Chevrolet’s latest splashy ad has all the hallmarks of a campaign strategically tied to Americas 250th anniversary. Theres the modern interpretation of a 75-year-old jingle thats sung by an up-and-coming country singer. A birds-eye view of a pickup truck atop a natural landmark in Utah. A television debut on February 6 during the opening ceremony for the Winter Olympics.
In every choice, Chevrolet is carving out friendly, apolitical terrain at a moment when Americans have mixed feelings about such patriotism. A record-low 58% of U.S. adults say they are extremely or very proud to be American, according to a Gallup survey from last year. Thats down 9 percentage points from 2024.
It feels like modern patriotism has to walk a fine line between celebrating what’s great about America but also being careful not to anchor to just glib symbols and slogans that potentially could be dividing or polarizing, Paul Frampton-Calero, CEO of digital marketing agency the Goodway Group, tells Fast Company.
A calendar built for America250
The United States SemiquincentennialAmerica250, A250, Quarter Millenniumwhatever one would like to call it, may be too enticing for marketers to ignore. This years calendar is overstuffed with holidays like Independence Day and Memorial Day, as well as major sporting events like the Winter Olympics and the FIFA World Cup, which align nicely with patriotism.
There’s just a little bit more attention on America, American pride, and what the Olympics spirit is about, Steve Majoros, Chevrolets chief marketing officer, tells Fast Company. Throughout 2026, Chevrolet will revisit some of the auto brands classic campaigns and update them with a modern interpretation that coincides with major American moments, including the beginning of the baseball season this spring and Independence Day.
Brands rush in, politics close behind
The allure of the semiquincentennial has led large corporations including Amazon, Coca-Cola, and Cracker Barrel to sponsor the bipartisan America250 initiative, which is planning programming to promote the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Patriotism is also a major theme in Budweisers Super Bowl campaign called American Icons, starring a galloping Clydesdale and flying bald eagle as Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd roars in the background.
But Americas anniversary was also the focus of a traditional values marketing campaign promoting faith and marriage between a husband and wife funded by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. That spot aired during the NFL playoffs.
A generational divide in American pride
The Gallup poll showed less U.S. pride among Democrats and even some independents, which may not be a surprise given that the Republican Party fully controls all branches of government in Washington, D.C. But there could also be a generational divide that brands may need to consider when activating around America250.
When contextual advertising platform Chicory surveyed 1,000 U.S. consumers last month, it found that while 58% of Americans plan to celebrate the nations anniversary, enthusiasm was far weaker for younger adults. There’s a lot more hesitation within the Gen Z cohort, Yuni Baker-Saito, cofounder and CEO of Chicory, tells Fast Company.
The risk calculus for CMOs
Marketers who opt into messaging that celebrates the birth of the nation will largely aim to avoid wading too far into cultural war controversies that sparked boycotts and fiery criticism for marketing initiatives from Bud Light, American Eagle, and Cracker Barrel. Americans are divided on whether they want corporate entities to weigh in on political or social issues, and CEOs are also wary.
Target and Starbucks have been perennial targets for right-leaning activists for their more left positioning. But as they have moved to carve out more central and moderate corporate identities, both retailers have also angered more liberal-leaning consumers who have also called for boycotts.
Risk-averse CMOs will have to be thoughtful about every creative decision they make for any patriotism-themed ads this year. The board wakes up when choosing the wrong ad, the wrong song, or the wrong talent, says Frampton-Calero.
He believes that Chevrolets classic branding, which is frequently anchored in freedom of the moment, family, and road trips, avoids polarization. I think theyre quite a good example of staying on the right side of patriotism that connects into personal, collective well-being that resonates to an American, Frampton-Calero adds.
Nostalgia as a safe bridge
Nostalgic elements of Chevrolets See the USA in your Chevrolet include a song first performed by actress and singer Dinah Shore on her namesake TV variety show. The new version is sung by country artist Brooke Lee. Most new viewers wont make the connection to the old reference, but according to the company, it ties into the brands musical lineage. Chevrolet or Chevy has been name-checked in more than 1,000 songs, including Tim McGraw by Taylor Swift.
Airlifting a 2026 Chevrolet Silverado ZR2 to the top of Castle Rock in Utah for the ad spot is also a nod to two of the brands past campaigns, when it put a Chevy Impala atop the 400-foot rock in TV and print advertisements that aired in 1964 and 1973.
From left: Stills from Chevrolet advertisements in 1964 and 1973 [Images: Chevrolet]
Universal values, global appeal
Majoros says Chevrolets patriotic-forward campaign rests on universal themes that most Americans can agree on, including hard work, hope, optimism, opportunity, building families, communities, neighborhoods, and creating memories.
Many of those values also surface in research thats conducted in markets ranging from China to South America. The brands current slogan, Together lets drive, is also intentional wording that allows Chevrolet to step to the side of that divisiveness,” he adds.
When asked about the Gallup poll, Majoros sees opportunity.
That means theres 42% of people who are thirsty to connect to something and who want to be pat of something, he says. The majority of people probably fall in that big, huge middle. If we can be the kind of a brand that speaks to the things that people are thinking aboutand longing forI think that number would be much higher.
After more than two decades as a psychosexual therapist, I have learned to listen carefully for what people are not saying. When vulnerability is close to the surface, uncertainty shows up quickly. Am I doing this right? Do I belong here? What am I allowed to ask for, and what will it cost me if I do?
At its core, psychosexual therapy is not really about sex. It is about how humans relate when the stakes are high, when power is present, and when much of what matters remains unspoken. It is about noticing how meaning is made in moments of vulnerability and choosing how to respond rather than react.
What continues to surprise me is how familiar these same dynamics feel when I step into boardrooms, leadership teams, and global organizations as a social psychologist. The context changes. The language becomes more polished. But the relational patterns remain strikingly consistent. Over years of working across more than forty countries, I came to realize that my clinical work and my leadership work were asking the same essential question: how do humans make meaning together when the cues are subtle and the consequences matter?
Our jobs are rarely just jobs anymore. Many of us are seeking purpose, belonging, and fulfillment beyond a financial transaction. This is where I often see a widening gap between traditionally informed organizations and leadership styles, and those that have evolved alongside shifting sociocultural norms. We talk a great deal about generational differences. What if instead we looked at work through a relational lens?
I am often described as a relationship architect. My work is about helping people make sense of their relational spaces so they can direct their energy, attention, time, and resources to where they actually bear fruit. Through this lens, I have come to see that thriving relationships, whether in the bedroom or the boardroom, are built on the same six fundamental ingredients.
1. Respect
Respect is often misunderstood as politeness, obedience, or walking on eggshells. In intimate relationships, respect looks like keeping the other persons priorities in mind, honoring boundaries, including your own, and practicing what I call the platinum rule: not treating others how you want to be treated, but how they want to be treated.
In professional life, respect shows up in much the same way. It is reflected in how leaders honor boundaries around time, attention, and capacity. It appears when managers understand that what motivates one team member may exhaust another. Cultures of respect are built through everyday actions, arriving on time, being fully present, and not being distracted by a phone call in the middle of a conversation.
