At a recent fundraising event, I stood backstage with a young woman waiting to give a speech in front of 550 people to honor her alma mater. She was visibly nervous; I watched as she paced, taking deep breaths to calm the adrenaline that was flooding her body, twisting her hands, and looking toward the stage door as if she might try to make a run for it.
As a charity auctioneer who has spent more than two decades on stages around the world commanding rooms filled with thousands of people, I know that feeling. There were so many nights in the beginning of my career when I felt the same way. But spending 1,000-plus nights onstage has given me plenty of practice to learn what it takes to cultivate confidenceand keep itin my professional and personal life.
Here are two easy mindset shifts that anyone can use to boost their confidence walking into any room.
Find Your Strike Method
Every time I walk onstage as the auctioneer, I bring a small gavel to bang down three times to get the attention of the crowd. After many years of hearing the gavel crack three times against the podium, I associate the habit with the most confident version of me. On nights when I forgot my gavel, I started to use anything within reach to mimic the motion and sounda saltshaker from the table, a tube of lipstick, even a hockey puck when I was taking an auction at a hockey arena.
I also found I could use this offstage as well. Whenever I am about to step into a difficult meeting or a big presentation and find my confidence starting to recede, I visualize the gavel strike. The familiar method reminds me to throw my shoulders back, put a smile on my face, and walk in like I own the room.
For my book The Most Powerful Woman in the Room Is You, I interviewed professional athletes, CEOs, and people at the top of their industry and realized that most successful people have their own version of a strike method. Whether it be a mantra, an action, or a physical item, there is something that helps them conjure strength and confidence in the moments when they dont feel it.
To cultivate confidence, spend time thinking about the moments when you feel your most powerful. Come up with your own mantra or action that you can use anytime you arent feeling your most confident, and let your strike method empower you to move forward.
Nail Your Sales Pitch
When it comes to shifting your confidence mindset, inner work is as important as anything you do in your personal or professional life. You may dream about building the biggest business in the world and spend hours designing your dream life, but if you havent mastered your sales pitch, you will always find yourself fumbling when asked a question about yourself.
Sit down with a piece of paper in a quiet place and write down a list of everything you want people to know about you: what you are good at, what you do, where you are headed. If you find that you have written about things that you no longer want to be known for, simply cross them off the list.
Once that list is complete, spend some time writing a 30-second sales pitch that describes these key details: who you are, what you are doing, and, most importantly, where you are headed. Articulating this vision and putting it into a concise sales pitch will put you in control the next time someone asks, So tell me about you.
A few minutes before the nervous young woman stepped onstage, I walked over and gave her an unsolicited hype speech to help her own the moment. You are going to rock this speech, and everyone in the audience is ready to watch you command the stage. I saw her stand up taller, still nervous but now ready to take up space on the stage.
Confidence ebbs and flows, so dont forget to surround yourself with people who believe in youand give you a hype speech on the days when you arent feeling the most confident.
The 2002 sci-fi thriller Minority Report depicts a dystopian future where a specialized police unit is tasked with arresting people for crimes they have not yet committed. Directed by Steven Spielberg and based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, the drama revolves around PreCrimea system informed by a trio of psychics, or precogs, who anticipate future homicides, allowing police officers to intervene and prevent would-be assailants from claiming their targets lives.
The film probes at hefty ethical questions: How can someone be guilty of a crime they havent yet committed? And what happens when the system gets it wrong?
While there is no such thing as an all-seeing precog, key components of the future that Minority Report envisions have become reality even faster than its creators imagined. For more than a decade, police departments across the globe have been using data-driven systems geared toward predicting when and where crimes might occur and who might commit them.
Far from an abstract or futuristic conceit, predictive policing is a reality. And market analysts are predicting a boom for the technology.
Given the challenges in using predictive machine learning effectively and fairly, predictive policing raises significant ethical concerns. Absent technological fixes on the horizon, there is an approach to addressing these concerns: Treat government use of the technology as a matter of democratic accountability.
Troubling history
Predictive policing relies on artificial intelligence and data analytics to anticipate potential criminal activity before it happens. It can involve analyzing large datasets drawn from crime reports, arrest records and social or geographic information to identify patterns and forecast where crimes might occur or who may be involved.
Law enforcement agencies have used data analytics to track broad trends for many decades. Todays powerful AI technologies, however, take in vast amounts of surveillance and crime report data to provide much finer-grained analysis.
Police departments use these techniques to help determine where they should concentrate their resources. Place-based prediction focuses on identifying high-risk locations, also known as hot spots, where crimes are statistically more likely to happen. Person-based prediction, by contrast, attempts to flag individuals who are considered at high risk of committing or becoming victims of crime.
These types of systems have been the subject of significant public concern. Under a so-called intelligence-led policing program in Pasco County, Florida, the sheriffs department compiled a list of people considered likely to commit crimes and then repeatedly sent deputies to their homes. More than 1,000 Pasco residents, including minors, were subject to random visits from police officers and were cited for things such as missing mailbox numbers and overgrown grass.
Four residents sued the county in 2021, and last year they reached a settlement in which the sheriffs office admitted that it had violated residents constitutional rights to privacy and equal treatment under the law. The program has since been discontinued.
This is not just a Florida problem. In 2020, Chicago decommissioned its Strategic Subject List, a system where police used analytics to predict which prior offenders were likely to commit new crimes or become victims of future shootings. In 2021, the Los Angeles Police Department discontinued its use of PredPol, a software program designed to forecast crime hot spots but was criticized for low accuracy rates and reinforcing racial and socioeconomic biases.
