As people feel increasingly powerless, these leaders show how employee empowerment drives resilience, trust and long‑term business success.

Oh what a difference a year makes — and then, sometimes not. Last year, we opened our feature article on the importance of business leaders who empower with the following exhortation: “Amidst the current economic turmoil, uplifting and strengthening people should be the number one goal of business leaders — plus, it’s an integral element of capitalism and business done right anyway. For those who are blessed to be business leaders, it’s a watershed moment to stand up and demonstrate your thoughtful, courageous and long-term strategy for building your business by building up and protecting your people. This is your moment to shine.”

Well, this feels a lot like Groundhog Day, because the struggles, fears and need to empower not only persist but have grown. However, that also means the opportunity for business leaders to step up to the plate has grown as well.

Or, as the World Economic Forum stated in a January article this year, Why business must lead the next era of prosperity:  “In a world where abundance, scarcity, collaboration, isolation and conflict seem to pull in their own directions, the need for genuine leadership and restored trust is more important than ever.”

So, once again this year, we at the Center for Social Capital implore business leaders to resist the bottom‑feeder thinking that says to cut and run during tough times. Instead, empower all stakeholders, and you will achieve sustainable long‑term success that carries you through these difficult years for all the right reasons.

The Cacophony of Voices Supporting Empowerment Is Growing Louder

A growing number of credible leadership studies now support our own findings — and what many commonsense leaders have sensed intuitively: Empowerment is no longer a nicety. It is now a necessity for business performance and long‑term success.

The Agile Business Consortium’s Insights-Report-2025 Shaping the Future of Change identifies empowerment as one of the four essential “zones” of organizational success because, it says, “Organizations in 2025 face unprecedented disruption … Traditional change frameworks are no longer sufficient without agility.”

Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends report makes a powerful case that workforce empowerment is essential to the complete reimagining of work now underway. As Deloitte sees it, “The future is both here and unknown, making curiosity a core organizational capability … workers are not only adapting to disruption but empowered to shape it.” Deloitte even argues that empowerment is essential to the success of AI, noting, “Empowering workers to adapt and grow requires organizations to rethink their leadership and management layers … moving away from top‑down management and rigid hierarchies toward agile, networked teams.”

But empowerment is a big word with many facets — and trust is one of them. “Trust must be built to optimize productivity,” says Cisco’s Global Hybrid Work Study 2025.

Interestingly, Cisco’s report found that the trust gap is at the heart of the blowups over forced return‑to‑office mandates, casting this controversial issue in a whole other light. As Cisco reports, “There is a clear disconnect between employers and employees regarding the drivers of return‑to‑office policies, particularly around trust … This highlights a misalignment between how productivity is measured by employers and how it is experienced by employees.” Its data shows “as many as 77% of employees believe that organizations are mandating working from the office because they don’t trust all employees to be productive at home — and with 81% of employers agreeing with this, their assessment is proven right.”

Putting a nice human punctuation mark on all of this is The State of Organizations 2026 report from McKinsey & Company, which is a rousing endorsement of our Center for Social Capital’s people‑centric mantra in general — and ultimately drives the case home for empowerment specifically. As they write, “People, behavior, and culture remain central. While a variety of forces are bringing about change, including technology and the external environment, change management fundamentally is about people and behaviors. Successful change management has to be people‑first, outcome‑oriented, and evidence‑led. Leaders play a vital role. They need to be mobilized as role models who engage, empower, and inspire the workforce.”

And we have added another important component to our empowerment feature this month: the customer side and the idea that a company which is either designed to strengthen its customers or does so by the policies with which it does business will reap the rewards.

Taken together, these studies and our own exclusive reporting from the leaders that follow confirm a consensus: Empowerment is emerging as a structural lever for performance, not an idyllic soft skill. Organizations that intentionally empower employees, customers and all those they engage with through information, autonomy and AI‑augmented tools designed to help them are outperforming those that rely on control‑based models built for a bygone era. Empowerment as a leadership capability will separate organizations prepared for success now and in the future from those anchored in the profit models of the past and losing out on the profit potential of the future.

Policies of empowerment in business operations flex the tremendous power and potential of capitalism to make your business prosper by improving the lives of your employees and customers — and that goes double when times are tough.

At its heart, that is the saving grace of capitalism, which may well be what saves our nation and our world — and what gets us through what we hope is a temporary time of uncertainty and transition.