2. Trust
Trust, in both intimate and professional relationships, is built through reliable and consistent actions repeated over time. Trust allows people to relax, to be vulnerable enough so connections could form, and to take risks.
This looks like doing what you say you will do, taking accountability when you cannot, and repairing when things go off course. It means saying yes only when you can follow through, and saying no early rather than offering a lingering maybe.
At work, trust functions the same way. Teams trust leaders who show up predictably and communicate clearly. Trust erodes when expectations shift without explanation or when people feel they must stay guarded. In organizations, low trust quietly taxes performance. People spend more time managing risk and protecting themselves than doing their best work. Over time, this shows up in burnout and avoidable turnover.
3. Attraction
Attraction is often reduced to chemistry, but in reality it is about reciprocity and choice. In intimate relationships, attraction grows when people feel wanted and when there is space to be seen and chosen again and again. Attraction can take many forms, intellectual, emotional, social, physical, or financial.
In professional settings, attraction shows up as engagement. Why do people want to be in the room? Why do they choose to stay with an organization or lean into a project? Leaders often underestimate how much attraction shapes retention. When attraction is absent, organizations rely on incentives. When it is present, people stay because they feel drawn to the work, the purpose, and the people.
4. Loving behavior
Loving behavior is not about romance. It is about how we make others feel. In intimate relationships, it includes making the other person feel seen, special, and given the benefit of the doubt. It often means responding with generosity rather than suspicion when something goes wrong.
At work, loving behavior translates into psychological safety. It shows up when leaders assume positive intent, acknowledge effort, and recognize unique contributions. People are more willing to stretch and innovate when mistakes are met with curiosity rather than punishment and they think their contribution is unique and it matters.
5. Compassion
Compassion is often confused with empathy, but they are not the same. Empathy is feeling with another. Compassion is staying present without making the other persons experience about yourself.
In intimate relationships, compassion allows partners to witness each others struggles without collapsing into them or turning away. In leadership, compassion means to be there for the other in a meaningful way. Leaders who can hold space for difficulty without over relating or becoming defensive are better able to guide teams through uncertainty and change.
6. Shared vision
Finally, shared vision gives relationships direction. In intimate relationships, it helps couples navigate priorities, negotiate and compromise intentionally, and make sacrifices that feel meaningful rather than resentful.
In organizations, shared vision determines where resources go, how decisions are made, and what success looks like. Without it, teams may work hard while pulling in different directions. With it, even difficult choices feel coherent and strategic rather than personal.
The architecture of effective human systems
What I have learned, sitting with couples and working with leaders across cultures, is that relationships do not thrive by accident. Across every context I have worked in, the relationships that truly thrive share these six foundations. They are not optional and they are not interchangeable. Respect, trust, attraction, loving behavior, compassion, and shared vision are the conditions that allow people to bring their full capacity into a shared space. When they are missing, no amount of strategy or incentive can make up for it.
The bedroom and the boardroom are not as far apart as we like to think. Both are spaces where power, vulnerability, and belonging are negotiated. These are not soft skills. They are the architecture of effective human systems.
At the end of the day, the way we do one relationship is the way we do them all.
Over the past two years, a troubling trend has started to take shape in the media; for a large majority of journalists, DEI framing became the default for covering Black businesses.
What should be stories about innovation, resilience, market disruption, and leadership have increasingly been flattened into a single, repetitive narrative: DEI. Not the company’s business model. Not the founders vision or entrepreneur journey. Not the problem being solved or the customers being served. Just DEI. And its often framed through the lens of rollbacks, political backlash, or cultural controversy.
This didnt begin overnight, but in recent years and especially amid the political climate shaped by the Trump administration, it has accelerated to the point of absurdity.
Today, if a business is Black-owned, media coverage almost reflexively treats it as a DEI case study rather than a company. The founder becomes a symbol, success becomes secondary, and the story becomes predictable before the first paragraph is even finished.
One Narrative, Over and Over Again
If you listen closely to news interviews from 2024 until now between reporters and Black founders, nine times out of ten a pattern quickly emerges. The questions sound eerily similar. How are DEI rollbacks affecting your business? What does the current political climate mean for Black entrepreneurship? How do you feel about corporate pullbacks from diversity initiatives?
My company, Brennan Nevada Inc. New York Citys first and only Black-owned tech PR agency, has been able to witness this firsthand through my daily interactions and interviews with members of the media. Ive prioritized spending more time and conducting the necessary due diligence that preps my clients on how to engage, navigate, or just not participate in the same DEI obsessed interview.
With these interviews between journalists and Black founders, the most important questions often go unasked, like What problem does this business solve? Or What makes it competitive? How did the founder build it? And What lessons can other entrepreneurs learn from its success? And when coverage does come out, it typically leads with the current administrations DEI rollbacks, and less like profiles of thriving companies. The rhetoric reflects commentary on diversity politics, with the business itself serving as a backdrop rather than the subject.
When Black-Owned Becomes a Category, Not a Credential
The underlying issue is subtle but very damaging: Black-owned has become synonymous with DEI in media framing. That equation is flawed and needs to be reworked. A Black-owned business is not inherently a diversity initiative or a political statement. It is first and foremost a business built by someone who just so happens to be Black. Thats it.
Yet most media coverage today increasingly suggests that Black success exists primarily within the context of diversity efforts, and worse, that it is somehow dependent on them. When DEI programs face scrutiny or rollbacks, Black businesses are often portrayed as collateral damage rather than as resilient enterprises capable of thriving on merit, strategy, and execution.
This framing does a disservice not only to Black founders, but to readers and audiences as well. It robs them of real business insight and reinforces the idea that Black success must always be explained through an external lens.
The media tends to shift its tone to whats currently happening in the cultural moment, especially when towards Black businesses. Five years ago during George Floyds murder and the Black Lives Matter movement that happened around Juneteenth in 2020, the media positively highlighted a lot more Black businesses alongside brands that pushed for DEI to address systemic barriers.
The Cost of Poor Storytelling
This media obsession with DEI is getting old really fast. It reduces complex entrepreneurial journeys into political soundbites. And it quietly undermines the credibility of Black founders by implying that their success is inseparable from institutional support rather than personal vision and capability.
Im not saying this is being done on purpose, because even well-intentioned coverage can fall into this trap, and oftentimes does. When every story leads with race rather than results, representation becomes reductive instead of empowering.
The irony is that truly compelling stories are being missed. There are Black founders building category-defining products, solving real-world problems, scaling companies, and creating jobs; stories that deserve the same depth and seriousness afforded to any other entrepreneur.
But those stories require more work. They require curiosity beyond a headline. They require journalists to move past the easiest narrative available.
Whats Next for Black Stories in 2026
As media organizations reassess their role in shaping public discourse, 2026 presents an opportunity for a long-overdue reset.
What would it look like to cover Black businesses the same way we cover all businesses, by focusing on innovation, leadership, and success first? What if founders were allowed to be experts in their industries rather than spokespeople for diversity debates? What if success stories were told as success stories?
None of this means ignoring race or pretending systemic inequities dont exist. Thats not what Im saying since that context absolutely matters. But its my belief that context should inform a story not consume it.