Necessary innovations or dangerous overreach?
The failure of these high-profile programs highlights a critical tension: Even though law enforcement agencies often advocate for AI-driven tools for public safety, civil rights groups and scholars have raised concerns over privacy violations, accountability issues, and the lack of transparency. And despite these high-profile retreats from predictive policing, many smaller police departments are using the technology.
Most American police departments lack clear policies on algorithmic decision-making and provide little to no disclosure about how the predictive models they use are developed, trained, or monitored for accuracy or bias. A Brookings Institution analysis found that in many cities, local governments had no public documentation on how predictive policing software functioned, what data was used, or how outcomes were evaluated.
This opacity is whats known in the industry as a black box. It prevents independent oversight and raises serious questions about the structures surrounding AI-driven decision-making. If a citizen is flagged as high-risk by an algorithm, what recourse do they have? Who oversees the fairness of these systems? What independent oversight mechanisms are available?
These questions are driving contentious debates in communities about whether predictive policing as a method should be reformed, more tightly regulated, or abandoned altogether. Some people view these tools as necessary innovations, while others see them as dangerous overreach.
A better way in San Jose
But there is evidence that data-driven tools grounded in democratic values of due process, transparency, and accountability may offer a stronger alternative to todays predictive policing systems. What if the public could understand how these algorithms function, what data they rely on, and what safeguards exist to prevent discriminatory outcomes and misuse of the technology?
The city of San Jose, California, has embarked on a process that is intended to increase transparency and accountability aroud its use of AI systems. San Jose maintains a set of AI principles requiring that any AI tools used by city government be effective, transparent to the public, and equitable in their effects on peoples lives. City departments also are required to assess the risks of AI systems before integrating them into their operations.
If taken correctly, these measures can effectively open the black box, dramatically reducing the degree to which AI companies can hide their code or their data behind things such as protections for trade secrets. Enabling public scrutiny of training data can reveal problems such as racial or economic bias, which can be mitigated but are extremely difficult if not impossible to eradicate.
Research has shown that when citizens feel that government institutions act fairly and transparently, they are more likely to engage in civic life and support public policies. Law enforcement agencies are likely to have stronger outcomes if they treat technology as a toolrather than a substitutefor justice.
Maria Lungu is a postdoctoral researcher of law and public administration at the University of Virginia.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Given President Donald Trump’s well-established penchant for golden objects, it was not a surprise to many when images of his administration’s decorative choices in the Oval Office started appearing.
The space now abounds in gold. There are gold picture frames, gold statues, gold trophies, gold crown molding, and gold coasters. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump called in his Mar-a-Lago “gold guy” to assist with the redesign, adding custom-made and gilded carvings. Compared to those of presidents past, Trump’s Oval Office decor is a maximalist and glistening tour de force.
To some, the decoration is all a bit much. New York magazine called the overall decorative approach in the White House “tacky and trollish.” An opinion piece in The Washington Post called the decoration “gaudy-awful.” Another drew a direct line between Trump’s decorative leanings and the over-the-top opulence of the Palace of Versailles.
From left: President George W. Bush, circa 2008, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent under the recently gilded entry, 2025 [Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images, Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]
“In order to gain a certain kind of reputational notoriety he emulates this style that’s connected with the elite. But he does so in a very pastiche way,” says Robert Wellington, a professor of art history at the Australian National University and a specialist in the arts in France during the reign of Louis XIV. Trump, who has called “the look and feel of Louis XIV” his “favorite style,” has interpreted this period mainly through items that are, or look like, gold. “Perhaps he’s trying to create a sense of material splendor around him that gives a sense of power and buttresses his claims to the success that his administration is having,” Wellington says. “He wants to give that illusion of success.”
From left: Oval Office seating area, circa 2010, and 2025 [Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images, Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images]
What are those things?
According to information from the White House, some items in Trump’s Oval Office actually do have legitimate value, both materially and historically. On top of the mantle, there is a line of seven historic items from the White House collection dating back to the early and mid-19th century.
This is the lineup, according to details from the White House curator’s office, that was provided by a source in the White House. On the outside edges there are two gilded silver dessert stands made around 1810. Next to those are two gilded silver figurative centerpieces made around 1843. Next to those are two gilded bronze vases made around 1817 and associated with James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States. And in the center is a gilded bronze basket made between 1815 and 1820. All the items originated in either England or France.
[Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images]
The provenance of these pieces may have some subversive significance for those who read between the lines. The four outermost pieces were bequests from Margaret Thompson Biddle, heir to a diamond- and copper-mining fortune and one of the richest American women of the mid-20th century. Once married to a diplomat, she lived for many of the pre- and post-World War II years in Europe, and hosted famous salons in her Paris home with the leading lights of American and French society.
The centerpiece was a gift of Gifford B. Pinchot, an early trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an organization that by its own accounting sued the first Trump administration 163 times. Pinchot, who donated the piece in 1973 and died in 1989, was the son of Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forest Service and a close ally of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th U.S. president, with whom he helped formulate the federal government’s approach to resource conservation. Neither of these people would seem ideologically connected to the current administration’s policies.
Made in the USA? Not in the White House
More notable, perhaps, is the fact that none of the items on the mantle in Trump’s Oval Office were made in the U.S., which contrasts with the administration’s present focus on imposing tariffs on foreign-produced goods and services.
“There is a long passion for French decorative arts in America, through the Gilded Age patrons but also in the White House itself. So it’s not completely outrageous to imagine these French styles coming into the White House,” Wellington says.
