Companies With a Cause: Finding Purpose Beyond Profits

BY juliemadsen | April 24, 2019

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The Brand Manager’s Nightmare: Is Every Purchase Decision Now a Political One?

Starting May 12, Avelo Airlines, a budget carrier, is scheduled to begin flights chartered by the U.S. government to fly from Mesa, Ariz., to El Salvador. The Boeing 737s will be carrying not vacationers but people, in shackles, who are being deported, destined for a known hellhole of a prison.Even before the plane took off, Avelo had touched down in a public relations fiasco. Avelo said it was proud to assist the government, yet all but stated that it needed the business. The company is a startup, an Ultra Low Cost Carrier (ULCC) that operates out of secondary airports such as Wilmington, Del. Avelo quickly became the target of a boycott by groups in Delaware, as well as Connecticut and California, where it operates, who accused the airline of transporting people who were being deported without due process. For that same reason, Connecticut’s attorney general, Will Tong, threatened Avelo’s tax breaks and subsidies.A higher-profile company, Tesla, has learned the cost of the controversy created by its CEO, Elon Musk, who spent $250 million to help elect Donald Trump president and then fired tens of thousands of federal workers in his role as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).The world’s richest man has lost some $150 billion in wealth this year as shares in his car company continue to fall. Tesla reported that its profits dropped 71% and revenue from car ales declined 20% in the first quarter as customers abandoned a brand once viewed as progressive and eco-friendly. But Musk’s ties to Trump have made the Tesla brand toxic. The used car market is flush with Teslas, as owners abandon the company. Tesla owners who can’t afford to unload them display bumper stickers proclaiming, “I bought this before Elon went crazy.”For other companies caught one way or another in the political crossfire—Target, Anheuser-Busch, Costco—it’s a year that offers lots of bad options concerning brand and reputational risk as America’s politics continue get more strained. And pained.Even America as a brand is in play, the golden door having been slammed shut, the world leader now becoming isolationist. The president of the U.S. dissing Canada, geography’s nicest neighbors, has set off a boycott by Canadian tourists that is already apparent in places like Las Vegas, New York, and Florida.  Within this political maelstrom, companies are trying to figure out whether consumers are going to turn every purchase decision into a political one. As for me, I'm just trying to buy paper towels on the cheap.  Does my cereal choice really have to be a commentary on the Trump Administration?  Can’t a hamburger just be a hamburger? Increasingly, the answer is no.The Hazard of Getting Outside the Brand FitOf all the corporate jobs I wouldn’t want to have right now—other than DEI director—brand manager might be one of them. This used to be a fairly straightforward assignment. If you are in charge of say, Ivory Soap, your job is to make sure the brand speaks to purity, cleanliness and motherhood.But in our over-politicized world, virtue signaling and value signaling can trip over each other. And when they do, there’s trouble. We saw this happen, most spectacularly, when Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Lite brand decided to do a promotion with a transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. There was an actual brand fit—Bud Lite has a longstanding marketing presence in the LBGTQ community, just as it does in deep red areas. And given that Bud Lite had run some pretty insipid creative in the past (and I’m talking about you, Spuds MacKenzie), this promotion should have had a half-life of about 30 seconds.But Bud’s umbrella brand image of traditional American masculinity—all of it pulled by Clydesdale horses—was too much for MAGA America, which staged a loud boycott. Bud Lite’s sales tanked until the company counter-programmed with the reddest of red, white and blue advertising. Gay and trans people are still drinking Bud Lite, presumably, but you are just not going to see that highlighted as much. You can call A-B a coward for being bullied, but brands, and the companies behind them, adjust their identities at considerable peril. Consider what happened to BP, the British oil giant that tried to reposition itself as a green energy company.  