A Black-owned business should not automatically trigger a DEI narrative. And Black entrepreneurship should not be treated as a subplot in a political storyline. If the media wants to tell better stories in 2026, it needs to start by asking Black founders better questions, and by remembering that Black businesses are not symbols.
We are enterprises. We are innovations. And we deserve to be covered as such.
It’s Q1 2026. Your chief financial officer is cutting innovation budgets by 20%.
Your AI pilot showed 94% accuracy improvements. The LLM is yielding solid results. You’re getting defunded anyway.
The reason? You solved a problem AI can solve. Your budget-holder needed you to solve theirs.
Companies launch AI pilots that produce results, then stall at scale. The team’s diagnosis: “They don’t get it.” What’s really going on: These projects never earned budget-holder buy-in.
Passing the budget-holder test requires three things pilot teams fall short on: analytic proof that you move their needles, execution confidence that scale is achievable, and relational trust that you have their back.
As economic headwinds hit 2026, here’s how to know if your project will surviveand what to do about it now.
Analytic ProofDo You Move Their Needles?
Budget-holders don’t fund impressive technology. They fund solutions that move metrics they get credit for at bonus time.
Your pilot team celebrates: “Our AI improves processing accuracy by 40%!”
Your budget-holder asks: “Does that improve my customer retention rate? Lower my cost per acquisition? Move my net promoter score? Show me the math and where this shows up in monthly financial reports.”
Most teams can’t answer. They proved the technology works. They got great feedback from customers. They didn’t prove it moves the drivers of financial outcomes that matter to the person holding the purse strings.
One of the most challenging barriers I encountered in banking: We proved migrating customers to digital self-service generated huge impacts on customer segments aligned to product P&Ls. But accounting systems didn’t attribute these improvements to each P&L owner. They couldn’t “get the credit” in performance reviews.
Without attribution in the system of record, results almost didn’t exist. P&L owners had no incentive to shift resources from familiar approaches to digital initiatives they wouldn’t get recognized for.
You may prove improvements in metrics everyone claims to supportcustomer experience, innovation, digital transformation. But if those improvements aren’t attributable to line items on their scorecard, they won’t survive prioritization discussions.
This requires analytic work most pilots skip: understanding what drives the budget-holder’s financial metrics, connecting AI outputs to those drivers with causation and magnitude, and confirming results will manifest in financial reporting.
When the CFO asks “prove ROI,” showing AI accuracy improvements isn’t an answer. Showing how accuracy translates to their measured outcomes is.
Execution ConfidenceCan You Actually Scale This?
Your pilot worked in controlled conditions with a small team, friendly users, and tolerance for iteration. Your budget-holder knows what you might not: What you needed to test is totally different than what you need to scale.
They’re assessing execution risk. Can you articulate what’s different about scaling? Have you anticipated the capabilities to address those differences?
Four capability gaps erode budget-holder confidence.
Strategic optionality: AI evolves faster than traditional planning cycles. If your road map locks the organization into today’s context, you’re creating risk.
Human judgment integration: Edge cases that were 2% of your pilot become thousands of customer impacts at scale. Do you know where human judgment is essential, or will you create operational chaos?
Quantitative versus qualitative reality: Your dashboard shows 85% adoption. But are users completing tasks because the experience works, or because they have no alternative?
Sustaining motivation: Organizational anxiety about AI is realpeople fear being replaced. What’s your impact on the budget-holder’s team motivation to achieve 2026 targets?
Budget-holders who’ve seen technology work in pilots but fail at scale won’t fund projects where execution risks aren’t anticipated and addressed.
Relational TrustDo You Have Their Back?
This is the most critical dimension.
Your budget-holder is assessing: Do you understand my pain? Are you here to make me successful, or to pursue the latest “shiny object”?
The gap shows up in how teams frame problems. “We can use AI to automate customer service” starts with what AI can do. “Your call center costs are 15% above target and customer satisfaction is droppinghere’s how we address both” starts with their problem.
It shows up in how you treat pushback. If the budget-holder or their team are “obstacles” to what you believe should happen, you’ve already failed. Their messages are loaded with intelligence about what they need before they’ll get on board.
A team I worked with spent two years trying to get a test file of customer names from an operations team to validate a hypothesis. They kept asking without diagnosing the real issue: colleague fear of a new approach that seemed implausible and raised risks to predictable results. It could be overcome only through trust-building and patience.
Given anxiety about AI replacing jobs, are you building confidence or eroding motivation among the people who need to execute?
Budget-holders fund teams they trust understand their reality. Active champions invest in your success. Passive tolerance means you’re first on the cut list.
The MetroCard Lesson
In 2006, my team at Citi partnered with Mastercard and the Metropolitan Transit Authority to prove contactless payments worked in subway turnstiles. The technology performed. User feedback was strong. But scaling required three complex organizations to align business models, priorities, cultures, and decision-making. The execution capability took two decades to build.
Today’s AI leaders don’t have 20 years. You have until Q1 budget reviews.
What to Do This Week
Assess where you stand on all three dimensions:
1. Analytic ProofCan you draw a direct line from AI outputs to your budget-holder’s measured outcomes? Not “Our accuracy improved, but “Here’s how accuracy translates to the retention rate you’re accountable for and will show up in your results”?
If you can’t make that connection, do that analysis before asking for scale funding.
2. Execution ConfidenceCan you articulate what’s different about scaling versus piloting? Have you identified execution risksstrategic optionality, human judgment integration, what dashboards miss, organizational anxietyand built capability to address them?
If you think scale is just “bigger pilot,” you haven’t earned their confidence.
3. Relational TrustHonest assessment: Are you focused on making your budget-holder successfu, or on building impressive technology? Are you treating their concerns as intelligence or obstacles? What’s your impact on their team’s motivation?
If they’re not actively championing your project, you’re at risk.
The AI projects that survive 2026 won’t necessarily be the most technologically impressive. They’ll be the ones where teams built all three dimensions of budget-holder confidence.
Economic pressure doesn’t care about your pilot. It cares whether you solve their problem or yours.
An Olympic torch is a small, flaming time capsule.
Since the start of the modern Games in 1936, the torch has been passed by thousands of runners in a relay that goes from Olympia, Greece to the host city’s stadium. It’s a feat of engineering, since it needs to be durable enough to resist wind and rain, while keeping the Olympic flame arrive. But torch designers also imbue them with symbolic meaning.
1936 Berlin [Photo: IOC]
The Berlin 1936 torch was engraved with the Nazi iconography of an eagle. The Sapporo 1972 torch was a thin, cylindrical combustion tube that was a marvel of Japanese engineering. The Rio 2016 torch featured rippling blue waves celebrating the country’s natural beauty.
1972 Sapporo [Photo: IOC]
What kind of torch represents the world we now live in? Carlo Ratti, the Italian architect and designer tasked with creating the torch for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, pondered this question for a long time. Ratti’s work largely explores the future of cities, particularly as global warming looms. For him, the biggest issues of our time are climate change and political polarization. Three years ago, he began the process of making a torch that captured these big ideas.
