Leading Through Grief in Life and Work

MORRA AARONS-MELE: I’m Morra Aarons Mele, and this is The Anxious Achiever. We look at stories from business leaders who have dealt with anxiety, depression, or other mental health challenges, how they fell down, how they picked themselves up, and how they hope workplaces can change in the future.

Are you sad? I’m sad. Sometimes, I’m overwhelmed by a sadness so intense, it can only be described as grief. Like many of us, I grieve now for our world, our people, and our planet. Grief is in the air. On HBR, David Kessler wrote powerfully that the world, all of us, are feeling different kinds of grief for what we’re experiencing right now and what we fear in the future. The loss of normalcy, the fear of economic toll, the loss of connection – it’s all hitting us, and we’re grieving.

The grief that we imagine in the future is really anxiety, Kessler tells us. It’s like your mind is going to a future point and imagining the worst, which is called catastrophizing. Have you been there recently? I definitely have, like a million times a day. Perhaps nothing has been more symbolic of the loss of our formerly prosperous and delicious way of life than the cratering of the restaurant industry during coronavirus. The food and drink business has always been brutal – working hours, really tough margins – but it’s a creative industry full of innovation, and it’s glamorous, something a lot of us are attracted to.

Today’s guest, Jody Adams, is someone who’s been so resilient in the face of grief. We’ll talk with her about what happened a few years ago. I think of her now as a leader in the Boston restaurant scene. In fact, when I called her for our interview, she had been participating in a webinar with restaurant owners about what to ask for in terms of aid. She’s involved with seven restaurants, and she’s working and leading with this once vibrant community to process a whole new kind of grief. Grief can manifest in different people in different ways, but it’s often a situation where you can feel alone, trapped in your own mind, unable to see a future. When organizations are facing a loss, being a leader and leading through grief can be really challenging. We’ll talk to Jody Adams about that. She joined me to talk about what it was like letting go of the restaurant where she’d spent two decades of her life, while, at the same time, she was losing her sister to cancer.

You described your path out of Brown as a little bit uncertain. I think you said you wanted to be a nurse practitioner. You got married for the first time at 24, and you were working at a gourmet food store in Rhode Island. Then your life changed. You said in an interview, “If you’re really unhappy in your marriage or in your professional goals at 25, then you really should make the shift because it’s going to be a long life of misery if you don’t. I figured that much out.” What happened when you were at 24 to 25 that helped you make the shift into the life that you have now?

JODY ADAMS: Well, first of all, I found the right place in that gourmet food store. I had been taking courses to become a nurse practitioner. I had been working in a nursing home. It was all fine, but once I got behind that counter and was dealing with beautiful cheeses and homemade breads and things like that, I knew that I was in the right place. I felt like I was home. It just was so natural. I had married somebody because I was terrified of going out into the world after getting a degree that didn’t provide me with a really clear path. I got a degree in anthropology. I was not going to become an academic. This man entered my life and was a grown-up. I thought that would keep me safe. The problem is I grew up quickly and realized that I was in the wrong profession, that I wanted to be involved in food.

I had been involved in food all my life, and suddenly it was like, oh my God, I can do this. It’s a real thing. It was when Dean & DeLuca had just exploded in New York. Restaurants were becoming recognized and respected, chefs names were getting to be known, Julia Child was a force … I could see this world that I could be a part of that was really exciting. The man I was married to really wasn’t excited about this person who was soaring. It was not good. I had spent some time trying to … We did try to fix the marriage. Ultimately though, there was a tape in my head that said, “I’m in the wrong place, I’m in the wrong place, I’m in the wrong place. I’m so unhappy.” I realized that I was telling lies all throughout the day just to get through the day and to not rock the boat, and that just wasn’t me.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: In Boston, you’re known for so many things, but I think a lot of us know you and love you as being the chef of Rialto at The Charles Hotel in Cambridge. Tell us what that restaurant … That was your first restaurant, right? You had it for 20 plus years.

