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Being seen is a fundamental human need. We all can recall a moment when we truly felt “seen” by someone for who we are, and how good and empowering it made us feel. When this happens, it deepens our sense of belonging and makes us more connected to our work, and to others. And today, with so much of our attention being scattered and superficial, being truly seen is as surprising as it is refreshing. Research supports this: a sense of social belonging is one of the strongest predictors of engagement and performance at work. According to Deloittes Global Human Capital Trends report, 79% of organizations say that creating a sense of belonging is important or very important for their success. However, only a small percentage feel equipped to make it happen. This needs to change, now. Because when people feel seen, they feel validated, appreciated, and engaged. And thats where leadership truly begins. According to Nina Bressler, Global Head of Service Academy at Hitachi Energy, Every time we see someone fully, not just their role but in their humanity, we have the experience of learning and growing together. People lean in, share what they know, and risk showing what they dont. In that mutual recognition, performance becomes a natural outcome of belonging. A Personal Story: The Power of Sawabona In the Zulu language, theres a greeting I love that captures this sense of belonging. Its Sawabona. It means I see you, but it’s much deeper than that. Its not just an acknowledgment or a greeting; its an affirmation of someones existence and humanity. The response to Sawabona is just as powerful: Ngikhona, which means I am here. This exchange conveys mutual respect, and sets the tone for meaningful connection and authentic interaction. For years, I sat on a leadership advisory board within the intelligence community, made up of accomplished experts across a variety of fields. We always sat at the boardroom table, putting our heads together to urgently tackle the high-stakes issues that needed our input. The pressure to perform was always stressful, and the environment felt as intimidating as it was inspiring. But one day, the mood changed. The chairwoman of our board, Renee, began our meeting with Sawabona, she said. This was definitely different from the typical call to order and reading of the agenda, and people were seemingly caught off guard. We all then said the response: Ngikhona, I am here. And immediately, people smiled. Not just because it was a little awkward, but because it was so human. This exchange set the tone for the entire meeting. It was a kind acknowledgment of each persons presence, and importance. That single act of recognition created an atmosphere where we could show up genuinely and engage deeply, not just as experts but as humans with unique experiences, values, and stories. Why Sawabona Matters for Your Team At work, we forget the power of seeing each other fully. I know Im guilty of this, because I get, well, busy. We all focus on tasks, deadlines, and outcomes, but better outcomes happen when people feel seen as themselves. Research from BetterUp found that when employees experience a strong sense of belonging, organizations see: 75% fewer sick days 56% improved job performance 50% lower turnover risk These kinds of results are worth the risk of an awkward moment, in my opinion, no? Sawabona is rooted in the African philosophy of Ubuntu, which emphasizes both interconnectedness and mutual care. I am because we are speaks to the understanding that our individual worth is shaped by our connection to others. When we see each other, we strengthen the bonds that foster collaboration, innovation, and shared purpose. If you want your team to thrive, fostering a sense of Sawabona is key. Leaders who do this are recognizing people for who they are, not just what they produce. When you honor someones existence and humanity, you unlock their potential. How to Bring Sawabona to Work Incorporating Sawabona into your team culture isnt about using the phrase as a token gesture. Its about showing everyone mutual respect and authentic connection, even in small ways. Heres how to start: Show Up Fully Sawabona means showing up, not just physically, but emotionally and mentally. That means you dont just show up and sit in the room; be engaged. When people feel their presence is valued, theyre more likely to show up as their best selves. Practice Active Listening The foundation of Sawabona is truly listening. So, be attentive, ask thoughtful questions, and seem understanding. Celebrate Individuality Everyone on your team is unique. Their perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds shape what they bring to the table. Take time to acknowledge what makes each person special. Let that perspective add to new ideas and solutions. Create Space to Share People need to feel safe to express themselves. Create an environment where your team can give ideas, voice concerns, and add to the conversation without fear of judgment or rejection. The Radical Power of Being Seen The act of being seen is alarmingly radical in a world that frequently treats people as a means to an end. Sawabona rejects the transactional nature of work to focus on a deeper, more authentic human connection. Because people arent just cogs in a machine. Theyre individuals with worth, complexity, and unique contributions. As a leader, its your responsibility to create an environment of support, because your success depends on it. Sawabona is a practice that says, I see you for who you are, and I value your presence. Next time you gather your team, start by greeting them with Sawabona, and watch how it transforms the way you work, collaborate, and connect. SEO Tags: Sawabona, Ubuntu leadership, team engagement, mutual respect, leadership culture, active listening, team empowerment, empathy at work, authentic leadership.