2026 Milan Cortina [Photo: IOC]
His torch is perhaps the most sustainable one we’ve seen. It is made of recycled materials and it is designed to be refilled, so it can be used up to 10 times. It is minimalist to a fault, meant to fade into the background so that the world focuses on the flame within it. The flame, he says, is a powerful symbol of our joint humanity.
At this time of deep polarization and divisions, he says, we tried to strip down most of the things from the torch and really let the fire speak. Fire, after all, predates every nation that now passes it along. Its one of the first technologies of mankind, Ratti notessomething ancient, sacred, and shared long before borders existed.”
A Lineage of Torch Makers
Before sketching a single form, Ratti traveled to Lausanne, Switzerland, where every Olympic torch is preserved at the Olympic Museum. Seeing them in person, rather than online, made the pattern unmistakable.
Everybody somehow tried to capture the moment of their time, Ratti says. Each torch, he observed, follows the same basic logic: a burner at the core, wrapped in a designed shell meant to convey meaning. Like car design, he explains, the engine is hidden beneath an eye-catching exterior. And then the second thing is capturing the momentconnecting with local motifs.
1992 Albertville [Photo: IOC]
Early torches, beginning with the relay introduced at the Berlin 1936 Summer Olympics, leaned heavily on classical references. The London 1948 torch resembled a chalice, while the Rome 1960 torch was designed to look like a column.
1994 Lillehammer [Photo: IOC]
Toward the end of the 20th century designs were more sculptural and declarative, often mirroring national ambition. The 1992 Albertville torch, designed by Philippe Starck, was in the shape of an elegant curve and was meant to reflect French modernism. The 1994 Lillehammer torch had a distinct Viking aesthetic.
2000 Sydney [Photo: IOC]
In the 21st century, the emphasis shifted again to focus on technological innovation. The torch for Sydney 2000 famously combined fire and water. Beijing 2008 engineered its torch to survive the winds of Mount Everest.
2008 Beijing [Photo: IOC]
A Radical Shift
Against that backdrop, Rattis instinct was to do something quietly radical: design the flame, not the torch.
That idea led to an inversion of the usual process. Rather than starting with an expressive exterior, Ratti and his team began with the burner itself, shaping only the minimum structure needed to hold and protect it. The result is the lightest Olympic torch ever producedsmall, slender, and almost an afterthought in the runners hand. We just start from the inside, Ratti says, and we do the minimal shape around the burner.
[Photo: IOC]
The effect is intentional disappearance. In photographs, the torch nearly dissolves into its surroundings, reflecting sky, snow, or cityscape depending on where its carried. The runner and the flame take precedence; the object recedes. Ratti describes the earliest sketch as a runner with a flame in her or his hand instead of the torch itself.
1964 Tokyo [Photo: IOC]
There are a few earlier torch designers who had similar instincts. Ratti points to the torches designed by Japanese industrial designer Sori Yanagi for Tokyo 1964 Summer Olympics and Sapporo 1972 Winter Olympics as key inspirationsboth exercises in restraint. What has changed, he argues, is technology. Today, advances in aerodynamics, materials science, and fuel systems make it possible to minimize the object without compromising the flame.
That same logic extends to sustainability. Milano Cortinas torch is not only smaller but engineered to be refilled and made largely from recycled aluminum. For Ratti, this approach is part of his broader philosophy. He argues that any designer working today must consider the environmental impact of their work.
This applies to his work as an architect, creating a floating plaza in the Amazon River where people can experience the impact of climate change to turning a former railyard in Italy into a logistics hub featuring a renewable energy plant. The first step in order to adapt is to use less, to use less stuff, he says.
[Photo: Andrea Amato/NurPhoto/Getty Images]
Looking back at Olympic history is bittersweet. Earlier generations didn’t have to focus as much on sustainability because the climate hadn’t yet been so damaged. But today, it is impossible to design a torch without thinking of its environmental impact.
For Ratti, it was important to imbue the torch with a clear message because the passing of the torch is seen by millionspossibly billionsof viewers around the world. By designing a torch that fades into the background, Ratti is making the case that we should pull back on overconsumption and excess, and focus our energies instead how we can work together to keep thriving as a species. Maybe humanity will lose interest in oversized ballrooms and gilded pastiche, he says.
Laying people off takes its toll.
Going back 25 years plus ago, I can still remember every situation that I had to do it in, says Robert Kovach, a work psychologist and former corporate executive.
The experience sticks with you, he says. Because its not just about operational stress: Have I filled out the forms? Made the calls? Its also filled with moral stress, he adds.
Even when the decision is necessary, it can feel like a violation of your own personal values.
People laying off their coworkers often feel a clash between their responsibility to their company and their responsibility to be a good person to the people theyre laying offparticularly because layoffs are about a company needing to downsize, not always about the individual employees poor performance.
These feelings have been coming up a lot lately, with layoffs reaching a high in 2025, and 2026 already being off to a layoffs-filled start, with Amazon, Pinterest, UPS, Home Depot, Dow, and others announcing cuts so far.
While getting laid off can of course be devastating, theres a big emotional challenge for the people who must do the laying off, as well.
How do you [show] respect [for] someone when you know you’re about to mess up their life? Kovach asks. Though you may get feedback from higher-ups that you shouldnt feel bad for letting someone go because its just business, you know deep down, that its not.
Its all very personal, Kovach says.
Fast Company spoke with several mental health experts about the psychological underpinnings of having to lay someone off at work: the anxiety leading up to the event, the language to use during the moment of truth, and the guilt-provoking aftermath.
Maintaining composure throughout is keybut how do you? Like Kovach says: Youre about to mess up someones life.
Prepare
Being the person who has to deliver the news can be deeply distressing, says clinical psychologist Melanie McNally. Psychologically, many people experience anxiety, guilt, and even a sense of grief.
Approach a layoff meeting with a clear idea of how you want to handle it, says Victor Lipman, a Psychology Today contributor who provides coaching on mindful management at work. This doesnt necessarily mean having a script ready, as that can come off robotic or impersonal, but lay out some key talking points you need to hit during the conversation. These might stem from organizational obligations.
Consult with the appropriate powers that be, says Lipman, whether thats human resources or the companys legal department. You may be obligated to make certain statements about severance or explain the reason for layoffs in a certain way. Its worth making sure those points are covered not just to fulfill the duties to your organization, but also to add some predictability to an otherwise unpredictable situation.
You may also want to turn to colleagues for moral support. Preparing emotionally might involve talking with a trusted colleague or supervisor, says McNally. HR and mental health providers might also be available at your company to help with layoff prep.
Ultimately, to go into a layoff meeting prepared, its important to acknowledge and validate your own feelings first, says McNally. One way to do that, says Kovach, is to name that this is going to be tough.
Dont pretend that youre a robotaccept the emotional component and choose to lean into the empathy that comes with it.
Be direct
Everyone knows that there is a wrong way to lay someone off.
When former Google employee Vivek Gulati prepared for a meeting one morning in January 2023, he checked his email to find an announcement that the company would conduct 12,000 layoffs. (At least this email was sent on purposejust last month, Amazon accidentally sent employees an email announcing a round of global layoffs, which they later confirmed would indeed take place.) The next email in Gulatis inbox contained his personal layoff notice. In a story he wrote about this experience for Harvard Business Review, Gulati also shares how his manager learned about his layoff.