The Hall of Mirrors in Versailles [Photo: Jessica Kantak Bailey/Unsplash]
But Wellington also sees a deep irony in Trump’s affection for Louis XIV and the Palace of Versailles, which he explores in a forthcoming book, Versailles Mirrored: The Power of Luxury, Louis XIV to Donald Trump. Wellington notes that Versailles was built as a kind of advertising program, establishing France as the center for luxury production by putting its finest craftsmanship in furniture, metalwork, mirrors, silks, and paintings on display. The palace’s decorative approach was also a form of protectionism, meant to stop people from importing luxury products from other countries. “It was state-sponsored luxury production which led to France being seen as the place where the very finest things could be made,” Wellington says.
Trump’s version of Louis XIV’s approach is more surface than substance, Wellington says. In contrast with the industry-boosting decoration at Versailles, the White House decor undermines one of the administration’s key policies. “If Trump wanted to be a Louis XIV, I think he would be well placed to support the arts and culture. Instead, there’s very regressive ideas about arts and culture being supported under the Trump administration,” he says.
“To be a great model of patronage you would be looking to the greatest minds of the day, the greatest artists of the day to create an image of America, to make America great again,” Wellington adds. “The way that you would do that is to think to the future, not to lock into some old idea.”
Generative AI is radically reshaping the job marketcreating new roles, changing some, and phasing out others. But heres one effect of the transformative technology thats not as widely talked about: Its deepening long-standing workplace gender gaps.
A double disadvantage
According to a recent report from the World Economic Forum and LinkedIn, women systematically face a two-part problem in the ongoing AI transformation. Relatively fewer women are currently in jobs that are being augmented by generative AI, and relatively more are in roles that are being disrupted.
According to LinkedIn data for the US, 24.1% of men work in augmented occupations, while 20.5% of women do. At the same time, 33.7% of women work in occupations that are being disrupted, compared to 25.5% of men. Related research by LinkedIn shows that the pattern of mens higher representation in augmented roles holds for 95% of the 74 countries with available data. Examples of occupations that look set to be disrupted in the US include medical administrative assistant (91% female) and office manager (88% female). Augmented fields, meanwhile, include electrical engineer (94% male) and mechanical engineer (89% male).
The STEM Gap
The data align with broader AI-related disparities in STEM education and employment. Already, too many women are lost in the transition from STEM degrees to their first job in the STEM workforce. Women who graduated in 2021 accounted for 38.5% of STEM graduates, but only 31.6% of STEM job entrants in 2022. This decline in representation continues across the hierarchy once women are in the workforce: in 2024, women held 29% of STEM entry-level positions and 24.4% of STEM managerial positions in STEM, but only 12.2% of STEM C-suite level roles. Women are also underrepresented in AI-related academic and leadership roles.To ensure that those who have the right skills have a fair chance to succeed and advance in the workplace, regardless of their gender, business leaders need to review and rethink their hiring practices, performance evaluation methods, and promotion processes. Generative AI itself can both help and hinder efforts to create a more level playing field. Relying on historical employment patterns to make predictions about future performance has too often overlooked womens potential to succeed in jobs where they have not traditionally been represented. On the other hand, using generative AI to predict future success based on current skills is a powerful way to deploy the latest technology to debias hiring processes and create a more level playing field.
Some positive news
When it comes to AI skills, there are encouraging signs that women are catching up on both AI literacy and AI engineering skills. In 2018, 23.5% of AI engineering skill-listers on LinkedIn were women; in early 2025, this number had risen to 29.4%. Over the past five years, the gap narrowed in 74 of the 75 economies with available data. At the same time, research by LinkedIn suggests that women are more likely to underreport AI skills in their professional profiles.
Disparity among inventors
Currently, no economy is fully leveraging all of the available talent to drive innovation, but some are doing better than others. In a race where every competitive edge counts, this is significant. High-level data on the gender breakdown among inventors, named as such on patent applications, reveals that East Asian economies are drawing on a more extensive talent pool, with more than 25% of inventors being women in China (26.8% in 2019) and South Korea (28.3% in 2019), which is around 10 percentage points higher than in the European Union (EU) and the United States.
Around the world, the generative AI boom is being shaped in ways that dont fully reflect the diversity of society, leaving women underrepresented in the jobs and leadership roles of the future. Yet this moment offers a rare opportunity to course-correct. By investing in skills, using AI in a way that makes hiring and promotions more equitable, and ensuring technology is built by and for a broader range of people, we can create a more competitive future that expands economic opportunity and promotes fairness. Without such action, generative AI will reinforce inequality instead of driving meaningful progress.
Your flights will probably get noticeably bumpier over the next few years, according to new research on how climate change is affecting turbulence.
Paul Williams is a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Reading in England who has researched turbulence for more than a decade. In a presentation at the European Geosciences Union conference last week, Williams shared his research showing how global warming is likely leading to an uptick in something called clear-air turbulence, or turbulence that cant be seen on an airplane monitor or from the cockpit.
Based on Williamss research, severe clear-air turbulence has increased by 55% since the 1970s, and its only going up. Over the next few decades, Williams told Inside Climate News, turbulence is expected to quadruple along some busy routes, presenting potentially dangerous conditions for aviation.
What is clear-air turbulence?
Clear-air turbulence, in simple terms, is turbulence that’s not caused by clouds or stormsmeaning that, for flight crews, it can essentially appear out of the blue.
Whereas the more common turbulence happens due to weather, clear-air turbulence is most often due to jet streams in the atmosphere. Jet streams are strong, river-like air patterns, about 6 to 8 miles above the Earth, that contain many layers of air blowing at different speeds.
