3 Things the Royal Family Has Done Right During This Transition—and 1 Thing They Can Do Better (Opinion)
What the Transition From Queen Elizabeth to King Charles Can Teach Us About Managing Change
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The Royal Family has a checkered history with transitions. Henry VIII made such a mess of his family life that he’s remembered today, above all, for the mnemonic: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. (If you don’t happen to have a set of Broadway-loving teens in your house, as I do, you can check out the memorable recreation of this marital résumé in the opening of Six.)
On the opposite side of the spectrum, Queen Elizabeth II’s grandfather, King George V, was lying comatose on his deathbed on the night of January 22, 1936, when his doctor, Lord Dawson, gave him a fatal dose of morphine at precisely 11 o’clock so that the announcement of his death could be carried ''in the morning papers rather than the less appropriate evening journals.''
Now that’s planning!
Given that his granddaughter lived—and made public appearances—well into her 97th year, it should come as no surprise that the 1,000 members of her palace staff had planned for the transition down to the T (or maybe it’s tea).
Operation London Bridge, as the master plan was called, had been in the works for more than 60 years. “From the moment the queen became monarch, Whitehall started the planning process about what would happen when she died,” Philip Murphy, a professor of British and Commonwealth history at the University of London, told the New York Times.
I’ve spent most of the last decade thinking, studying, and writing about transitions. I published a book in 2020 called Life Is in the Transitions, and have another coming out next year on work transitions. The transition that’s been unfolding before the world since the queen’s death on September 8 is the best-managed I’ve ever seen. But it hasn’t been perfect.
Here are three things the Royal Family has done right during this transition—and one thing they can still do better at.
1. Articulate Their Emotions
Most people, having not been planning for their life transitions for seven decades, feel overwhelmed when they enter one. They either make a 212-item to-do list and say I’ll get through it in a weekend, or they lie in a fetal position and say I’ll never get through it. Both are mistaken. Look at enough of these times, and certain patterns become clear.
For starters, transitions have three phases. I call them the long goodbye, in which you mourn the old you; the messy middle, in which you shed habits and create new ones; and the new beginning, in which you unveil your fresh self. The Royal Family is clearly in the long goodbye, and they’re doing the two things you need to do to handle this period effectively.
First, they’re confronting their emotions. Transitions are challenging times; the first tool to managing them successfully is to accept that reality and identify what you’re feeling. The top three emotions people feel in such times are fear, sadness, and shame. Am I the only one struck that the famously stiff-upper-lip royal family has given public expressions of sorrow to “my darling Mama” and “Grannie”?
Photo courtesy NPR
2. Use Rituals to Mark the Occasion
The second of the seven tools I’ve identified to help you through a difficult time is to mark the occasion with rituals. Transitions, by their very nature, feel fluid and unstable. In the face of such instability, we have the remarkable ability to create our own stability. We sing, dance, hug, purge. We spread flowers in front of fences. We hold long marches behind coffins. We gather, mourn, and cry.
In a world with no boundaries, rituals create demarcation. In moments of deluge, rituals provide containers. No wonder 78 percent of people in my hundreds of conversations with people who’d been through wrenching transitions said they used rituals to help them get through their difficult times.
Surely there is no institution better than the Royal Family at organizing and hosting the kinds of public spectacles that we’ve seen in recent days. While harkening to the past, these events also summon the future. They are ways of saying — to ourselves and others — that we’ve gone through a change and are ready for what comes next.
3. Shed Grudges
One of the surprising things I’ve learned in talking to people about periods of change is that transitions are times of molting. Just as animals molt horns, hair, skin, and fur when they go through changes, we shed habits, mindsets, delusions, and dreams. Over the years, I’ve heard poignant stories of people shedding people-pleasing, overeating, workaholism, drinking,
But not until this week have I seen or heard of people shedding grudges. And yet two of the more stirring images this week were of 1) the Queen’s feuding grandsons, William and Harry (and their wives!), strolling together in Scotland to pay homage to their grandmother, and 2) the Queen’s ostracized son Andrew walking behind her coffin alongside the new king, their other brother, Edward, and their sister, Anne. On Wednesday, both the Queen's children and her grandchildren all walked together.
Sure, these staged gestures of reconciliation may have been for the cameras—or may have been because of the solemnity of the occasion—but they sent a signal nonetheless: Transitions are times of rearranging. And as we all know from our own lives, sometimes even forced gestures can reap unexpected rewards.
The shedding part of a transition is critical because it makes room for what comes next: astonishing acts of creativity. At the bottom of people’s lives, they begin to experiment with new ways of living, to initiate new activities, and to generate their own renewal. It's in this arena of recreation that the Royal Family has its greatest challenge.
Polls have shown that Queen Elizabeth was beloved, while Charles is merely tolerated. His poll numbers have already started to rise, but so have questions about his wealth. And while William, the new prince of Wales, inherited his mother’s halo, he also inherited his father’s 685-year-old duchy, which CNN reported this week is worth a billion dollars. How will the public feel about giving the Royals $100 million a year—and no inheritance tax--when they control such riches. On top of all these challenges, the new king will have to deal with the ongoing scandal around Andrew as well as decide the financial support of host of other royal hangers-on.
Creativity will be order, indeed.
To be fair, transitions take a long time. Five years, on average, in my research. So the Royal Family has time. But for all the skill and pageantry that has marked this global case study on how to say goodbye, they will have to work even harder to finish the second half of that transition—embracing the new beginning.
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You might enjoy reading these posts:
How the Death of Queen Elizabeth Will Affect Her Adult Children, According to Science
Share or Don't Share? What Jane Fonda Can Teach Us About Handling Illness
Or check out my books that inspired this newsletter: Life Is in the Transitions and The Secrets of Happy Families.
Or, you can contact me directly.
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