He had tried to enter an office building, and his badge didnt work, Gulati writes. It was a rough way to find out.
This is why mental health experts recommend conducting layoffs in person.
Employees deserve personal communication, says Lipman. Laying someone off face-to-face exhibits emotional maturity in a companys leadership.
For the person conducting the layoff, however, the temptation to do so at a distance is understandable. By using text or email, you wont have to see the person break down; you wont be faced with trying to comfort them in a situation where you cant provide much assurance.
Kovach compares these at-a-distance layoffs to the studies from the 1960s where participants were told they were tasked with administering electric shocks to people they couldnt see in another room. It was much easier to knowingly cause someone harm when the administrator didnt witness it.
While you should be physically present to lay someone off, its best if no one else is. Ideally, layoffs should be conducted in a private, neutral space, like your office or a quiet meeting room, says McNally.
Be clear and direct. McNally suggests avoiding euphemisms, which might confuse or minimize the situation. For instance, you might feel compelled to cushion the blow with something like, Were going through a rough time financially now at the company, but if things turn around, Id love for you to get your job back. That likely doesnt represent a promise you can keep. You want it to be an efficient meeting, Lipman says, one that doesnt heighten existing emotional distress or provide false hope.
Zoom can constitute such a private, neutral space if its facilitating a one-on-one meeting. This work for layoffs when thats the usual way you communicate with an employee, but if youre both working at a physical office, its best to eschew video calls in this tense moment. (And of course, mass firings over Zoom never go well, yet continue to be part of many big firms MO for laying people off.)
Also: dont bash the company. Youre still management, Lipman says, and need to act professionally.
Lipman suggests saying something like, I’m sorry to see you go. I’ve enjoyed working with you, but this is just something that has to be done. While Kovach acknowledges certain enterprises might offer scripts to ensure everyone losing their jobs get treated the same (for legal and/or policy reasons), its okay to massage that script into your own words for a personal touch.
At the organizational level, companies should give transparency about why the layoffs are taking place: was a particular department underperforming? Did a new product fail to meet revenue goals? Companies can also offer mental health resources for employees conducting layoff, whether that’s in-house or via referrals. Also, the timing of layoffs should be well thought out and diligently coordinatedno one should find out theyre jobless because their key card suddenly doesnt work.
Ready for reactions
Calmness can be contagious, as can agitation, Lipman says.
Bad reactions to getting laid off run the gamut, says Kovach. From tears to physical outbursts to even suicidal ideation, responses reflect the fact that losing a job is a massive, detrimental shakeup to someones life and well-being.
It can fuel what somebody already believes about themselves, so they can slip into a narrative of I just wasn’t worth keeping, says social worker Yvonne Castaeda. This is why an explanation of its not you; its the company can be so important.
When encountering emotions from employees like shock, anger, sadness, anxiety, or even relief, McNally suggests, the best practice is to allow space for these emotions and dont try to fix them right away. Thats because you wont be able to.
Instead, take the time to listen to the employee, and validate their feelings in that moment. Provide support resources where you can, either from within your company or an outside trusted job placement organization, and give concrete details about severance packages. You can also encourage those whove been laid off to reach out to family, friends, or mental health professionals, McNally says.
Not everyone handles these emotions calmly, even if you exude calm while conducting the layoff. People are very capable of making a scene in a layoff situation, says Lipman. You want to be sure you have some backup in case anything goes wrongsecurity, if it comes to that.
Then theres dealing with your own guilt for having to lay off a coworker.
Maybe this persons also a friendsomeone with whom youve shared successes and failures at work, and whose families youve maybe barbecued with on Sunday afternoons.
Its normal to feel guilt, sadness, or even anger after laying someone off, McNally says.
Reflecting on what took place, either alone, with friends, or with a mental health professional, can help process these emotions, as can generally practicing self-care, like getting enough sleep and exercise.
At the end of your day, reassure yourself that this was something you had to do in the management role that you were in, Lipman says.
If you offered empathy and clarity during a layoffthen its better you conducted it, than someone who considered it just business.
The news cycle is seemingly always full of OpenAI stories. The state of various investments from fellow tech giants like Nvidia and Microsoft, the competitive landscape between other big AI players like Google and Anthropic, and, of course, the more existential questions surrounding the direction of artificial intelligence and its impacts on society.
For its new Super Bowl campaign, OpenAI is focusing on a simpler narrative: how ChatGPT helps people build things that have real-world impact.
The company will roll out a 60-second national spot during the big game, but it has also made three regional ads, which are debuting exclusively on Fast Company. The regional spots (with both 30-second and long-form versions) profile three different American small businessesa seed farm, a metal salvage yard, and a family-run tamale shopthat are utilizing ChatGPT to grow and thrive.
According to OpenAI CMO Kate Rouch, more than half of ChatGPT users in the U.S. say it has helped them do something they previously thought was impossible. The company’s Super Bowl strategy aims to tell those stories.
Our core brand belief is that free access to these tools unlocks possibilities for people, and that anyone can build, Rouch says. We are for that person with an idea that doesn’t know how to make their idea real. Now they can, and that’s so much more important to us than any other thing we could use the Super Bowl for.
ChatGPT Stories
For Rouch, these ads are personal. In fact, the guy who runs the salvage yard in one spot is actually her neighbor. That’s how this series started, she says. He was showing me how he was using [ChatGPT]. That’s real. That’s cool. So the truth of this is how people are using the product.
The creative approach here is essentially a small-business extension of the vibe the brand unveiled back in September, showing individuals using ChatGPT for everyday things like finding recipes, sourcing exercise tips, and planning a road trip.
Its not the first time Rouch has used hyper-specific personal stories to illustrate the power of technology. When she was CMO at Coinbase, the brand used a similar approach to show that the crypto exchange and payments platform is a utility for everyday people, and a safe, dependable, and sensible option for modern commerce far away from Silicon Valley or Wall Street. The opportunity for Coinbase was to leverage its position to help give regular people a voice, she told me at the time. This is not crypto bros and Lambos.
OpenAI faces a similar challenge of convincing people its tools are for more than asking simple questions. These ads, Rouch says, are a way to platform the very real stuff people are building with the technology.
Millions of people are using ChaGPT every day to do meaningful things in their lives that extend their sense of what’s possible and help them in real ways: running businesses, caretaking for their children and parents health, exploring their own health, she says. This is happening and it matters.
Thankfully, OpenAI takes its brand challenges seriously enough not to jump on the Super Bowl AI gimmick bandwagon (see Svedka Vodka’s big game fever dream), instead emphasizing how many human minds and hands went into creating this campaign.
OpenAI needs to be telling more stories like these. For as much enthusiasm as there is around AI from brands, many people are currently feeling existential dread over the technology. The good news for a company like OpenAI is that it’s liberated from selling capital “T” transformation in its ad work. Now the onus is on them to make it more human.
Check out the long-form versions of each ad below.
Federal immigration enforcement officers operating in New York will soon be met by legal observers in purple vests.