These streams, which travel west to east, appear when warm air runs into much colder air. As the Earth is heated unevenly (with more sun in the tropics and less in the poles), warm air expands and rises up, and cold air rushes in to take its place, creating a moving current. There are multiple jet streams around the globe, and their strengths change throughout the year based on how hot and cold the converging currents are at a given time.
In an interview with CBS News, Daniel Adjekum, a pilot and aircraft safety consultant, explained that the differing air masses inside a jet stream can cause a lot of friction, and, in turn, turbulence. The major issue with this is that normally pilots can predict convective turbulence based on moisture content in the air. Because clear-air turbulence isn’t caused by moisture patterns, it doesn’t show up to the naked eye or on flight instruments.
Hassan Shahidi, president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation, told CBS that clear-air turbulence is typically very violent. Some experts believe that it was responsible for extreme turbulence on a Singapore Airlines flight last year, causing the aircraft to drop thousands of feet in just a few minutes. The incident killed one person and injured more than 70 others. In recent months, unexpected severe turbulence has also led to multiple injuries on two separate United Airlines flights.
How is global warming making clear-air turbulence worse?
Williams coauthored a paper in 2023 demonstrating that clear-air turbulence has been on the rise over the past several decades. Now he’s uncovering how global warming is driving that pattern.
The main piece of the puzzle, he explained in his presentation last week, is something called vertical wind shear. Inside jet streams, vertical wind shear is a phenomenon that occurs when two air currents close to each other move at different speeds. If the variation is wide enough, the atmosphere breaks into unusual, bumpy patterns, resulting in a turbulent flight experience.
A growing body of research demonstrates that climate change is disrupting jet streams and, in turn, worsening vertical wind shear. Studies show that faster rates of global warming at the poles can twist jet streams into unusual patterns, creating “rough patches” with high wind shearssome of which are expected to worsen near busy transatlantic flight paths.
Based on Williamss research, vertical wind shear has already increased by around 15% over the past 40 years. If rapid warming continues on its current trajectory, his models show that vertical wind shear inside jet streams could increase another 29% by 2100.
This, of course, means a lot more turbulence in not that many years from now, he concluded at last weeks presentation.
Flying is still considered to be a very safe form of travel. However, when problems do arise, theyre often caused by turbulence: Data from the National Transportation Safety Board shows that more than one-third of all airline incidents in the U.S. from 2009 through 2018 were related to turbulence, and most of them resulted in one or more serious injuries, though no damage to the plane. Now, Williams’s research shows, flight safety agencies may need to find new ways to monitor ever-bumpier skies.
Effective leadership isnt a one-size-fits-all endeavor. It requires adaptability, self-awareness, and a deep understanding of when to step in and when to step back. Leaders often struggle to find the right balance between empowering their teams and maintaining strategic oversight.
But theres a way that you can do both. By adopting the practical 2×2 leadership framework that Ill get into in this article, leaders can assess their approach based on two critical dimensions: Degree of Empowerment and Degree of Strategic Altitude.
The leadership quadrants
When you map out leadership approaches across these two dimensions, four distinct quadrants emerge. Each quadrant represents a different leadership style, and understanding when and how to apply each can help leaders optimize their impact.
Control hub (operational overreach)
This quadrant is appropriate when employees lack the necessary skills, experience, or confidence to perform tasks independently. Its crucial in high-stakes situations that require precision and compliance, like crisis management or regulatory adherence. Leaders should adopt this approach when theyre training new employees or when they need to take immediate corrective action to prevent costly mistakes.
Potential pitfalls
Overindulgence in this quadrant can lead to micromanagement, which stifles employee creativity and autonomy. When leaders insist on controlling every aspect of a task, employees may feel disengaged and undervalued, leading to high turnover rates and low morale. However, avoiding this quadrant when you genuinely need it can result in poor quality control, increased errors, and project derailment due to a lack of oversight.
Maria, a project manager at a fast-growing tech company Ive consulted with, is leading the rollout of a new software update for a major client. Given the complexity of the project and the tight deadlines, she feels the need to oversee every aspect, from development timelines to QA testing. Despite having a capable team, Maria conducts frequent check-ins, requests detailed reports, and personally reviews code before deployment.
Initially, Maria’s approach ensures that the project stays on track and meets the client’s stringent quality standards. But as the project progresses, her team begins to feel micromanaged, leading to frustration and burnout. Experienced developers feel undervalued, and morale begins to decline.
Maria realizes that while tight oversight was necessary at the project’s start, gradually transitioning to a more empowering leadership style could have built trust and improved team morale. She implements a phased approach, which allows senior developers to take ownership of specific modules while she shifts focus to higher-level strategic issues.
Guided autonomy (empowered operators)
This quadrant works best when employees have a solid foundation of skills but still require occasional guidance to refine their capabilities. Its effective for developing talent and allows employees to build confidence while benefiting from the leaders strategic input. Leaders should apply this approach when the team needs to complete moderately complex tasks that require periodic support.
Potential pitfalls
Overindulging in this quadrant can potentially make employees overly dependent on the leader, which slows down their growth and initiative. Leaders might also avoid this quadrant due to discomfort with providing critical feedback, which can allow performance issues to go unchecked.
Jason, a sales director, is coaching a group of midlevel sales managers tasked with expanding into a new market. They have a good grasp of sales fundamentals but lack experience in handling high-stakes negotiations with enterprise clients. Jason decides to provide them with structured mentorship, offering periodic guidance while still giving them room to develop their negotiation skills.