Then its Texas refinery blew up, revealing the firm’s horrible environmental record. Granted, oil companies did green energy pantomime during the Biden Administration, but they are suddenly oil-and-gas companies again, as opposed to the energy companies.And maybe that kind of honesty is preferable. Resource extraction is a dirty business. If you’re driving a gasoline-powered auto, maybe you shouldn’t expect chlorophyl from a hydrocarbon seller;  just fill’er up, shut up, and drive.But if  you want to know how to do down-and-dirty,  there’s Waste Management, now known as WM, which has managed to raise trash removal to some kind of sacred environmental  mission. WM’s communications all but scream, “We love garbage!” It’s a clear corporate statement that shareholders and other constituencies can understand.How Much Leeway Does a Brand Have?A company’s brand or trademark is often explained in terms of permission: What does your brand or logo allow you to offer customers? Being Budweiser gives you permission to market the beer made by a company founded by a German immigrant—that is now part of a Belgian-Brazilian conglomerate—as All-American. But Anheuser-Busch earned that permission over the last 100 years of brand communication. What it doesn’t permit you to do is engage in identity politics, at least not today.And not every brand-marketing failure is caused by controversy. In the 1980s the old-line retailer Sears, Roebuck bought Dean Witter, an old-line stockbroker. The reasoning was that consumers would gladly buy stocks where they buy socks. Because both firms were trusted, went the logic. But people didn’t shop for equities and power tools the same way, wouldn’t you know. Sears had neither mission nor permission to sell stocks.Costco, on the other hand, is an example of a company that had permission from its customers to freely reject the anti-DEI initiatives of the Trump Administration. From its beginning as a membership wholesale club, Costco was green, liberal, worker-friendly and an absolutely first-rate operation. Customers love the place because cheap groceries and merchandising magic are bipartisan. There was no red drain from Costco’s coffers, because the company and its culture were behaving in the way that co-founder Jim Sinegal had executed from the start.Target employees marching in the New York City Pride Parade in 2017. When Target stepped away from its DEI commitments earlier this year, a boycott broke out (Photo by Aneese/iStock by Getty Images) On the other hand, poor Target, the midwestern retailer that’s been a favorite of young families, managed to catch it from both the left and the right by trying to please both. Target’s decision to back away from its DEI program, which included supporting gay rights, infuriated the soccer-mom set as well as Black shoppers. The ensuing boycott has hurt in-store traffic, down 9% in February and 6.5% in March  vs. the prior year, compelled CEO Brian Cornell to seek a meeting with Black leaders to try to repair the damage. The company pledged to buy $2 billion from Black-owned suppliers. But not everyone in the community is onboard.Then we’ve got Ben & Jerry’s, where the corporate owner, the Dutch conglomerate Unilever, just fired the CEO for being too political, even though the brand has a stated mandate to be socially progressive. This in the context of Unilever's decision to sell its ice-cream portfolio, which the company carefully assembled and artfully mismanaged. Co-founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield have offered to buy back the company and return the brand to its progressive roots. Set Chunky Monkey free! That might not matter to people who just want some chocolate ice cream. But if you are part of the company and its community, you care a lot, because the politics are part of the culture.That’s why nobody expects Patagonia to be anything but a fierce environmental steward, because that’s exactly the company that Yves Chouinard created. How fierce? In 2021, Patagonia pulled its business from the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort after a then-owner hosted a fundraiser for far-right, which is to say anti-green, Republicans.Essentially, Patagonia fired one of its prestige customers. You might label that decision as extreme, but it’s also an example of a company living up to its culture and mission. Over the long term, there may be way more value in reinforcing the mission than losing a customer.Bill Saporito is an editor at large at Inc. magazine whose work has also appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post. Previously, he worked as an assistant managing editor at Time magazine and as a senior editor at Fortune. He has written for From Day One on the power gap among labor unions, the myth of the “woke” corporation, and the perils of getting technology and people misaligned.(Featured photo: People take part in a protest on March 2025 outside of the Tesla centre at Park Royal in West London, as part of a campaign encouraging customers to boycott Tesla. Photo by Stefan Rousseau/Associated Press)

Bill Saporito April 30, 2025

Calm Amid Chaos: How to Talk to Your Team About Uncertainty