New York Attorney General Letitia James announced on February 3 that her office is launching an initiative called the Legal Observation Project. Trained legal observers from her officeincluding lawyers and other state employeeswill serve as “neutral witnesses” of the federal government’s immigration enforcement activity on the ground in the state, James’s office said.
By observing and recording the actions of agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or other federal agencies, which the public has a right to do, the observers will provide the attorney general’s office with information that could one day be used in future legal action if any laws are broken. By having a uniform, they are standing out and identifying themselves.
“We have seen in Minnesota how quickly and tragically federal operations can escalate in the absence of transparency and accountability,” James said in a statement. “My office is launching the Legal Observation Project to examine federal enforcement activity in New York and whether it remains within the bounds of the law.”
James’s office says specifically that observers from the initiative won’t interfere with enforcement activity and that their job is to merely document federal conduct safely and legally. Her office did not respond to a request for comment.
The purple vests these observers wear will bear the insignia of the attorney generals office. They’re the latest example of state-level officials turning to colored vests amid President Donald Trump’s escalation of federal immigration enforcement. In Minneapolis, the Minnesota National Guard last month began wearing yellow safety vests so people could tell them apart from federal agents.
In the absence of a single dress code, mostly masked federal officers from multiple agencies have worn a range of clothing, from jeans to fatigues and tactical vests in the Minneapolis area. The yellow vests are bright signifiers “to distinguish our members from those of other agencies, due to similar uniforms being worn,” as Minnesota National Guard spokeswoman Army Major Andrea Tsuchiya put it. A safety vest signals that the wearer wants to stand out and actually be recognized.
In New York, the vests color “will aid in the ability of the trained legal observers to stand out in a crowd of bystanders and federal agents,” University of Minnesota College of Design faculty lecturer Kathryn Reiley tells Fast Company. “The federal agents tend to wear uniforms that are black, navy blue, or army green. The purple vests will produce the intended result of making the trained legal observers identifiable as a separate group of government employees that are not federal agents.”
The ramping up of New York’s Legal Observation Project comes as the Trump administration is scaling down its enforcement efforts in Minnesota. On February 4, the administration said its withdrawing 700 officers immediately, about a 25% reduction.
The reduction in force in Minnesota only came following public pressure made possible thanks to citizen footage that showed the reality on the ground in Minneapolis and galvanized the public against ICE. A 56% majority of U.S. adults have little or no confidence in the agency, according to the latest American Values Survey released this week by the nonpartisan research nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute, including 85% of Democrats, nearly two-thirds of independents, and more than one in five Republicans.
Its easy to be charmed by the first delivery robot you see. I was driving with my kids in our Chicago neighborhood when I spotted one out the window last year. It was a cheerful pink color, with an orange flag fluttering at about eye level and four black-and-white wheels. It looked almost like an overgrown toy.
When I told the kids that it was labeled Coco, they started waving and giggling as it crossed the street. Over the months that followed, spotting Cocos rolling down the sidewalk became one of our favorite games.
Then, last fall, another type of delivery robot appeared. This one was green and white, with hardier all-terrain wheels and slow-blinking LED eyes. My kids and I tried to read the name printed on its side as it idled across the street: Peggy? Polly?
I later learned that the green newcomer was a Coco competitor made by a company called Serve Robotics. Every Serve robot is christened with its own individual moniker.
At first, my interactions with the robots were mostly polite. One slowed to a stop while my dog cocked his head and sniffed curiously. Another waited patiently while we crossed Lincoln Avenue on our daily walk home from school, giving my stroller right of way on the ramp at the curb.
In principle, they seemed like an improvement over double-parked delivery drivers and careening e-bikes.
But some of my neighbors were having more negative experiences.
Josh Robertson, who lives around the corner from me with his wife and two young children, was unnerved enough by a standoff with a robot that he decided to start a petition: No Sidewalk Bots. Thus far, more than 3,300 people have signed, with nearly one-third of those submitting an incident report.
Through the incident field, Robertson has heard about feet being run overa Serve robot weighs 220 pounds and can carry 15 gallonsnear-collisions, unwelcome noise, blocked entryways, and more. In one case, a man required stitches around his eye after stumbling into a robots visibility flag.
Sidewalks are for people, Robertson says. Vehicles, in general, should be in the streets.
Robertsons petition, the first so far in the cities where Coco and Serve operate, has revealed a groundswell of frustration over the strategically cute autonomous vehicles.
In conversations with the CEOs of Coco and Serve, I got a close-up look at the arguments in favor of delivery robots, which the companies say are better suited to short-distance deliveries than 2-ton cars. If they have their way, whats happening where I live will soon be playing out across dozens of cities as these well-capitalized startups seek to deploy thousands of their sidewalk bots.
But in a matter of months, my neighborhoods robots have arguably gone from novelty to nuisance. Silicon Valley startups are good at launching bright ideas, but bad at estimating their collateral damage.
Are our sidewalks destined to be their next victim?
From cute to concern
In early December, around the same time the petition started to get local media coverage and gain momentum, I found myself sympathizing for the first time with the petitioners point of view.
I was running an errand on a sidewalk that was crusted on one side with a thick layer of dirty snow when I noticed a Serve robot named Shima inching forward in my direction. It stopped as I approached, per Serves protocols. But in order to pass it by without stepping onto the snow, I had to navigate an inches-wide lane of space. If I had been pushing a wagon or a stroller, I wouldnt have fit.
The tree-lined sidewalks in my neighborhood are among the reasons I love living here. Outside my front door, near DePaul University, there is a constant stream of activity: bedraggled undergrads, eager dogs, bundled babies, dedicated runners. Within a 10-minute walking radius, I can find coffee, ice cream, playgrounds, vintage shopping, two Michelin-starred restaurants, my doctor, and my dentist.
I began to worry that delivery robots would change Lincoln Parks sidewalks for the worse.
Why delivery robots are suddenly everywhere
In the U.S., startups have been experimenting with delivery robots for close to a decade. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the first were deployed in San Francisco. By 2017, the Bay Area city had become a hotbed for robot innovationand residents frustration. In December of that year, city lawmakers passed an unusually restrictive policy limiting companies to deploying just three robots and requiring that a human chaperone accompany them.
But the idea of sidewalk-based robots remained attractive to both entrepreneurs and delivery companies. Zach Rash and Brad Squicciarini founded Coco in 2020; as UCLA undergrads, they had built research robots to assess transportation and accessibility issues on campus. The following year, Uber spun Serve Robotics out of Postmates (which it had acquired for $2.65 billion to bolster its Uber Eats business), installing Ali Kashani, who had led Postmates X, as CEO.
The delivery economy is booming, with three in four restaurant orders now eaten outside of the restaurant itself. For eateries and the platforms that enable their deliveries, robots offer a way around the labor costs and unpredictability associated with drivers. In an investor presentation from last year, Serve projected that its cost of delivery, with increased scale and autonomy, could be just $1 per trip.