JODY ADAMS: 22 years. It was the first restaurant where I was a chef and a partner and ultimately the sole owner. It was my life. It was a community. It was a world. As it evolved over 22 years, my role evolved from being somebody who was exclusively in the kitchen to being in charge of the entire restaurant, as well as being a member of the community and filling a responsibility in the community. I really grew up there, in terms of who I was professionally. I find even today, people … It’s been four years since Rialto closed, and I run into people who almost daily tell me how much they miss Rialto, miss being a part of that community, and miss the experiences that they had there. It was more than the food. Somebody once said they felt that Rialto was a hearth in the middle of Cambridge. I loved that image. There was just this wonderful magnet as a gathering place for people.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: Well, and the bar literally looked like a hearth. It was this gorgeous, what was it, travertine or something? It was lit.

JODY ADAMS: Onyx.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: You know, Jody, I’m not from Boston. I’ve lived here for a while now, but I first came up to go to graduate school at the Kennedy School, and for people not listening from Boston, which is most people, your restaurant is literally right next door to the Harvard Kennedy School. There was this photo of you for Rialto, and you were smiling and had this very chic, short haircut, and you just looked like a woman in charge, who knew herself. You were so glamorous. It was this big photo of you in the middle of Harvard Square for your famous restaurant. When I came to graduate school, I was feeling a bit lost, as many people are. I looked at you, because I would walk past you every day, and thought, “Oh man, I want to be like…” It was just something about that anchor of your photo that really … To me, you really were like a physical woman leader in the community.

JODY ADAMS: Wow, that’s beautiful. Thank you. That was hard for me.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: The photo?

JODY ADAMS: Well, the PR company said we need to put a big picture of you in front of the restaurant because Rialto is hard to find. It’s not obvious. It was on the second floor. There wasn’t a street entrance. There was hardly a sign. We put that big photo of me. My kids … I was a little concerned that my kids would think that I was going over the top, but it was a way of saying to the world, this is the person in charge, and this is the kind of experience you’ll have. The fact that you knew the person in that picture, I love that.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: Then you had this period where you became like a TV celebrity chef, right, which must have been totally surreal. What is it like to emotionally juggle all the balls of running a restaurant and then becoming a brand? I think we all know that running a restaurant is very hard. The margins are bad. The hours are bad. It’s very physically demanding. What was that evolution like for you when you became famous? You were on Top Chef and Top Chef Masters, and you were a brand. What did it demand of you as a leader?

JODY ADAMS: It demanded respecting the role. I remember my first job as a chef was at McKayla’s Restaurant in Cambridge. A sous chef and I were going off to do some event, and we pulled out of the garage. I had to open my car door to have the arm of the garage go up because the window in my car was broken. He turned to me and said, “I can’t be your sous chef unless you get a new car.”

MORRA AARONS-MELE: Because your car was too crappy.

JODY ADAMS: My car was too crappy. I learned that even, I didn’t feel … one does not necessarily feel like a celebrity chef. One feels like a really hard-working person who’s juggling a million things and trying to be a good boss, a creative person, a good member of the community, and then also be a really good mom and a good wife and a good daughter and a good sister. There’s so many things to juggle. Being a celebrity chef is not the first thing when I think about myself or have ever thought about myself, and I also didn’t really believe it. I had to pay attention to what it meant to have this, to be in this world, to be in an arena where I was a public figure and to respect that because it was important for the business. It was important for my professional life.

It was the people who allowed that to happen. I learned that also from Julia Child. Watching her operate in the world, she always had time for people. She always had time to be gracious and thank people. If she ever came to our restaurant, people would go up to her and want autographs, and she was always there for people and knew that without them, she wouldn’t have the presence that she had in the world.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: Can you think of, looking back, the hardest moment you had as a business person and a manager in your time in restaurants?

JODY ADAMS: The most difficult period I went through, I thought, was opening Rialto for the second time, reinventing it in 2007. Parting ways with my partners and working with architects and PR companies and writing a menu and hiring people and writing protocol. I did not have the experience and, therefore, didn’t think I had the confidence to do it. I was super anxious. It was a great weight loss process but wasn’t good for very much, if anything, else. I didn’t face anything that hard again until I had to close Rialto. I had chosen with my partners to open a restaurant, Porto, and also, in the same year, Saloniki. I didn’t know at the time that we were going through that, that I would be closing Rialto. The combination of those things all happening at the same time was monumental. Later that year, my sister got really sick.