Life can be unpredictable, and we don’t like it that way.Our brains were designed for certainty. Humans look for patterns in our surroundings to form useful habits and conserve mental energy. Always have: Hunting buffalo in the winter when the animals’ coats are thick. Sowing seeds in the spring before the rains. Buying our lattes from the same reliable coffee shop week after week.These days, a lot feels unsettled: Tariffs on or off? Financial markets up or down?  Recession is possible, but who knows? The Trump administration’s disdain for DEI and ESG has upended workplace culture and hiring practices, leaving many employees confused or upset about their company’s values and practices.All this comes at a time when employee engagement is at a ten-year low. Just 31% of workers report feeling engaged, according to a Gallup survey released in January, well before the current administration began its rapid-fire changes. “Economic uncertainty remains a significant drag on the sentiment of workers as tariffs, federal funding and workforce cuts, and general business uncertainty disrupt investment and hiring plans,” wrote Glassdoor’s lead economist, Daniel Zhao in an April report.No kidding. And it could get worse. This just in from the Editorial Board at Bloomberg: “A financial crisis isn’t out of the question.”How can HR leaders and other managers respond? The first thing is to appreciate the physiology. Uncertainty rattles our nervous system. It creates a sense of ambiguity that our minds struggle with. “The stress of uncertainty, especially when prolonged, is among the most insidious stressors we experience as human beings,” said Aiofe O’Donovan, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychiatry at the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, back in 2020, when the pandemic was our biggest problem. Now impacting our psyches are the upending of global alliances, accepted health practices, and predictable weather patterns.Some workers are literally cracking their teeth from stress, dentists in Washington, D.C., have discovered recently. Even Slackmojis have taken a very dark turn.When our prediction-seeking brains are challenged with too many plot twists, we tend to feel threatened, scared, and overwhelmed. But there are proactive steps that leaders can take to restore some calm, promote needed focus on work, and reduce the long-term, unhealthy effects. Among them:Validate and EmpathizeHumans need to feel understood. If your workers are quietly panicking and seeking reassurance, let them know that their concerns are normal and understandable. Give them space to talk about their fears and listen to their perspective. You might see more tears during meetings or meltdowns over minor mishaps. When appropriate, remind workers about the resources the company offers, such as EAPs, employee resource groups (ERGs), mental health therapy of all kinds, and even subsidized gym memberships that might give them places to feel supported or just sweat out their anxiety. While being a careful listener may require extra effort, there’s a substantial upside: research finds that workplaces that promote candid communication tend to be more collaborative, have higher morale, and react to layoffs with more resilience.Communicate Regularly, With EmpathyKeep your workers well-informed. During uncertain times, “employees most want information about their job and the organization,” according to research by Kristine W. Powers and Jessica B.B. Diaz, academics at Claremont Graduate University. “They want psychological and instrumental support from their manager and clear, fast, and accurate communication.” If you’re making changes to programs, like DEI, explain why, as candidly as possible. If you’re keeping everything the same, tell them that, too. If your company is using silence to the outside as a strategy, then keeping your internal communications robust is even more important, writes Paul Klein, author of Change for Good: An Action-Oriented Approach for Businesses to Benefit From Solving Social Problems, in a recent Forbes article. “Use this as an opportunity to deepen your team’s understanding of the company’s purpose and impact. Develop internal newsletters, Q&As, and leadership briefings that reinforce your values. Employees are your most credible messengers. They need to know what you stand for, even if the world outside doesn’t hear as much as before.”Be prepared for pushback. Some employees might be upset that you are bending to the current political winds and may quit, rebel, or confront, as the Washington Post reported last week. Think honestly about the impact that might have on morale and staffing issues.Celebrate the ControllablesA powerful antidote to anxiety is agency. Help your workers focus on what is squarely within their control. Praise the value of their work and guide them to new projects or tasks that will give them a sense of mastery. Be clear about what they need to do and let them figure out how they can do it.  