Mass adoption of delivery robots is now possible because of recent technology advancements, says Rash, Cocos CEO, as he ticks off the list. We have Nvidia compute on the vehicles thats designed for robotics. Battery capacity has gotten a lot better, so you can drive multiple days without needing to recharge. Then, we have really robust supply chains around wheels, motors, motor controllersa lot of the basic stuff you need to drive these things.
Put it all together, and Coco aims to operate a global fleet of 10,000-plus vehicles in select U.S. cities and overseas locations like Helsinki. Were delivering hot food, so [the robot] has to be able to get from point A to point B incredibly reliably every single time while maintaining a really low cost, Rash says.
Though Coco, like Serve, is only as wide as the shoulder width of an average adult, it can tote four grocery bags or even eight large pizzas. It can fit all the types of things people need delivered, says Rash, but its incredibly compact, its safe, its energy efficient, and I think its the best way to shuttle stuff around our cities.
For now, that stuff consists almost entirely of restaurant deliveries. Both Coco and Serve have partnerships with Uber Eats and DoorDash.
But the vision for the two startups extends far beyond burgers and burritos. Someday our kids are going to look back and think how weird it was that a person had to be attached to every package that comes to our front door every day, says Serves Kashani, who believes delivery robots true transformative potential lies in last-mile delivery.
I ordered a pair of climbing shoes for my daughter, and it was the wrong size, he says. It took two days to come, and then I had to deal with the reverse logistics of shipping i back and waiting for the next pair. Well, instead of ordering from Amazon, I could have ordered from a local store. [A delivery robot] could have shown up with two, three sizes. The robot could have waited while we tried the shoes and taken back the ones that didnt fit. So you have all these new types of things that people can do that werent possible before because last-mile was just too inefficient and expensive.
Serve started 2025 with roughly 100 robots. By December, it had built 2,000. Thats a point where it makes sense for the Walmarts of the world to want to integrate because now theres a fleet they can access, Kashani says, noting that Serves robots can accommodate more than 80% of Walmarts SKUs.
How Coco and Serve approach safety
Coco and Serve, along with competitors like Starship (which raised a $50 million Series C last October and announced at the time it planned to have 12,000 robots by 2027), are all, in a sense, bets on autonomy.
Behind the scenes, human operators are training the robots and stepping in to resolve problems. But the success of the model ultimately hinges on how well the vehicles learn to navigate neighborhoods on their own.
Robot companies often point out that unlike self-driving cars, bots can usually just hit the brakes to de-escalate an encounter or avoid a collision.
Its usually appropriate to stop, right? A car cant just stop; you might cause an accident, says Rash, acknowledging, though, that the sidewalk is a much less structured environment with a lot more chaos.
If my robot stops in the middle of a sidewalk, nothing bad happens, echoes Kashani, adding that Serve robots have thousands of times less kinetic energy than a car. That also gives us some affordances. Because we are moving more slowly, we have more time to think. So we dont need as expensive of sensors, for example, or as many computers to achieve the same thing [as a self-driving car].
But despite those advantages, combined with years of training data, robots are still making mistakes. Social media abounds with robot bloopersand worse. In one recent example, a high-speed passenger train in Miami mowed down a delivery robot stopped at a crossing on the tracks. Stopping, in that case, was fatal to the robot.
In my own experience, one of the challenges pedestrians encounter with robots is simply their unpredictability. Cocos robots tend to drive more smoothly, perhaps a result of the startups choice to have human pilots more involved.
“Coco has been operating in Chicago for over a year with strong community support and without any major incidents or safety concerns,” Rash says. “Safety and community partnership are our top priorities.”
Serves robots, in contrast, are more reliant on lidar and AI; their stilted driving often reminds me of the remote-controlled toy car my son used to drive as a toddler.
A Serve spokesperson tells Fast Company: We are working closely with city officials and local stakeholders to ensure responsible deployments, and we are committed to being a positive, safe, and respectful presence in the communities we serve.
Knowing that the robot is designed to cede to pedestrians is little comfort when its jerking back and forth right in front of you.
Whats next for Chicago
Robot deployment in Chicago is still, technically, part of a pilot program. Two city agencies, the Chicago Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection and the Chicago Department of Transportation, are jointly involved in licensing and assessment. If the City Council doesnt renew the pilot, Coco and Serves licenses will expire in spring 2027. This week, one city alderman began soliciting feedback from his constituents as Coco and Serve seek to expand into other Chicago neighborhoods.
Robertson, who created the anti-bots petition, is calling for an immediate halt to the program. The delivery robots promised benefits are appealing, he acknowledges, from reduced emissions to lower congestion. But I think we should be skeptical [of those claims] and make sure were taking a data-driven approach, he says. What if robot trips replace bike trips instead of car trips? Or what if opening our sidewalks to these little vehicles leaves the total number of trips in the street unchanged? We need data. Then Chicagoans will be able to decide for ourselves if thats how we want to tackle emissions and street congestion.
Robertson also raises the problem of enshittification, a term coined by author and journalist Cory Doctorow in 2022 to describe the perhaps inevitable degradation of online platforms over time as they seek to wring greater profits from their users. Eventually, these robot companies, even if they do save consumers a buck or two right now on delivery fees, theyve got to make a return for their investors, people like Sam Altman, he says. (OpenAI cofounder and CEO Altman has invested in multiple rounds of Cocos funding; last spring, OpenAI and Coco announced a partnership that will make use of Cocos real-world data.)
Already, ads supplement Serves revenue, turning some robots into rolling billboards and inserting the commercial into the public way.
Last month in Chicago was bitterly cold and snowy, the kind of weather that drains robot batteries and presents obstacles to even all-terrain robot wheels. After growing accustomed to seeing Coco and Serve on a daily basis, I found myself wondering whether they were even attempting to brave the frigid January sidewalks.
But I cant say that I missed them.
Burnout is best understood as a work-related psychological syndrome arising from sustained emotional and interpersonal strain. It has three core components: emotional exhaustion, characterized by chronic affective depletion; depersonalization, in which work becomes alienating and psychologically distancing rather than engaging; and reduced professional efficacy, marked by declining confidence, poorer self-appraisals, and a loss of self-worth.
Importantly, burnout is not the same as stress. Rather, it is a pattern of responses to work stressors, and can also be distinguished from depression by its work-specific context. Burnout is best assessed via self-report questionnaires (psychometrics), and the below statements provide a simple checklist for evaluating its three components.
{"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-16X9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-1x1-2.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more insights from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic","dek":"Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of organizational psychology at UCL and Columbia University, and the co-founder of DeeperSignals. He has authored 15 books and over 250 scientific articles on the psychology of talent, leadership, AI, and entrepreneurship. ","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/drtomas.com\/intro\/","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91424798,"imageMobileId":91424800,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
1. Emotional exhaustion (energy depletion)
I feel emotionally drained by my work.
By the end of the workday, I feel used up or wiped out.
I wake up feeling tired at the thought of another day at work.
I feel I have nothing left to give emotionally at work.
2. Depersonalization (psychological distancing and cynicism)
I have become more cynical or negative about my job.
I feel detached or emotionally distant from my work.
I am less interested in what my job means or contributes.
I find myself being more irritable, blunt, or indifferent with colleagues or clients.