He schedules biweekly coaching sessions, where he reviews their progress, provides feedback on their approach, and shares best practices. However, Jason struggles to provide direct corrective feedback because he fears it might demotivate them. As a result, some managers continue to struggle with closing deals, leading to missed targets.
Jason realizes that empowerment doesn’t mean avoiding difficult conversations. By balancing encouragement with constructive feedback, he can help his team refine their skills without undermining their confidence. He starts incorporating role-playing exercises and clear, actionable feedback into his coaching sessions.
Strategic steering (visionary control)
This approach is ideal when the organization or team needs clear strategic direction while requiring oversight to ensure alignment with long-term goals. Its particularly useful during times of change, such as mergers, expansions, or new strategic initiatives. Leaders should engage in strategic steering when they need to provide vision while maintaining control over key decision-making areas.
Potential pitfalls
Overindulgence in strategic thinking might disconnect leaders from ground-level realities, which leaves employees without practical guidance. Avoiding this quadrant may result in a lack of long-term vision, which leads to shortsighted operational decisions.
Emily, the founder of a successful e-commerce startup Ive coached, wants to expand to international markets. She dedicates most of her time to crafting the company’s long-term strategy and forming partnerships with global distributors. However, in doing so, she becomes detached from day-to-day operations, assuming her management team can handle internal processes.
Over time, operational inefficiencies emerge, with increasing customer complaints about delivry times and product quality. Employees feel directionless as their efforts are not aligned with the founder’s ambitious vision.
Emily realizes the importance of balancing strategic oversight with operational involvement. She implements regular strategy check-ins with her leadership team to ensure alignment between the company’s long-term goals and daily operations, bridging the gap between vision and execution.
Strategic empowerment (empowered governance)
This quadrant works best for high-performing teams that demonstrate consistent results and align well with the organizations strategic goals. Leaders should utilize this approach when their primary focus is on shaping organizational culture and long-term planning while trusting their teams to handle daily operations effectively. This quadrant is particularly valuable for fostering innovation and employee ownership.
Overreliance on delegation can lead to a lack of awareness of operational challenges, potentially causing misalignment with organizational goals. However, avoiding full delegation altogether might stifle innovation and growth.
Alex, a regional President at a multinational corporation with whom Ive worked, has built a highly capable leadership team. Trusting their expertise, he adopts a hands-off approach, allowing them full autonomy over department operations. He shifts his focus to high-level industry trends and shapes the organizations long-term vision.
Initially, this approach fosters a sense of ownership among his managers, and innovation flourishes. However, over time, small inefficiencies begin to accumulate. Without periodic oversight, teams start to work in silos, and communication gaps result in misalignment with company objectives.
Alex learns that he needs to accompany empowerment with structured accountability. He starts to introduce quarterly strategic alignment meetings to ensure all departments remain connected to the broader organizational goals, while maintaining the autonomy that drives innovation.
Great leadership requires a dynamic balance of empowerment and strategic altitude. By understanding and applying this quadrant framework, leaders can better align their leadership style to their teams needs, which drives both individual and organizational success.
Whether on the dance floor or the balcony, the key is to know when to step in and when to step back.
Many leaders view employee activism as a disruption or threat. They see it as something to contain, avoid, or manage behind closed doors. This perception isnt surprising because activism challenges established hierarchies, questions the status quo, and introduces unpredictability into organizational life. Yet a 2007 study has shown that employees who feel heard are more engaged, innovative, and committed to their organizations success.
In contrast, when employees feel ignored or dismissed, trust and morale decline, and disengagement is likely to set in. Activism is one form of voice, and is often the last resort when other channels have failed.
The business case for listening
The rise of social media has heightened concerns. Employees can bypass internal channels and take their concerns public, often in real-time. This new visibility amplifies reputational risk and fuels executive fears of losing control over the narrative. Leaders worry about backlash from customers, investors, and regulators or the derailment of strategic priorities.
What executives need to consider is that activism can actually be an early warning of cultural misalignment or emerging ethical tension. When leaders reframe activism as a potential strategic insight rather than a threat, they can uncover the opportunities it offers.
For example, McKinsey’s research notes that organizations with high psychological safety, where people feel safe speaking up, are more likely to innovate, adapt to change, and outperform peers.
How to avoid common pitfalls
Leaders often make the mistake of trying to silence or sideline dissent. This can take the form of tightening communication protocols, minimizing concerns, or casting vocal employees as disloyal or disruptive. These tactics might quiet the noise temporarily, but they rarely address the underlying issues. More often, they damage credibility, erode psychological safety, and drive dissent undergroundonly for it to reemerge later (likely louder and more polarized).
Another common misstep is failing to address the gap between stated values and lived experience. Activism often arises when employees perceive an inconsistency. This is when what the organization claims to stand for doesn’t match what it does in practice. To maintain credibility, leaders need to assess how policies, behaviors, and decisions align with the organizations purpose on a regular basis.
From dissent to dialogue: constructive responses
To harness the insight, leaders need to respond thoughtfully and proactively. This begins by shifting from a defensive stance to one of curiosity and engagement. The following strategies can help:
1. Create safe, structured channels for discussion
Before concerns surface on social media or in the press, employees should have clear, accessible ways to raise them internally. For example, town halls, anonymous feedback tools, or dedicated dialogue sessions. What matters most is that these forums are genuine, not tick-box exercises. When employees see that companies listen to their input, trust grows.
2. Lead with curiosity, not defensiveness
When dissent arises, leaders often default to protecting the status quo or minimizing the issue. This instinct can escalate the conflict.
Instead, leaders should ask: What are they really saying? Why now? What values or expectations are at stake? Constructive conversations start with a willingness to listen and understandeven when the message is uncomfortable to hear.