And don’t be shy about asking for feedback on matters ranging from office layout, meeting scheduling, even party planning. If you have the resources, send out a survey soliciting advice on how a specific system might be improved. When workers feel trusted and see that their feedback matters, they’ll feel like significant members of a team rather than cogs in a wheel.Fact-Check Your Own FearsTo be a good leader, you need to have a grip on your sense of uncertainty. When faced with conflicting and frightening news, it’s common to panic or catastrophize. First, ask yourself, How likely is this to happen or How real is this threat? If your honest answer is likely, then turn to trusted sources. Talk to a good friend, colleague, or manager to gain perspective.  If the threat is about the world order, consult well-reported, professional news sites for information rather than random posts on IG, X, or TikTok. One resource to help spot misinformation is Rumor Guard from the News Literacy Project, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching Americans how to discern fact from fiction and dispelling viral rumors.Take Ten—and Commend It to Your Team“Most of us are working with tired brains,” says Amit Sood, M.D., author of The Mayo Clinic Guide to Stress-Free Living. If you're getting caught up in the rapidly changing political rhetoric, take ten-minute breaks during your workday. Treat yourself to micro naps, mini nature walks, or a sound bath on Spotify—anything that will give your tired mind some time to rest and recharge. And please, don’t scrimp on sleep. This is no time to be running on empty. You need to be in good mental shape for yourself and your workers.Model Self-compassion and CuriosityWhile this might sound self-indulgent, research proves that workers who treat themselves with grace rather than punishment perform at a higher level, have less workplace stress, and are better team players. How does this look? Instead of tearing yourself down, ask: “What do I need to overcome this challenge? How can I grow from this experience? What support would help me move forward?” This is the advice of Kristin Neff, associate professor in the University of Texas at Austin's department of educational psychology, and the author of  Mindful Self-Compassion for Burnout. And apply the same level of curiosity and kindness to workers who are struggling with uncertainty, burnout, or any type of work challenge.Admit Your Mistakes and Clear the AirLeaders will make mistakes navigating the current unpredictability and they should admit their vulnerability, says Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic and author of the classic True North leadership books. “Harvard is acknowledging it didn’t control the antisemitism on campus,” he told the Minnesota Star Tribune last week. “So let’s put that one out there. Harvard leader Alan Garber is clearly doing that. I think clearly [CEO] Mary Barra at General Motors, who was trapped with the tariffs, right now is acknowledging some of the mistakes that they made, and they’re trying to adapt to that. So I think we do see many leaders now being more vulnerable. Some are not. They’re afraid of being vulnerable. But I think when you do that, then you kind of clear the air. You have to admit your mistakes. Any leader that won’t admit their mistakes is not a real leader.Keep Track of the Good and the GreatEven during difficult times, one can find positive events and ideas to appreciate. Focus on your accomplishments and help your employees do the same. Robert Waldinger, M.D., author of The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, shared a humbling story in a recent blog post: “During the An Lushan Rebellion [a major uprising against the Tang Dynasty in China, 755-763 A.D.], amid so much death and destruction, there was a poet who was trapped in a town that was being destroyed. He wrote a poem called ‘The View This Spring.’ The poem is just two lines.” It goes: The nation is destroyed, mountains and rivers remain. When you find yourself consumed by worry, zoom out to the bigger picture. Take stock of your wins and the beauty in your life and world. And help your workers do the same.Lesley Alderman, LCSW, is a psychotherapist and journalist based in Brooklyn, NY. She writes about mental health topics for the Washington Post and has been an editor at Money and Real Simple magazines and a health columnist for the New York Times.(Featured photo by iStock by Getty Images)

Lesley Alderman, LCSW April 22, 2025

Corporate Empathy: Where It Went and Why It Matters