From January through the middle of April, we watched as she declined, and ultimately, she died. I threw myself into taking care of Porto because Porto was struggling. I came out by September, and I was just a wreck. If you looked at me, I would cry. I was just dragging myself around. My kids were calling to ask if I was okay, looking out for me, which was very unusual. Finally, Ken, my husband, said, “You know, you really need to see somebody. You need to go talk to somebody.” I was like, “No, I don’t. I can do this by myself. I’m strong,” blah, blah, blah. I found a woman … actually, she found me. I went to see a therapist who’s fabulous and wonderful. I said to her, “I don’t want to talk about my parents. All I want is to find a way to manage these kinds of feelings because I know I’ve had them in the past, and they will come back.” She said, “This is grief.”

Grief is a real thing. I hadn’t allowed myself to process the grief of closing Rialto a year before or the loss of my sister. And the loss of my own identity as the owner of Rialto was huge.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: Why did you close Rialto? How did you come to that decision?

JODY ADAMS: Closing Rialto was a decision that I made. It was a difficult decision to make. It wasn’t 100% what I wanted to do. It did make sense at the time. The owner of the hotel and I agreed that it was time to part ways. I wasn’t 100% ready emotionally to do that. I didn’t really know that until afterwards, but I hadn’t finished what I wanted to do. I had intended to be there three more years, so psychologically, I still had three more years.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: Why? Was it that 25 years that just felt good?

JODY ADAMS: Yeah, it just felt good. My contract would have been up. There were a variety of reasons at that time. My daughter would have finished college. It would have been a new chapter in my life. I was preparing for that, and it just happened three years earlier than I had expected. I closed the doors. I remember saying to Gordon Hamersley, who is a good friend of mine and the first chef I really worked for, “You know, I don’t think I’m going to wear a chef’s jacket again. I think that when I cook, I’m not going to wear a chef’s jacket. I just don’t feel like I want to do that. I just felt so stripped of my identity as a chef.”

He said, “Don’t you dare. You put that chef’s jacket on. Get out back out there.” It took me a while to recalibrate again who I was and my identity, because my identity was so wrapped up in the community at Rialto who supported me. And to not be a part of that community in the same way left a huge hole for me.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: Were you nervous about how you would communicate that to the community? Did you feel a sense that they might be confused or that you wouldn’t… Did you feel any shame about that? Also, I can imagine being so public and being so beloved in a community, and then it going away, that people might have questions, and that would make me very anxious.

JODY ADAMS: Yes. Very good point. I was nervous about telling people. I was really sad. You can never be 100% honest about “why” in situations like that, and there was definitely shame. I felt like, to a certain extent, I had failed. Even though I knew that I hadn’t, it felt that way. I felt like I was failing the community, failing my family, and failing as a professional.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: I want to talk about grief and, of course, your sister, but it seems, to me, very relevant right now. A lot of us feel … I feel this way. You know, my small business before the pandemic was about to crest a wave, and I remember saying to my partner, we finally did it. We have been working so hard, and we were almost there in terms of new revenue goals and growth, and then it just all got taken away. It was this horrible, disruptive change.

JODY ADAMS: Terrible.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: It’s terrible. We’re all feeling that now. Is there anything you can tell us about how to lead through that? Because you still had to show up and manage staff through this disruptive change that you wouldn’t have chosen.

JODY ADAMS: I think it’s really important to pay attention to your strongest self and pay attention to what people around you are telling you as to who you are and what you represent in their lives, because that hasn’t gone away. Some stuff may go away. There may be stuff that you don’t have anymore. I mean, we had to move. I lost a house and had to move. We’re all going to lose something in this time. We’re going to lose businesses. We’re going to lose money. We’re going to lose dreams, but that’s just stuff. Some of it can be rebuilt. I mean, I don’t mean to minimize how horrible this is and what the loss is going to be for many people. One thing that I found that was enormously helpful is a Buddhist practice, a meditation practice to pay attention to what’s happening in the moment and look at the things that you actually can control right now.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: When your sister was so sick, what did your days look like? Were you working more than ever? Were you working less?

