In 2025, Liverpool Football Club (LFC) sank into mourning after a pivotal and beloved player, Diogo Jota, passed away abruptly. The loss tore through the fabric of a community. Scarves and flowers flooded the club’s surrounding areas, and the team travelled to Portugal for the funeral. A few days later, training resumed. The club’s website now carries a page dedicated to Jota – his memory lives on, and life goes on. 

What LFC demonstrated something rare and significant: organisational maturity, respect and dignity in the face of loss. The club modelled what it looks like when an institution truly knows how to say goodbye. Indeed, the capacity to manage departures well – be it sudden events, resignations, retirements or leadership transitions – is a central indicator of organisational health. Below, we explore how organisations can cultivate this, and why it matters for those who remain. 

Attachment theory and the organisational body 

Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby identified four attachment patterns, each representing a different strategy for managing separation anxiety. Those with secure attachment are confident, resilient and able to navigate separation and loss effectively. Individuals with an avoidant attachment style maintain self-sufficiency as a defence, downplaying the significance of relationships because dependency feels dangerous.  

Then there’s anxious attachment – when people are hypervigilant to signs of abandonment, cling to relationships and struggle to accept endings. Finally, someone with disorganised attachment oscillates between avoidant and anxious strategies, behaving in an unpredictable, contradictory manner in the face of loss. 

Our ongoing conversations with executives suggest that these attachment styles aren’t confined to individuals. Organisations develop their own relational styles – ways of drawing people in, holding them and letting them go.  

The developmental dimension 

To understand why some organisations manage departures with grace and others with avoidance or drama, it helps to consider psychologist Robert Kegan’s constructive-developmental theory together with attachment theory. Kegan proposed that human development isn’t simply the accumulation of knowledge and experience, but the progressive transformation of the structures through which we make meaning. 

He identified a sequence of distinct “orders of mind”. Most of us sit at the level of the socialised mind, where identity is significantly determined by the expectations and values of those around us, and where loyalty and belonging are paramount. Roughly 35% reach the level of the self-authoring mind, where one has developed an inner compass that exists independently of external approval. Only about 5% operate at the level of the self-transforming mind, capable of holding multiple ideological frameworks simultaneously and sitting with uncertainty. 

An organisation dominated by socialised thinking tends towards anxious attachment. The “irreplaceable” senior partner who’s retiring is often a figure onto whom the organisation has projected its own sense of competence and continuity, and the loss is experienced as a rupture. Succession planning falters, the successor may be unconsciously undermined, and the retiree may be kept on in an advisory role that blurs rather than supports any transition. 

In an avoidant organisation, by contrast, leadership may adopt a pseudo-self-authored stance – a self-sufficiency that mistakes detachment for maturity. They may handle departures with bureaucratic efficiency: the individual is treated as a dispensable unit of human capital, easily replaceable and swiftly forgotten.  

Meanwhile, secure organisations are populated by self-authored individuals who can simultaneously acknowledge loss while supporting renewal. They don’t pretend that neither emotions nor practicalities exist and approach the moment of saying goodbye with equanimity. 

Why leaders matter and what poor departures cost 

Leaders who handle departures well invest in the transition early, initiating conversations about succession and legacy well before they become urgent. They make space for emotional complexity without letting it destabilise the organisation. They describe a person’s contributions in ways that are specific, personal and true – the kind of precise recognition that tells someone they are genuinely seen and valued. 

Such leaders also understand that how someone’s departure is handled shapes the authority of their successor. Every choice that blurs the transition, such as allowing the predecessor continued informal influence, costs the incoming leader legitimacy. This matters because the price of “bad” departures can be significant. A recent Gallup report estimates that low employee engagement costs the global economy roughly US$10 trillion annually, and the management of significant transitions is a meaningful contributor to this figure.  

When employees see a long-serving colleague being shown out with indifference, they recalibrate their own relationship with the organisation. Indeed, research shows that perceived violations of the implicit employment relationship are among the most reliable predictors of reduced commitment, diminished effort and an uptick in intentions to leave the organisation.

In an era where employee engagement, knowledge continuity and the quality of leadership succession are recognised as core strategic assets, the ability to manage departures well is a competitive advantage that’s available to any organisation with the will to develop it. All relationships end – but endings handled with honesty and warmth strengthen rather than weaken what remains.