3. Cocreate solutions
Where appropriate, involve employees in shaping the response. This collaborative approach builds shared ownership, improves solution quality, and signals a more inclusive, modern leadership style. It also helps move the conversation from complaint to commitment.
Build leadership capability
Engaging constructively with activism requires skill. Many leaders arent trained to manage dissent. Emotional intelligence, empathy, and influence are criticalbut often underdevelopedcompetencies. Investing in leadership development that strengthens these skills can help managers respond with confidence and care rather than fear or force. As Daniel Goleman advises, emotionally intelligent leaders can better navigate tension, build trust, and foster inclusive cultures. They recognize the value of differing perspectives and can engage in difficult conversations without becoming defensive.
From risk to resilience
In today’s complex and connected workplace, silence isnt a sign of harmonyit may be a sign of disengagement. Vocal employees, by contrast, are often deeply committed to the organizations mission and future. They speak up because they care.
Leaders who recognize this have an opportunity to lead differentlymore openly, courageously, and effectively. Reframing activism as a source of insight rather than a reputational risk allows leaders to strengthen not just company culture but strategy. Listening well, responding transparently, and acting with integrity are the pathways to progress.
When organizations respond to dissent with defensiveness, they fuel division. When they respond with curiosity and courage, they build the foundations for long-term trust, innovation, and shared success.
Even in this new era where hundreds of words are getting erased from U.S. government websites, one wouldnt imagine a word like retrofit to be offensive, especially when retrofitting a building or a home can save lives and protect the pocketbooks and health of millions of Americans. And yet, retrofit programs appear to be on Trump’s chopping block.
The Trump administration recently took aim at a housing retrofit program within the Department of Housing and Urban Development, whose funding was appropriated and approved through a bipartisan Congress. This retrofit program helped ensure that vulnerable Americans, many of whom are seniors, wouldnt be too cold in the winter due to poor insulation, be burdened with unnecessarily high utility bills, be breathing in moldy or unhealthy air from failing heating and air-conditioning units, or be at significant risk the next time extreme weather rolls through.
In response to the Trump administrations attempts to axe this vital service, last month a federal judge ruled that the programs funding must be unfrozen and resumed. While this was a positive development, it was a preliminary injunction in effect while the court deliberated. The risk to retrofitsand to the health, well-being, and pocketbooks of millions of Americansremains. That’s why in April, more than a dozen members of Congress sent a letter to HUD Secretary Scott Turner urging continuation of the program.
The importance of retrofitting
To date, this HUD programwhich is called the Green and Resilient Retrofit Program, but could easily be renamed the Keeping Americans Safe and Healthy Programhas funded retrofitting projects for nearly 25,000 housing units across the country. Thats real impact thats reaching millions of Americans.
These are housing units where landlords might be reluctant to do the necessary weatherizing, insulating, and other efficiency upgrades, all of which would improve the health of residents living there, as well as lower their utility bills. By making grants and loans available to owners of affordable housing, they were incentivized to improve a propertys energy or water efficiency, indoor air quality, and resilience to heat waves. And as our country continues to face a housing affordability crisis, any and all public-private partnerships like this that lower the costs associated with housing should be welcomed, not eviscerated.
The program had three simple goals:
First, reduce energy and water use in multifamily properties that HUD assists. Thats a no-brainer, as efficiency has long been a bipartisan area of congressional consensus. It saves money for anyone paying an energy or water bill (usually renters with lower incomes) and is a much-needed offset, given the increasing unaffordability of monthly rent.
Second, help multifamily properties be more resilient to extreme weather events and disasters. That should also be a given, as its far more expensive for taxpayers to clean up damaged housing after a disaster than it is to prevent damage in the first place. There has been bipartisan support in Congress over the years for this kind of preparedness to extreme weather. And since extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and ferociousand more costly as a resultthe necessary upgrades to make homes more resilient, such as flood-proofing, make a ton of financial sense.
Third, reduce greenhouse gas emissions from multifamily properties. And here the program took a page of out the bipartisan conservationist playbook, as a cleaner and more efficiently built and operated property requires less carbon to construct, heat, and power it.
Theres another benefit to these emissions reductions, too: Cleaner and less-polluting homes lead to thousands fewer premature deaths and hospital visits per year for Americans. And it brings with it tens of billions of dollars in new economic benefits that come from healthier and more productive Americans. The financial data is clear and compelling on this.
Retrofitting housing, then, couldnt be more American. Its good for American businesses who are contracted to do the upgrades, and its good for the Americans who are going to live healthier lives, save money on their utility bills, and be more protected, safer, and secure during the next superstorm.
Now, lest more retrofitting programs get the axe by the Trump administration, it’s time for the U.S. courts to stand by congressionally appropriated program funding. Its also time for American communities to stand up for public-private partnerships that are good for American businesses, health, and pocketbooks. Its time to save the retrofits.
Real ID, the new format for drivers licenses and state IDs in the U.S., shows how design can set federal standards while minimizing federal oversight.
When Congress passed the Real ID Act in 2005 at the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, it was an attempt to standardize minimum security requirements for state IDs and driver’s licenses nationwide, as well as make consistent the forms of identity recipients needed to show to get an ID. On the surface, it might seem like a simple ask, but in practice, the legislation butted up against privacy concerns and ideological opposition to federal overreach.
About half of states opposed the law after it passed, and 13 passed laws to prohibit their states from complying, according to The Washington Post, including Arizona, whose governor at the time, Janet Napolitano, called it an unfunded federal mandate. The ACLU said it would bring government into the very center of every citizens life.