JODY ADAMS: I’m in Boston, and she was in New York. My mother, my older sister, and I were tag-teaming down to New York to take care of her. She was at home the entire time. I’d go down for three or four days at a time and then come back, and then go down, and then come back. When I was in New York with her, it was all-consuming as a caretaker. The wonderful thing that I got to do was cook. These wonderful meals were around her table. There would be 10 or 12 people there. She was a magnet for people. People would come at the end of the afternoon and stay for dinner. Those were the last weeks of her life, but it was really hard. Of course, it’s so hard to lose a sibling and a best friend and watch somebody, in their late 50s which is pretty young, deteriorate.

Particularly after she had been diagnosed and re-diagnosed four years before, at the time, she decided that she was going to live the best way she could and rode her first Pan-Mass Challenge with stage four breast cancer. She rode four total. She actually raised all of her money for her fifth ride, but she wasn’t alive for her fifth ride. She was an example and just a model of how to live life day-to-day, moment to moment, when you don’t know what’s going to happen next and when there is so much loss.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: You said that grief was something that you hadn’t allowed yourself to, I think you said, accept as real, something like that.

JODY ADAMS: Mm-hmm .

MORRA AARONS-MELE: Really? I mean, how? You had never been in therapy before?

JODY ADAMS: I had been in therapy before, not for years. I hadn’t been in therapy for grief. I knew that I was sad because my sister died. I knew that I missed her, but I didn’t put all of the pieces together of closing Rialto and not really having a chance to process that because I was opening two other restaurants and then facing my sister’s illness. The cumulative effect of that just took me down so very far that I was almost paralyzed. This wonderful therapist who … I intentionally found somebody who has a meditation practice that’s part of the therapy. My therapist helped me with meditation, and I worked through the feeling of grief as being something very real and something to hold onto in my own terms.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: What does that mean?

JODY ADAMS: It means that you have to go into it and carry it. As somebody once said, grief is like putting a bag of rocks on your back. It doesn’t necessarily get lighter. You just get used to it, and you get stronger. I don’t ever feel that I won’t be living with my sister’s death and with her life. It will never go away completely. She was way too important a person in my life. In fact, right now, I’m getting a little teary, because right now, in this crisis time that we’re in, she would be somebody who would be so important for me to connect with, so I think about her a lot. I think about the fact that if she were alive, she would be in New York right now figuring out how to help as many people as possible. I think it is not pushing grief away, not pushing the hard things away. It’s actually a phrase that I came up with for myself: take suffering by the hand.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: I think it would be really helpful, actually, if you don’t mind for listeners, to talk through, before your husband had an intervention with you, what your days with the grief felt like. Because I’ve had people in clinical depressions talk through what getting up when you’re clinically depressed feels like. It feels like you’re carrying cement and even just walking to brush your teeth just feels like a lot. Can you think back to how your physical being felt in those days, your emotional being, your sleep?

JODY ADAMS: Yes. Well, it was a combination of depression and anxiety. I was super anxious about the success of these new restaurants. At the same time, I was handling the grief of closing Rialto and my sister’s illness and ultimately death. Because I was anxious, I was able to get up and get going for a while, and then it was as though I was weighted, that I didn’t care about anything. It was really hard to think about anything as being super important except getting through the day. I was crying a lot, a lot. I would lie to go to sleep … I would lie on my back and just fold my hands over my chest and try some mantra to make myself go to sleep. I also did find that medication was enormously helpful.

I went on an antidepressant and also an anti-anxiety medication for a time when I needed it. It helped get me through that time, and then I came to a point where I felt more like myself. Then I stopped the medication. Going to somebody, a therapist who is able to say that everything you’re feeling is normal for what you’ve gone through, doesn’t mean that you’re a weak person, or that you’re incompetent or not accomplished, or that you can’t be successful or haven’t been successful, or any of those things. It just means that right now, in this moment, there was an avalanche of things that happened that brought you to this place.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: How long did it take till you started feeling a little bit more like yourself?