Happily, the number of leaders we are honoring for doing exactly that has grown for this feature since last year. We have added four more leaders to our roundup, along with powerful anecdotes showing how directly connecting the business model to empowerment creates real change in society while simultaneously driving tangible business success.

And, to reiterate the hope and charge we concluded with last year, despite our struggles we live in a nation founded on ideals to empower others, strengthen others and validate the value of humanity, so we are proud to highlight and applaud the following companies — and inspire others to follow suit. We ask our readers to take a good look at them, and then build on their examples as they continue to embrace the values of the Social Capital movement.

Mark Donohue, Founder & Executive Chairman at LifeGuides

Empowering Employees through Non-Clinical Mental Health

Today’s workforce is navigating a level of uncertainty and pressure that many organizations have never seen before. Employees are balancing economic stress, rapid AI adoption, and increasing expectations both at work and at home. In this environment, empowering employees is about giving them the support, connection and confidence they need to succeed as human beings, not just employees.

To me, empowerment begins with a simple but powerful idea: People perform at their best when they feel seen, supported and trusted.

At LifeGuides, we think about empowerment through the lens of human connection and the power of Non-Clinical Mental Health.

Many employees are not facing clinical mental health conditions. But they are navigating a variety of life events — normal but difficult challenges of life and work: leadership pressure, career transitions, health concerns, aging parents, financial stress and burnout. Yet the traditional mental health system is largely designed to intervene only once someone reaches a diagnosable condition or crisis point.

This creates a structural gap in the system. As I explored in a recent white paper on the emerging Non-Clinical Mental Health sector, the majority of people seeking support are not looking for diagnosis or therapy. They are looking for trusted guidance, perspective and shared lived experience as they navigate everyday life challenges.

That is the space where Non-Clinical Mental Health operates. Instead of diagnosis and treatment, it focuses on mentorship, shared experience and human-to-human guidance that helps people process challenges earlier, before they escalate.

LifeGuides was created to help fill this gap by connecting employees with experienced mentors and guides who have walked similar paths in their careers and lives. When people have access to that kind of trusted conversation, they gain clarity and confidence. They make better decisions, navigate challenges more constructively and often discover leadership potential they did not know they had.

When companies create environments where people feel safe to speak honestly and constructively, better decisions follow. Employees closest to the work often have the clearest view of where systems are breaking down or where opportunities for innovation exist.

I have seen firsthand how powerful this can be.

In one organization we worked with, an employee was struggling after her young son was diagnosed with autism. Suddenly her days were filled with specialist appointments, new terminology, and difficult decisions about therapy and schooling. She was trying to keep up at work while quietly navigating a life that had changed almost overnight.

She wasn’t in crisis, and she didn’t need clinical mental health treatment through her company’s EAP. What she needed was perspective from someone who had walked a similar path.

Through the LifeGuides platform, she was matched with a mentor who had raised a child with autism and understood the journey firsthand. That shared lived experience created an immediate sense of trust.

Their conversations were not clinical sessions. They were practical and human. They talked about navigating school meetings, managing the emotional ups and downs, and finding ways to balance caregiving with work responsibilities.

Over time, the employee said something simple but powerful changed. She no longer felt like she was carrying the experience alone. With that support, she felt calmer, more confident in her decisions as a parent, and better able to stay present with her team at work.

Stories like this remind me that empowerment is not always about professional development or leadership training. Often, it begins by supporting the human being behind the employee.

The future of work will require a broader view of how we support people. Not every challenge requires clinical care, but many require connection, perspective and trusted guidance.

When organizations create space for that kind of human support, employees feel more confident, resilient, and empowered to navigate both work and life.

And when people feel supported as whole human beings, organizations become stronger as a result.

Ed Bastian, CEO at Delta Air Lines

At Delta, the best ideas often come from our people. Over our 100-year history, we have built a culture that not only enables but encourages our employees to speak up about things that matter to them. Whether it’s doing the right thing for the customer in the moment, requesting a change to a process to improve safety or supporting a colleague in need, we find that empowering our employees to speak up means we can make the best business decisions and better serve our customers and our people.

Beyond this, empowering our employees also means providing the resources, opportunities and support they need to be successful not only in their careers but in their own lives. This is why, at Delta, we offer industry-leading benefits that focus on enhancing the total well-being of our people — which includes providing resources that support physical, social, emotional and financial wellness. Supporting our people in this way allows them to show up and do their best for our customers, communities and one another.