It certainly seems like a bleak moment to be a worker in America. Scroll the news or social media and a picture forms of an uncaring, turbulent, and miserly workplace.Why is this so striking? Empathy, or the ability to understand and be sensitive to others’ feelings and experiences, became a fashionable trait in business just a few years ago. For a while, employers were getting really good at responding to the needs of the workforce. Some companies even traded on it. Empathy, as well as its more active cousin, compassion, took many forms. As more attention focused on how some demographic groups were often left on the sidelines, employers said OK, let’s find ways to level the playing field, and they set hiring goals and stood up mentorship programs. When Covid lockdown closed schools and day-care centers and quarantined babysitters, companies told workers to take care of their families and welcomed Zoom cameos from kids. When employees needed a reprieve from expensive cities and long commutes, companies converted to remote work and hybrid work. When burnout and loneliness pressed on our minds, employers started footing the bill for therapy.The year 2025 feels really different. Much of change in the weather has to do with what the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are doing to the federal workforce, gutting it haphazardly and villainizing the civil service—and how companies in the private sector are playing follow-the-leader. Meta appeared to ingratiate itself to the incoming administration by axing its DEI programs. And when President Trump ended federal DEI programs, Google and Amazon ended some of theirs. When Elon Musk fired “low performers” from the federal government, so did Meta and Microsoft. Public sector followed private sector in ending remote and hybrid work. First Amazon, AT&T, and Boeing called workers back to the office in late 2024, and the president did the same on inauguration day. Underscoring the dramatic shift: All of this is happening as we arrive at the fifth anniversary of Covid lockdowns in the U.S. In some ways, all those revolutionary changes to the way we work seem to be dissolving. To be sure, many employers insist that employee well-being is still a priority, but surveys show that most workers aren’t feeling it. According to Gallup, the percentage of employees who believe their organization cares about their well-being plunged to 21% in early 2024. At its peak in May 2020, that figure was 49%.These stories and statistics certainly make it seem like employers are pulling the plug on empathy. But while the big tech and banking companies that have toughened up their workplace policies employ a lot of people, as does the federal government, they don’t employ everyone. Do these stories really reflect what it’s like to be a worker in 2025? Is corporate empathy dead? I started asking around.When the Reality Doesn't Match the MessageAs I was working on this story, Lauren Branston, CEO of the UK-based nonprofit Institute of Business Ethics, sent me an email. “I have been hearing people I trust saying they are seeing more and more ‘campaigns’ saying empathy is bad, etc. Which I find worrying,” she wrote. “People are campaigning against a core human value. We aren’t ready for this as an institution or in society because we have assumed these topics to be settled.”For decades, she later told me in an interview, people have operated with the belief that undergirds much of Western political democracy: that those with power can largely be trusted to use that power for good, and if they don’t use it for good, then accountability, in the form of ethics or regulations, will come for them. Now, it’s not clear whether either of those things is enough to stop the rolling tide.“It’s fundamentally challenging, she said. “It’s a moment where your values and beliefs are shaken, and it’s a moment where you have to sit and recalibrate what’s going on. What you see when people’s values are challenged is engagement and collaboration and connection. People organize and get organized. And I think that might happen.”As a reporter, I talk to senior HR leaders and executives every day, and some of them I know well. It’s clear to me that a lot of these people who work in HR are, as individuals, genuinely concerned about the well-being of their colleagues. And some are really pushing for change.In February, I moderated a From Day One panel of senior talent-acquisition leaders, and all of them were insistent on providing a good candidate experience even as they introduce AI into their hiring process and navigate an unwelcoming labor marketplace. In fact, they were most concerned with finding ways to provide feedback to individual applicants, even those who don’t get the job. Comcast, which might get a thousand applications for a given role, learned that what applicants want most is feedback, so its TA team is finding ways to provide that.But when what the company says is not what the company does, a lot of HR leaders are really troubled by this. Lori Osborne is one of them. She has spent her 20-year career in HR, mostly working for corporations and startups, plus a brief stint with a non-profit organization, before leaving in 2024 to be a fractional CHRO for startups. Hypocrisy is why she left corporate HR, after finding that values and behavior just didn’t add up. Publicly, leadership would say, “‘We want you to go on a run at lunch. We want you to go to your kids’ school play. We want you to do this thing that you have a personal passion for, even though it’s during work hours,’” Osborne told me. But behind closed doors, the same leaders debated whether to promote employees who went on lunchtime runs or left early to make the school play. Taking them at their word was a trap. But this didn’t happen in the new, colder environment, it happened years ago, when it was in vogue to be a support-everyone kind of company. Which tends to confirm the worker suspicion that many companies never believed in empathy at all.What It Feels Like When the Vibe ShiftsEven so, I found employees who wanted me to know that they don’t believe corporate empathy is dead. One of them works in product development at a large, U.S.