Illinois residents wait in a line that stretches nearly two blocks to enter the Real ID Super Center operated by the Secretary of State’s office to apply for a Real ID on May 06, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois. [Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images]
IDs have a new standards manual
It took 20 years and multiple deadline extensions to fully enact the law, which requires that applicants have two proofs of residency, proof of identity and legal residence, and a Social Security card or W-2 form that includes a Social Security number to be eligible.
Even today, lingering anxieties over the idea of a federal ID can be found on the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) website. On its frequently asked questions page, the agency shoots down a question about supposedly building a national database.
“Real ID is a national set of standards, not a national identification card,” DHS says. “Each jurisdiction continues to issue its own unique license, maintains its own records, and controls who gets access to those records and under what circumstances. The purpose of Real ID is to make our identity documents more consistent and secure.”
Real IDs, real design differences
Under America’s federal system, issuing driver’s licenses is the responsibility of the state, but with Real ID, the federal government sets some design standards. The new IDs must contain certain personal information about the card holder, like legal name and birthdate, a machine-readable barcode, and physical security features of states’ choosing to prevent forgery, like holograms, hard-to-print patterns, or UV florescent ink.
New IDs that meet these minimum requirements, or Real IDs, are identified with a star icon in the top right corner of the card front, but the law leaves some room for creative interpretation. It’s safe to say that some states incorporate the star icon in more interesting ways than others.
Designs of Current American Real IDs in All 56 States/Territories by inPassportPorn
While most states show the star icon inside a simple circle, there are a few standout designs for the tiny mark.
California displays its star icon inside a grizzly bear, which is its state animal and also appears on its state flag. Maine, Michigan, and Nevada place the star icon within an outline of the state’s map. Ohio’s star symbol appears next to a green rendering of the state, and South Carolina similarly places its star next to a red illustration of the state. Washington is the only state to not use a star, and instead denotes its Real IDs with a U.S. flag.
Real ID may be a federally mandated design standard, but it’s implemented in a decentralized way. By leaving IDs to the states but still ensuring they meet minimum standards, the law lets states design their IDs with confidence they’ll be recognized nationwide.
Sahil Lavingia has had just three jobs over a 15-year career in tech.
The first was as the second employee of Pinterest. The second was by founding the startup Gumroad, a successful, famously lean company that makes it easy for content creators to sell digital goods. The third? As an unpaid contractor supporting the Department of Veterans Affairs in a role facilitated by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a fact recently revealed in a Wired piece.
One of these things is not likeand is far more controversial thanthe others.
But Lavingia, who chose not to speak to Wired but reached out to me after I drew attention to the piece, makes no excuses for his decision to join DOGEs tidal wave of on-the-fly federal contractors. He says hes able to work without pay because of Gumroads successand that he is driven by a sense of mission.
The reason I did it is, I think, the impact I can have, he explains. Lavingia says that in the private sector, technical employees can have between six and seven figures of financial impact over their lifetime. If theyre a successful startup founder like he is, maybe that number is larger. But in the government, I really believe that I can have billions of dollars of positive impact just by being technically minded.
To hear it from Lavingia, the Elon Musk-backed DOGE was a shortcut in a direction he already saw himself going. Years ago, during the Obama administration, he applied to the United States Digital Service, the predecessor organization to DOGE, only to find the hiring process arduous. While he officially works for the VA, DOGE gave him an inroad into government work that didnt force him to go through a complicated vetting process.
They just sent me to the VA, he says. They just kind of helped me find the job. Which is greatIm proud of that.
Reflecting his tongue-in-cheek stance that DOGE is a glorified temp agency for software engineers, he got in through the side entrance, offering his services to the cause of government efficiency.
Im basically taking Elon at his word, he admits.
Wait, doesnt he run a company?
Lavingias decision to moonlightnot exactly unheard of in DOGE circlesdoesnt necessarily tie to his primary gig. But he suggests that it might have inspired his recent decision to open source Gumroad. After all, it matches what hes proposing with DOGE.
I think we should open source all the code that we write, he says of his VA work. And I think that if we did that, I’m not saying people will agree with us, but at least people will see what we’re doing.
His VA side hustle comes at a time when Gumroad itself is going through some major structural changes. Last year, the company rebranded its corporate structure as Antiwork, inspired directly by a popular Reddit community of the same name. As part of its restructuring, it began putting its various apps on GitHub, including Gumroad.
(The announcement taking Gumroad open source had some odd timing, hitting on the same day as the Wired story; Lavingia claims it was unintentional and unfortunate.)In one sense, this was a positive move for tech fans who run web apps and other software on their own infrastructure. Now they have a new tool at their disposal, and Gumroad has pledged to make it easier for them to install and maintain its code in the coming months. But the launch raised questions, in part because the license wasnt purely open source. With limits on the upside for commercial enterprises, tech users were skeptical.
In response to the feedback, almost on a whim (I just kind of woke up one day, and I was like, Fuck it, lets just do the thing), Lavingia decided to move the Gumroad code base to the MIT license.
That license, which companies such as Netflix and Apple have used to support their empire building, essentially allows users to do what they want with code without any requirements or limitations on its commercial use. Unlike the equally well-known General Public License, it does not require the creation of open-source derivative works.
There are technical reasons for the licensing decision that go beyond helping a few self-hosters. Gumroad is a prominent example of a complex code base built on the Ruby on Rails framework, something Lavingia claims there are only limited examples of in the commons. From an AI standpoint, he says, this creates a knock-on effect where providers of large language models are less helpful with Rails than with competing frameworks like React.