3. Reduced professional efficacy (poor self-evaluation and self-perceived impact)
I feel that I am not accomplishing worthwhile things at work.
I doubt my effectiveness or competence more than I used to.
I feel less confident in my ability to handle my job well.
Even when I work hard, it feels like it does not make much difference.
A workplace epidemic
As with most modern workplace malaise, precise prevalence figures are elusive. Yet multiple surveys show burnout is widespread in the industrialized world (where working conditions are actually better). According to a recent Gallup study, about 48% of employees globally report feeling burned out at work, and three-quarters say they experience burnout at least occasionally.
Regional data paints a similar picture. Surveys across Southeast Asia find that 62.9% of workers report high or very high burnout, and U.S. workforce research shows that roughly 31% of employees feel job-related stress often or always, a common precursor to burnout. Younger workers and those with high-demand roles typically report even higher rates, with some employer studies suggesting more than 80% of workers have experienced symptoms such as exhaustion or cognitive strain.
Overlapping forces
Burnout, like most behavioral outcomes, reflects the interplay of internal and external forces. Individual differences in personality and resilience shape vulnerability, while job design, organizational culture, and leadership determine exposure. The same role can exhaust one employee and leave another largely unscathednot because the pressures differ, but because their capacity to absorb and interpret them does.
So, for instance, job control, or the degree to which individuals experience control over their jobs, is a consistent negative predictor of burnout: The less control you feel you have over your job and career, the more at risk of burnout you are. In contrast, when people are given autonomy and resources to perform their jobs, they will experience a sense of control and agency, which in turn increases employee engagement and motivation, and decreases exhaustion and depersonalization.
Much like the difference between driving a car and being a passenger stuck in the back seat, having control makes even demanding journeys more tolerable. It increases motivation and engagement while reducing the emotional fatigue and cynicism that sit at the core of burnout.
Personality as predictor
But no matter how well jobs are designed, individual differences matter a great deal. Most notably, personality is a remarkably consistent predictor of burnout, with lower emotional stability (or higher neuroticism) standing out as a particularly strong risk factorincreasing vulnerability while eroding resilience. Meta-analyses evidence suggests that a substantial share of the variance in burnout symptoms can be traced back to personality, which in turn helps explain downstream outcomes such as job performance, absenteeism, and turnover.
The implication is not that burnout is a personal failing or that organizations should select only the psychologically bulletproof. Rather, it is that prevention and support efforts should be unevenly distributed. Some employees are naturally more resilient and will weather demanding environments with little lasting cost. Others, equally capable and motivated, will require greater support, flexibility, and early intervention to avoid being pushed beyond their limits.
Treating everyone the same may feel fair, but it is rarely effective. In practice, this means paying closer attention to those most at risk and designing support systems that recognize differences in resilience, rather than assuming that the same pressures will be absorbed equally by all.
Situational factors
To be sure, some features of work increase the risk of burnout for almost anyone, helping to explain the high prevalence figures reported earlier. These risk factors are, for the most part, intuitive. Chief among them is workload. When demands consistently exceed the capacity of individuals or teams, energy is depleted faster than it can be restored, making recovery impossible. Burnout, in this sense, is less a sudden collapse than a slow failure to recharge
Workload problems are not limited to quantity. A mismatch can also arise from the nature of the work itself. Even moderate demands become draining when people lack the skills, inclination, or temperament required to meet them. Emotional labor is especially costly: Roles that require employees to display feelings they do not genuinely experience (perpetual enthusiasm, calm, or empathy on demand) create a form of psychological friction that accelerates exhaustion. Unsurprisingly, workload mismatches are most strongly linked to the exhaustion component of burnout, the first and most common stage of the syndrome.
Another powerful driver of burnout is perceived fairness. A serious mismatch between individuals and their work arises when people feel they are treated unjustly. Fairness signals respect and affirms self-worth; its absence does the opposite. Perceptions of unfairness emerge in many familiar forms: inequities in workload or pay, favoritism in promotions, opaque performance evaluations, or grievance processes that deny employees a genuine voice.
Such experiences are not merely irritating but emotionally corrosive. They drain energy, erode trust, and weaken the sense of mutual obligation that underpins healthy workplaces. Over time, persistent unfairness accelerates burnout by intensifying emotional exhaustion and fostering cynicism, as individuals disengage not because the work itself is unmanageable, but because the system governing it feels arbitrary or rigged.
Likewise, burnout is more likely to take hold when a sense of community at work erodes. People function best when they feel socially connected to colleagues they respect and trust, and when everyday interactions allow for shared recognition, support, and even humor. Such connections do more than provide emotional comfort; they reinforce a sense of belonging and shared purpose.
By contrast, work environments that are isolating, transactional, or impersonal deprive employees of an important psychological buffer against stress. Most damaging of all is chronic, unresolved conflict. Persistent tension with colleagues or managers generates ongoing frustration and hostility, undermines trust, and steadily reduces the availability of social support. Over time, the workplace ceases to feel like a community and becomes merely a site of strain, accelerating the path to burnout.
The role of engagement
A final and often overlooked point concerns the relationship between engagement and burnout. Intuitively, the two are negatively related, but empirical evidence suggests the connection is far stronger than commonly assumed. Meta-analytic findings indicate that the overlap is so substantial that engagement and burnout may best be understood as opposite ends of the same underlying continuum rather than as distinct constructs.
Across studies, the average true correlation between burnout and engagement dimensions rises to nearly .80, with burnout explaining well over half of the variance in core engagement components such as absorption, dedication, and vigor. The broader pattern of correlates is almost identical, with vector correlations approaching .90, implying that what predicts burnout largely predicts disengagement in reverse.
Complicating matters further, longitudinal evidence suggests burnout may also reshape personality over time: Higher burnout predicts subsequent declines in extroversion, challenging the assumption that more outgoing individuals are simply less vulnerable.
Finally, job control is more strongly associated with cynicism and diminished efficacy than with exhaustion, a finding with important implications for practice. Given how frequently organizations track engagement, these measures may offer an early and scalable way to detect emerging burnout risks at both group and individual levels, often even before exhaustion becomes visible.
Taken together, the evidence suggests that burnout is neither a passing fad nor a purely individual affliction, but a predictable outcome of how modern work is designed, managed, and experienced. It emerges where chronic demands overwhelm recovery; where control, fairness, and community erode; and where individual vulnerabilities go unrecognized or unsupported. Because burnout closely mirrors disengagementoften preceding visible declines in performance or well-beingit can be detected earlier than many organizations assume, especially through careful attention to engagement data.
Ultimately, preventing burnout is less about eliminating pressure than about restoring balancebetween demands and resources, effort and reward, autonomy and accountability, and uniform policies and differentiated support. Organizations that understand this are not just protecting their people; they are safeguarding their capacity to perform.
{"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-16X9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-1x1-2.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more insights from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic","dek":"Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of organizational psychology at UCL and Columbia University, and the co-founder of DeeperSignals. He has authored 15 books and over 250 scientific articles on the psychology of talent, leadership, AI, and entrepreneurship. ","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/drtomas.com\/intro\/","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91424798,"imageMobileId":91424800,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