At Delta, we are constantly seeking employee feedback in many ways. It is one of the reasons our motto is “Keep Climbing” — because our continued commitment to better serve our customers and our people is never finished. One of my favorite employee experiences is VELVET, an event that connects our frontline people from all over the world with their colleagues and leaders. During VELVET, our most senior leaders, including myself, have the opportunity to hear direct feedback from our teams.

We also ask for employees to share their feedback through our annual Employee Engagement Survey. The results of this survey drive us to make improvements to the benefits we offer, technological investments we make and ways we support our team members’ growth. Another way we seek feedback from employees is our Flourishing Index. This wellness-focused survey — developed by researchers at Harvard University — measures the emotional, social, physical and financial well-being of our employees so we can recalibrate our benefits to best meet the needs of our people. Our holistic wellness strategy is grounded in the belief that if we take care of our employees, they will, in turn, take care of our customers and communities.

Listening to our people and giving them what they need is an important part of the Delta culture. We continuously create an environment where our people are empowered to share feedback because they know we are not only listening but are also taking action.

Tarang Amin, Chairman & CEO at e.l.f. Beauty

Some of my earliest lessons about empowerment came from working in my family’s motel. I saw firsthand that when you trust people and treat them like partners in the business, they take pride in their work and care about the business as much as you do. That sense of ownership makes all the difference.

That lesson has stayed with me. Today, empowering employees means creating an ownership mindset. At e.l.f. Beauty, every employee is a shareholder, and we operate as a High-Performance Team where accountability and collaboration go hand in hand. This creates an environment where people feel comfortable and more resilient speaking up, taking smart risks and bringing their whole selves to work.

A High-Performance Teamwork culture only works when people feel empowered and connected to the organization. We create regular open forums where people can ask questions and share ideas, from town halls and leadership Q&As to ongoing feedback loops within teams.

Just as important, we act on what we hear. When people see their input shaping decisions and put into action, it reinforces ownership and trust. We say, “One Team, One Dream,” and we mean it; accountability comes from caring about one another and the business we all own.

Vince Barsolo, CEO at Televerde

One of the most meaningful expressions of empowerment at Televerde happens during our quarterly Voices from Televerde segment, where employees share their personal journeys: why they came to Televerde, what the work has meant to them and why they choose to stay. What consistently stands out is the connection between purpose and performance. Employees speak not only about career growth, but about confidence, stability and the ripple effect the opportunity has on their families and futures. That sense of purpose is shared across the company from women working inside correctional facilities to teammates across our global organization. This reinforces that empowerment is not a concept we talk about, but something all our employees experience and carry forward.

At Televerde, empowerment starts with respect — owed respect for the humanity and potential of each person, and earned respect through the trust and accountability we build together. It’s not about ping pong tables or free lunches; those things are nice, but they don’t change lives. What changes lives is going deep — creating a culture that genuinely values every individual’s contributions and provides them with what they’ve often never had before: meaningful opportunities, clear guidance and a sense of purpose.

Because of our unique model, many of the women we work with have gone their entire lives — and particularly their time in prison — without feeling respected. When we create an environment where they are heard, supported, and trusted, it’s transformative. True empowerment means showing people that they matter, that their voice counts and that their work has real impact — every single day.

It’s not enough to ask for feedback — we have to show we’re serious about acting on it. At Televerde, that means creating multiple channels for open communication, like town halls, one-on-one check-ins and anonymous feedback tools. But beyond that, it means following through. If someone raises a concern, we address it. If someone has an idea, we consider it. When people see their input leads to real change, it strengthens trust and engagement.

For many of the women in our program, this is the first time they’ve had a platform to express themselves and be taken seriously. In the prison environment, their voices have often been disregarded or dismissed. We show them respect isn’t just a buzzword — it’s a commitment that starts at the top and flows through every level of our company. By acknowledging their ideas and acting on them, we make respect a multidirectional force that drives empowerment and, ultimately, changes lives.

 The moments that stay with me are when employees share why they chose Televerde and what the opportunity has meant in their lives. I remember one team member from our Scotland office speaking about the mental health challenges he’d faced and how difficult it had been to keep a job before coming here. Feeling accepted and supported — both professionally and personally — changed that. It strengthened his confidence, stability and even his relationship with his parents.

Our work began with creating second chances for women experiencing incarceration, but stories like this remind me that the impact of investing in people reaches far beyond any single experience. When people feel seen and supported, they grow. And that growth isn’t separate from business performance; it’s what drives it and what makes this work meaningful.