Internally, Antiwork aims for Gumroad to get 100,000 stars on GitHub, a number he freely admits is arbitrary. But what matters is its a good proxydid we actually build something people use, fork, and get value from?
(Its currently at 5,700 stars.)
Lavingia says the timing of his work at the VA is coincidental, but it helped inspire his thinking about open sourcing. Simply put, in a climate where equipment is often purchased through a complex bidding process, federal agencies have more flexibility with open-source tooling.
He uses the example of Drupal, an open-source content-management system that is ubiquitous throughout the government and enterprise, but has a reputation among tech enthusiasts of being an older framework.
People probably in startups would not say Drupal is their first choice, but what is really good about Drupal is that its MIT, he says. Its open source, it has a lot of packages and extensions. And its probably no coincidence that the government runs on Drupal for a lot of its CMS needs instead of some commercial proprietary thing.
One could see an automation-minded coding whiz like Lavingia modernizing the VAs stack around more efficient tools. But as the security-card mechanisms in many government-procured laptops highlight, federal agencies are a different beast.
A startup lifers view of the VA
Much of what has been written about DOGEthe push to get employees into sensitive systems, the aggressive attempts at layoffs, the weekly emailshas not endeared the work to the public, and Musk recently took a step back from the endeavor.
What people have heard about DOGE, they dont like. A recent New York Times poll analysis found survey respondents favored the idea of improving government efficiency, and even the idea of DOGE, but not the way it was being done.
But hearing a first-person perspective of whats happening on the ground from Lavingia is nonetheless revealing. Hes someone who has gone from being the big fish in a tiny pond to just anotherperson in an agency that counts more than 400,000 employees on its payrollthough, as with elsewhere in the federal government, it is also seeing cuts.
Now that hes there, he says he finds himself surrounded by people who love their jobs, who came to the government with a sense of mission driving their work.
In a sense, that makes the DOGE agenda a little bit more complicated, because if half the government took [a buyout offer], then we wouldnt have to do much more, he says, implying software can replace departing employees. Wed just basically use software to plug holes. But thats not whats happening.
Lavingias skills with automation, which have helped keep Gumroad lean, are what he hopes to bring to the VA. But when it comes down to it, what hes found is a machine that largely functions, though it doesnt make decisions as fast as a startup might.
I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions, he says. But honestly, its kind of finebecause the government works. Its not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.
In contrast to DOGEs shadowy reputation, Lavingia has made a case for transparency. Based on a pledge he received from Musk during a meeting, Lavingia has been open sourcing his VA work, creating tools that can generate org charts and detect compliance with the presidents executive orders.
If you arent a fan of DOGEs work, the open-source code, while useful for transparency, probably wont make you feel any better about Lavingias work at the VA. The compliance code, for example, is effectively a Python script that hooks into OpenAI servers hosted on Microsoft Azure, detecting whether a federal agencys communication references chief diversity officers, pronouns, or WHO (World Health Organization) partnerships.
However, Lavingia makes it clear that DOGE has limits, especially thanks to the court decisions and palace intrigue that have removed much of its bite. Ultimately, he argues, it has become a way for roving engineers to get an up-close view of how government worksa McKinsey for the government, as he puts it.
I think DOGE both gets too much credit and too much blame, he says. Blame the people who actually have the authority to make the decisions. Its like when people say billionaires are evil. Im like, well, maybebut really, the people at fault would be the lawmakers, right? I dont know.
Lavingia strikes me as someone who genuinely cares about the work hes doing, but who thinks about it like a software engineer. There may be a case for startup lifers to swoop in and out of government, sharing the latest technical innovations with a complex beast in dire need of more efficiency. But the move-fast-and-break-things style may simply be too swift and damaging when essential government services are on the line.
A fork in the Gumroad?
No matter how Lavingia sees things from a day-to-day perspective, the truth is that people who feel betrayed by Gumroads association with DOGE have a new reason to go with another creator-friendly tool.
But its not the first knock against the service. Its traditional laissez-faire approach to content moderationcontroversially, the site is the digital storefront of onetime Adult Swim sketch comic Sam Hyde, notorious for his alt-right tieshas long raised eyebrows.
The companys heavy use of automation has also created problems for users concerned about customer support. Evan Hildreth, a writer and programmer, recently expressed frustration with the platforms changes, and his inability to reach a support person that wasnt an LLM. Even with the licensing changes, he felt like he could no longer trust the platform.
The changes to email and memberships really shook my confidence in the product itself, he said. (Lavingia says Gumroad is working to hire additional customer support staff.)
And more recently, the platform has started to limit not-safe-for-work content, with Lavingia suggesting to TechCrunch last year that an unnamed supplier required the stricter approach.
But even considering all that, Lavingia seemingly hadnt taken into account one key aspect of open sourcing that the MIT license could allow: the potential of folks turned off by his moonlighting gig creating their own version of Gumroad by forking the code and continuing development independently. When I pose the question, he isnt entirely opposed. He admits that the brutal form of capitalism the MIT license allows for might force Gumroad to compete a little harderor, perhaps, become more community-oriented, like WordPress.
I kind of want that, almost. I want to move on with my life, he says. If someone launches Blueroad.com, or something worse on the right? Whatever.
While Gumroada small company with outsize impact on the creator economyisnt going away, going open source nonetheless seems like something Lavingia has been preparing to do for a while.
Gumroad is now 14 years old. So maybe the analogy is, My kids going off to college, and its not my problem anymore, he says. And maybe this means Gumroad will get even weirder in the future, right?
Given the current context, its already off to a weird start.