JODY ADAMS: I would say about six months.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: That’s a long time.

JODY ADAMS: It was a long time.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: Did you keep working?

JODY ADAMS: Oh yes. Yeah. Working is good. Giving is good. One of the things that I did … Because my therapist said when you’ve lost your community, you need to find a new community. I knew a woman named Sherry Hughes, who’s the chef at the Women’s Lunch Place. It services women as a day shelter, serves breakfast and lunch, and has showers and beds and laundry and toiletries. I mean, it’s an amazing, amazing place and advocacy. They help women find housing, if that’s something they need. They have a clinic there. I decided that I wanted to volunteer there. It took me a couple of months to get my courage up to go because I felt so not myself. It was incredible, what it did for me. It gave me a purpose every week I went there. I had thought maybe I’d help with the laundry or something, but of course, they put me in the kitchen.

I was just one more volunteer in a hairnet there, and an apron and gloves. It made my day. I think giving is so important when you’re feeling like you’re just so turned into yourself, getting outside yourself and also connecting to the thing that’s really painful. For me, as I said, I came up with this idea of taking suffering by the hand and just holding onto it and getting comfortable with it as opposed to trying to push it away.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: What advice would you give? I mean, you were the boss at some level, so you could take the space. I’m thinking of people who work hourly or who work really, really intensive schedules. What’s your advice, or how have you dealt with people in your restaurants who maybe have been through grief and have needed to take space but have felt like the kind of work they do doesn’t allow them the space?

JODY ADAMS: I know that in our businesses when people have been going through difficult times and they let us know, then we give them the time. If it’s somebody who wants to work, and often people want to work, then we just make sure that if they’re comfortable with it, that everybody knows what they’re going through, and that there’s a lot of love and support and a gentle hand with them. I mean, we just had somebody who works for us whose son died, not in this country and in a really brutal way. He was working the next day, and I asked him if he’d like to go home. He said, “No, this is a much better place for me to be. I’d much rather be here at work.”

I think everybody deals with things in different ways. I think creating a space where it’s safe for people to tell you what’s going on in their lives is extremely important. You know, we all face anxiety, stress, and uncertainty. We feel like we’re imposters, we’re insecure, our confidence plummets. You know, we all deal with that.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: What have you learned about being a caring leader who holds people but also knowing when to let people fail on their own or learn on their own? How do you balance it? Because you must, as both the person in charge whose name is on the door and a person who can’t possibly manage everything, otherwise you’d go crazy … you must have to triage situations a lot as a leader.

JODY ADAMS: Yes. You also have to hope that your investment in your leaders in the restaurant has paid off and that they know what to do. I can’t be in every situation, of course. I also can’t manage every situation and shouldn’t manage every situation. What I can do is listen, ask questions, and let people know that we care about them and that I care about them, and we’ll do everything in our power to make things right. But also, each individual is responsible for advocating for themselves, dealing with conflict, and managing conflict themselves. Because if you don’t manage your own conflict and you ask for help all the time, you don’t evolve.

My first concern right now in the situation that we’re in with coronavirus is the staff. They’re scattered now. There’s 500 people that work for us, and they’re scattered all over the Boston area. We don’t have a lot of resources for them in the city. I’m sending out emails about resources and hoping that it’s helping, but that’s the hardest. The hardest part about being a business owner is always the people. It’s the people because … or it’s the best part, I guess it’s both. It’s the best and the hardest. Right now, it’s really hard.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: That’s it for this week’s show. If you like what you’ve heard, be sure to subscribe and submit a review in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your shows. If you have an idea for the show or want to tell us your story, drop me a note at anxiousachiever@gmail.com, or you can tweet me @morraam, that’s M-O-R-R-A-A-M. Special thanks to the team at Harvard Business Review, my producer Mary Dooe, the team at Podcast Garage, and all of our guests who are telling us their stories from the heart. From the HBR Presents network, I’m Morra Aarons Mele, and this is The Anxious Achiever.