Amy Lemire, Founder of AIM Training and Consulting Inc.

If You See Something, Say Something: Building a Culture Where Employees Speak Up

Empowerment is one of the most commonly used words in business today, yet many organizations still struggle to define what it truly looks like in practice. In my experience working with organizations across industries, empowerment is not simply about giving employees authority or autonomy. True empowerment happens when people feel confident enough to speak up, share ideas and address challenges directly with one another.

Today’s employees face increasing pressure — rapid change, growing expectations and the constant need to adapt. In that environment, empowerment means creating a culture where individuals trust that their voices will be heard and that their contributions matter. Leaders play a critical role in establishing that culture. It requires modeling openness, encouraging dialogue and reinforcing that constructive feedback is not conflict — it is progress.

One organization I worked with faced a challenge that many companies experience but few openly address. Employees across departments — from sales to production to support — were hesitant to confront issues or provide feedback to one another. Problems were often noticed but rarely voiced. As a result, small concerns sometimes turned into larger inefficiencies or missed opportunities.

We introduced a simple principle inspired by a familiar message heard in airports: “If you see something, say something.” While the phrase is often associated with safety, in this context it became a reminder that every employee had both the permission and the responsibility to speak up when they noticed a challenge, an opportunity or a better way to do something.

Over time, the team began practicing this principle in meetings and daily interactions. Leaders encouraged respectful dialogue and reinforced that honest feedback was a sign of commitment to the team’s success. Gradually, employees grew more comfortable raising ideas and addressing issues directly with one another.

One moment illustrates the power of this shift. During a sales meeting, a top-performing salesperson offered a suggestion about how sales results were being shared with the team. The reports had traditionally been presented in alphabetical order, which unintentionally meant that his name often appeared last on the list despite leading the group in performance. His suggestion was simple: Present the numbers in stacked-ranked order so the entire team could clearly see performance trends and celebrate top results.

What might seem like a small operational change was actually a powerful example of empowerment in action. Because the culture had begun to shift, this employee felt comfortable offering a suggestion that improved transparency and recognition across the team. The change also sparked healthy competition and motivated others to raise their performance.

Empowerment becomes real when organizations move beyond encouraging ideas to actively listening and responding to them. When employees trust that their voices matter, they contribute more freely, collaborate more effectively and take greater ownership of outcomes.

At its core, empowering employees is about building trust and confidence — both in leadership and in one another. When people feel safe to say what they see, organizations gain access to one of their most valuable assets: the collective insight of their people.

Jeff Abella, CEO & Co-Founder at Moka Origins, and Ishan Tigunait, Co-Founder at Moka Origins

To us, empowering employees means creating an environment where people feel valued, supported and encouraged to do their best work and grow beyond it. Especially in today’s world, where uncertainty is a real challenge, empowerment has to go beyond motivation.

At Moka Origins, we’ve established a code of ethics and a culture centered around open communication and active listening. This enables our leadership team to stay closely connected to the needs of each team member and provide meaningful, personalized support. We offer flexibility in schedules; invest in professional development through training, online courses, and internal workshops; and foster an environment that prioritizes personal well-being.

Well-being at Moka includes fair compensation, generous time off, weekly leadership programs, meal support, community development initiatives and an open-door policy.

Acknowledging our team’s achievements and contributions inspires even more growth. One of our favorite initiatives is our staff travel program, where we invite a team member each year to join our procurement team on origin trips to meet the farming partners who supply our coffee and cacao. This not only honors their role but deepens their understanding of our mission and their impact.

We also practice transparency with company goals and strategy, so every team member sees how their work contributes to the bigger picture. We give employees ownership over their roles and encourage creative problem-solving rather than top-down directives.

Making sure that, at every level of the company, everyone’s voice and concerns are heard in a real and practical way starts with creating a culture of psychological safety. We talk about this openly and act on it, ensuring every team member knows it’s okay to speak up even when it’s uncomfortable. As CEO I personally hold space for daily communication through a one-on-one standup (which I call a “speed check”) and formal team check-ins, and we welcome anonymous feedback.

The most important part is follow-through. If someone shares a concern and nothing changes, trust erodes. So, we take every piece of feedback seriously, whether it’s about products, ethics, processes, workloads or leadership, and we respond thoughtfully.

That’s how we build trust, create accountability and actively shape a culture where every voice matters.