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Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Companys Plugged In. On March 9, Jay Graber stepped down as CEO of Bluesky. She will become the social networking platforms chief innovation officer, while Toni Schneider, a venture capitalist and former CEO of WordPress parent company Automattic, joins Bluesky as interim CEO. (I may be the last person left who also associates Schneider with Oddpost, an impressive browser-based email client he co-created way back before Gmail existed.) Graber explained her decision as stemming in part from a desire to turn the CEO role over to someone who can help scale up the platform. From November 2024 to January 2025, as Elon Musks role in Donald Trumps reelection prompted many Twitter users (including me) to hatch exit strategies, Bluesky added 10 million users. That turned out to be the peak of the networks boom, at least so far; 10 million users is also how many its added in the past 12 months. Its still growing, but not at the torrid pace that will get it to hundreds of millions of people anytime soon. If I had invested in Blueskywhich Schneiders venture firm, True Ventures, hasId want to see it grow far larger. As an individual user, however, I find it quite pleasant at its current size. Maybe even cozy, in a way Twitter had stopped being long before Musk trashed it. (I also enjoy the even tinier Mastodon.) Should Bluesky ever get ginormous, I hope it manages to retain the intimacy that it kindles today. But Im less curious about the future of Bluesky the social network than I am about the technology behind it. Called AT Protocol, its responsible for organizing all those users and posts so that the right people see the right stuff at the right time. And unlike the comparable infrastructure in place at behemoths such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, its open. Anyone can create their own social network based upon AT Protocol, or remix an existing one (such as Bluesky) by tweaking its algorithm or other attributes. Users can preserve their personal social graphs even if they use several otherwise distinct networks based on the protocol. When I first talked to Graber in December 2023, Bluesky wasnt yet fully open to the public, and had just 2.3 million members. She seemed as excited about AT Protocol as Bluesky itself, and told me she saw it as a potential antidote to social-media toxicity, moderation problems, and general user dissatisfaction with how the people who operate social networks do their jobs. If you didnt like Bluesky as Graber managed it, you could switch to a version of the service powered by a different algorithm, or a wholly independent social network running AT Protocol. You wouldnt even have to do so much as create a user account. From both a technological and cultural standpoint, thats a way more grandiose goal than simply building a social network thats bigger and better than Twitter. As someone who loved Twitter until I didnt, I found it immensely appealing. Who wouldnt want more control over their social presence? But a little over two years later, it remains a vision more than reality. Indeed, Bluesky has a festering reputation in some quarters as an obnoxious liberal bubble unwelcoming of other perspectives, which might not be a problem if people were remastering the network or creating new alternatives based on its technology. AT Protocol was hardly dead on arrival. There are hundreds of applications that use it, from Instagram and TikTok alternatives to a stock portfolio tracker to an app that puts Bluesky on your Apple Watch. Many are intriguing in their own right. But most are satellites revolving around Bluesky and its community, which was not the original idea. Even when I spoke to Graber in 2023, the possibility of an open social protocol changing everything was not exactly new. Mastodon, which turns 10 on March 16, is powered by ActivityPub, a standard with goals similar to AT Protocol. Meta incorporated a measure of ActivityPub support into Threads (kinda, sorta)and its not clear how invested the company is in going further. Even more to the point, Twitter cofounder and former CEO Jack Dorsey has long said that he regrets that Twitter ever became a company. Instead, he contends, it should have been an open protocol all along. Toward the end of his time there, he channeled that belief into incubating two such protocols. One became Bluesky; the other is the lesser-known Nostr, whose homepage cheerfully acknowledges the challenge it faces with the tagline An open social protocol with a chance of working. I wish the best for everyone behind AT Protocol, ActivityPub, and Nostr, but I cant help but wonder if the failure of the relatively small number of people interested in this stuff to coalesce around one protocol helps explain why progress has been so slow. (As computer scientist Andrew S. Tanenbaum waggishly put it in the 1980s, The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.) Its as if the companies that made browsers had never agreed on the shared technological underpinnings that let us use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or any of innumerable other options to explore the same World Wide Web. For now, I am attempting to stay active on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, though its hardly a cakewalk. Openvibe, the app I used to post to all three, has become so unreliable lately that Ive mostly given up on it. Flipboard CEO Mike McCue tells me that he wants to add crossposting to Surfa wildly ambitious app, still in closed beta, that weaves ogether the entire internet into user-curated feedsbut is still figuring out how to do it well. The only long-term solution involves all of these networksplus Twitter, Facebook, and many others yet to be bornsettling on a protocol so universal that they all just work together, without 99.9% of us needing to stop and wonder why. Im realistic about the daunting odds of this happening, but I havent given up. And I hope that Bluesky wont eitherregardless of where it goes under new management. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on fastcompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company MacBook Neo review: niceness on a budgetApple’s long-awaited laptop is even cheaper than the pundits expected, and still feels like a Mac. Read More Phoenix has lived with Waymos longer than any U.S. city. Here’s what its mayor learnedMayor Kate Gallego talks about working with Waymo, redesigning cities for autonomous vehicles, and why robotaxis may reshape everything from parking to public transit. Read More GoFundMe launches AI fundraising coach to help people raise more moneyThe new tool drafts campaign messages, suggests titles and photos, and guides users on how to share their fundraiser. Read More This new foldable phone may have upstaged Apple in the ‘zero-crease’ warOppo’s Find N6 isn’t fully creaseless, but it’s close. Read More OpenAI’s delayed ‘adult mode’ underscores the challenges of age-gating AIA lot is riding on OpenAI’s ability to separate older ChatGPT users from younger ones. Read More The uncomfortable valley: Microsoft Teams emoji faces have got to goThey don’t make the digital workplace more casual. They make it uncomfortably weird. Read More