-based tech company. He wanted me to use a pseudonym—we’ll call him Terry—so he could speak candidly.Terry likes his work, which he says is creative and challenging. He also likes that expectations are clear and good work is rewarded. There have been two rounds of layoffs and a reorganization since he arrived, but Terry believes the matters were handled as well as they could have been.Primarily, he told me, empathy is evident in the fact that executives are so accessible. For two years, and especially lately, employees have asked executives during town hall meetings whether they’ll stick with DEI. The answer has always been yes. They ask whether workers will be called back to the office. The answer is no, remote and hybrid work will stay in place. As far as ratcheting up productivity expectations, the company now attaches bonuses to performance, but Terry doesn’t believe that’s meant to hector workers. It’s just what happens when revenue flattens out.But something weird happened. Recently, Terry’s new boss told him to provide weekly status updates, a requirement that sounds suspiciously close to Elon Musk’s ominous email to federal employees, ordering them to list five accomplishments for the week. I asked Terry, does that give you pause? It does, so he’s going to ask his manager why. Is he not trusted? Many workers may be harboring the same concerns, but aren’t confident enough to speak up. “Senior leadership can’t make people ask questions,” Terry told me, “but they can create an atmosphere where you can ask questions in front of everyone, or silently Slack the leadership.” So that’s what he’s going to do.What Does Empathy Have to Do With Business?It may be worth asking ourselves where we expect empathy in the workplace to come from: the executives in the C-suite who represent the business, or the colleagues we interact with on a daily basis?One employee who was recently let go from the Department of Education wrote on LinkedIn about how her colleagues went out of their way to help when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. One tech worker told me how much their manager was a mentor. Federal workers at the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Commerce have told me how they’re banding together to share resources and support. Go looking for empathy, and you’ll find it.What some employees are getting from their employers cannot be dismissed: bullying and badgering, threats and ultimatums. Really big sticks and no carrots to speak of. People are really angry about layoffs. Most people would agree this is really bad humanity. Some would argue really bad business too.Business Insider’s Aki Ito reported on how Meta’s harsh performance reviews may backfire and damage productivity rather than improve performance. “CEOs may think they’re creating a meritocracy,” Ito writes. “but in reality they’re marching their companies straight into a trap of sunken morale, high turnover, depressed profits, and reduced innovation.”There’s evidence that corporate empathy really does affect dollars and cents. Among my favorite examples is a study by a group of researchers in Switzerland and the UK. They examined 510 CEO conference calls by 448 U.S.-based companies on the Russell 3000 stock index that took place in the earliest stages of the pandemic. They found that the more CEOs made statements, even vague ones, that signaled their human concern for employees, customers, or clients, the better those companies’ stock prices fared when overall share prices plunged in March 2020. The researchers call them “human care statements.”We’ve seen the opposite happen in 2025. Tesla’s stock price has been dropping precipitously, for nine straight weeks. Much of that may be politically inspired, but Musk’s gleeful lack of empathy for workers hit by DOGE cutbacks, with references to wood chippers and chain saws, gained viral infamy.The opposite kind of behavior appears to be demonstrably beneficial and stabilizing. “Follow-up explorations unveiled a negative association between CEO human care statements and stock volatility, meaning that market participants discounted these companies’ future earnings less,” the study reads. “Our explorations suggest that it pays off for CEOs to go beyond mere financial information and show some humanity.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism.(Featured photo by Miniseries/iStock by Getty Images)

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza March 19, 2025