will resolve in the next quarter or we have been through difficult periods before and we have always come through. These statements are not lies. They are the way human beings protect themselves from a reality that feels too large to fully absorb all at once. I have sat in rooms where leaders had the financial data in front of them and still could not see what the data was saying. Not because they were not capable. Because they were not ready.

Anger looks like blame. At funders. At policymakers. At board members asking the wrong questions. Bargaining sounds like if we can just land this one contract or get through the next six months. Depression looks like paralysis, deferred decisions, and a culture of waiting. And acceptance, when it finally arrives, is the moment when the organization can see its situation clearly enough to act.

The Problem Is the Timeline

In Kübler-Ross’s original framework individuals move through these stages at their own pace. That is not only acceptable in the context of personal grief. It is healthy. Rushing someone through the emotional process of loss does more harm than good. But organizations are not individuals. Financial distress does not extend the same courtesy. The options available at the denial stage are very different from the options available six months later. Decisions that could have been made proactively become reactive and more painful the longer they are deferred. By the time most organizations reach acceptance on their own timeline the most powerful interventions are no longer on the table.

I watched this play out in one of the most defining experiences of my career, guiding a large organization through acute cash crisis, restructuring, bankruptcy consideration, and ultimately acquisition and full post-acquisition integration. The warning signs had been present for a long time. There were moments when different decisions, made sooner, could have changed the trajectory significantly. The stages were all there. The timeline was the variable that changed everything.

The options available at denial are very different from the options available at acceptance. That distance is measured in cash, time, and choices that do not come back.

The Case for a Fresh Set of Eyes

In clinical practice we understand something important about people in the middle of a difficult experience. Their ability to see their own situation clearly is compromised not by a lack of intelligence but by proximity. When you are inside the experience, when you built the thing that is in trouble, when you know every person by name and the mission is personal, your vision narrows in ways you cannot always perceive from the inside. This is not a weakness. It is a deeply human response to being in pain about something you care about.

We would never tell someone navigating a profound personal loss to figure it out alone. We encourage them to seek support not because they are incapable but because grief narrows perspective. A skilled licensed therapist or trauma professional does not have the answers for you. But they bring a vantage point that is impossible to generate from inside the experience. They can see what you cannot see yourself. They can name what is happening without the emotional weight of having built what they are looking at. And they can help compress the timeline between denial and the decisions that actually protect what matters most.

The same is true for organizations navigating financial and operational challenges. The leaders who have given years or decades to building something are often the last ones who can see it with full clarity when it is under pressure. That is not a failure of leadership. It is a function of how deeply they care. What moves an organization from denial to acceptance faster than anything else is not more data or more meetings. It is a fresh set of eyes. Someone who can assess the reality without the emotional weight of the history and help leadership make the decisions that protect the mission before the situation makes those decisions for them.

In clinical practice we call that good judgment. In organizational advisory work we call it turnaround leadership.

Morse Regent is a turnaround advisory and interim executive leadership consulting firm partnering with mission-driven organizations, particularly those in healthcare, behavioral health, and education, at pivotal inflection points in their financial and operational performance, so that the organizations doing the most important work in our communities can continue to make the impact they were built to deliver. If any part of this resonated with you, let's talk.

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