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As of yesterday, March 12, hundreds of thousands of innovators, disruptors, and leaders began descending on Austin for SXSW. If you search “Tech and AI” in this years schedule, youll find 185 results. Thats more than double the 80 AI sessions in 2024, the same year I wrote a Fast Company op-ed about how women have spent decades building the intellectual foundation of AI while receiving almost none of the credit. It was also the year that companies with at least one female founder raised $38.8 billion in venture capital funding which is a 27 percent increase from the year prior, but still not close to the high point in 2021 with a raise of $62.5 billion. Two years later and the gapboth in acknowledgement and investor fundinghasnt closed. However, something else is happening and its worth paying attention to. There is a new wave of women who refuse to wait for the AI industry to become “fair” and “equal.” They are building their own companies, on their own terms, with a more authentic and purpose-driven design mentality. Its not general-purpose AI; its gender-purpose AI. An important distinction Before you roll your eyes, the distinction matters more than you might think. By 2030which is now only four years awayAI wont just enhance companies’ business models. According to IBM, it will be the business model. Right now, that business model is being built unsurprisingly by male-dominated teams for general audiences. The truth is technologyas an industry and a conceptwas never built for women. It was not built to prioritize or accommodate our visions. But that is changing. A new class of female leaders in AI is disrupting this model and demanding more room for gender-purpose AI and less patience for the influx of male-dominated teams building general-purpose tools. This is the year we move beyond celebrating their presence and start backing their vision with real investment. One of those women is Rana el Kaliouby, co-founder and general partner of Blue Tulip Ventures, who will deliver a keynote at this years conference titled “Why the Future of AI Must Be Human Centric.” She has spent more than two decades humanizing technology. As co-founder of Affectiva, she pioneered the field of Emotion AI, which reads human feeling through facial expression and vocal cues, and now as co-founder and general partner of Blue Tulip Ventures, she literally puts her money where her mission is and invests in early-stage startups building ethical AI that is good for people. The word “good” is subjective. But for too long, its been defined by the people building the problem, not solving it. The problem is also being solved by women like Valerie Chapman, CEO and co-founder of Ruth AI, an AI-powered career advancement platform. Last month, Valerie asked Sam Altman at an OpenAI builder town hall how AI can be used to fix the $1.6 trillion gender wage gap. His response was that AI should be an equalizing force in society and like Valerie pointed out in her recent op-ed, when AI is designed with intention, it can close the gap and its time to build it. What’s next As a fellow female founder helping brands understand and utilize AIas a topic and technologyin their comms strategies, heres what this shift tells me about where we are headed in 2026. 1. Male tech leaders want AGI. Female tech leaders want gender-purpose AI. The second is more inclusive. When women build AI, they tend to ask different questions in the design and development stage. Questions like who is this actually for and who will benefit from these capabilities? The truth is artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is at least 10 years away and the race toward the “holy grail,” as Big Tech has coined it, should not hold as much power and influence as it does. Gender-purpose AI is a race toward something more rewarding and meaningful: relevance. What a conceptthat we could have more technology that works for the people it claims to serve. 2. The gender wage gap will not close with more women working in tech. It will close when more women are building tech. Representation matters every month, not just during Black History Month, Womens History Month, or International Womens Day. Women deserve representation in the very tools and technologies they depend on. With almost 78 million women in the American workforce, this is a demographic that has earned our time, attention and investment. 3. Investment in gender-purpose AI means nothing without investing in the women who will build tomorrows innovations The increase in female founded and funded VC companies is a great step in the right direction. But the progress pipeline matters just as much if not more. We need more mentorship programs, technical education, access to capital for first-time female founders who have the vision but not a seat at the Big Tech table. To ensure we double down on gender-purpose AI as an industry, we have to prioritize and support the women who want to build what comes next. 4. The milestones for women in AI arent just on stage. They are in hallways and in boardrooms. When women lead AI companies, th product looks different. Canadian computer scientist Joy Buolamwini pioneered Gender Shades in 2018, which piloted an intersectional approach to inclusive product testing for AI and exposed racial and gender bias in Microsofts, IBMs, and Amazons facial recognition systems and insisted they change. Rana built technology that reads human emotion because she believed machines should understand people, not just process them. These are real-world use cases that prove that whoever builds the technology determines what the technology does and who it serves. In 2026, women wont be waiting for “the next big thing” because they will be the ones behind it. They will be the ones building the technology that addresses what male leaders have not addressed: equity, inclusion, and a redefinition of “good” that finally reflects what 51% of the world wants, needs and deserves. Its time the other 49% joined us.
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