Gary Sagiv, CEO at Motion Informatics LTD

 When I think about empowering employees, I do not think about slogans or culture statements framed on a wall. For me, empowerment is something much simpler and much heavier at the same time: It is trust. Real trust. The kind where you allow people to carry weight, make decisions and live with the consequences of those decisions.

We build medical technologies for people recovering from stroke and neurological injury. What we design affects whether someone regains the ability to move a hand, stand independently or walk again. From the beginning, I have been clear about our order of priorities. First comes the patient. Second comes social responsibility and awareness of the human impact of what we build. Only after that comes money. Revenue is essential for survival, but it is not the starting point. If the first two are correct, the third follows.

Empowering our team means allowing engineers, clinicians and product leaders to feel that human responsibility. I do not want them executing tasks. I want them owning outcomes. I want them to understand that what they are building has consequences beyond a quarterly report.

In practice, this means transparency about everything. Our regulatory challenges, our financial constraints, our risks and our long-term vision are shared openly. It also means that anyone can challenge a decision, including mine, if they believe it protects the patient or improves the therapy. And when someone leads a project, they truly lead it. They experience the pressure, the pride and the accountability.

Empowerment without accountability is comfort. Accountability without trust is fear. The balance between the two is where growth happens.

Regarding stakeholders, I try to keep something very clear in my mind: Listening only matters if it changes behavior. Otherwise, it is performance.

Our internal policy is built on social interaction. Real conversations. Engineers sitting with therapists. Developers observing patients. Management listening without interrupting. Social interaction is not a soft value in our company. It is operational. It drives product changes, clinical improvements and strategic direction.

For employees, we maintain open technical and clinical reviews where hierarchy does not decide outcomes. Data and reasoning do. For therapists and clinical partners, we integrate structured feedback loops into development. For distributors and investors, we share real numbers and real performance, even when they are uncomfortable. For patients, we measure functional improvement, not engagement metrics. If movement is not improving, we consider it our responsibility to fix it.

One moment stays with me.

In early clinical use, a young stroke patient became visibly frustrated during a session. He could see his muscle signals on the screen, but the actual movement was minimal. One of our engineers sat beside him for a long time. Not to defend the system and not to immediately adjust parameters, but to understand what it felt like from his side.

That conversation changed us.

We realized that our threshold algorithm was technically correct but emotionally unforgiving. It did not adapt enough to fatigue and small improvements. We redesigned it to become dynamically responsive in real time, adjusting thresholds based on performance so patients could experience progress without losing challenge.

Session completion improved. Adherence improved. Functional gains accelerated. But more importantly, frustration decreased.

That change did not come from a boardroom decision. It came from social interaction. From listening. From caring enough to sit next to someone and understand their experience.

For me, empowerment is when an engineer feels responsible for a patient’s recovery. When a clinician feels safe challenging our algorithms. When someone in the company knows that the first question we ask is not “How much will this make/” but “Will this truly help?”

Culture is not something we declare. It is something we live quietly, every day.

Richard Sheridan, CEO & Co-Founder at Menlo Innovations

While each time period in the last few decades presents unique challenges, I think some constants exist within “empowerment.”

In our work system, we provide very high clarity on what needs to be done and then allow people to pursue the “how” in work that they love. Giving this “how” autonomy is very empowering and would score very low on micromanagement. We create a clear system that identifies the top priorities for the day and the week. The amount of time needed for the tasks is determined by the people doing the work.

While many elements of our structured process give voice to all stakeholders — employees, customers, shareholders and the community — the cornerstone practice is a weekly Show & Tell with our clients. For every project, we hold a weekly Show & Tell event where the entire stakeholder group reviews the completed work and assesses how well it meets expectations. This very real conversation reconnects our team with the client paying us and reconnects our clients with the work product.

We have a specific accepted tradition that people who leave us have an opportunity to return someday, and from this comes an experience that validates our approach to empowerment: A few years ago, one of our team members left to join a very large employer. A couple of years later, he asked if we would consider him rejoining our team. We said yes. I asked him why he came back and he said, “I accomplish more here in two weeks than I did in the entire two years I was away.”

Keith Wakeman, CEO at SuperBetter

I have led the development and launch of over $1 billion in new products and consistently find that empowered teams create innovations that are bigger and more impactful. Here’s a recent example: SuperBetter Classroom equips K12 schools and colleges to proactively improve student mental health, resilience and academic performance. We recently received a grant from the State of Illinois to expand SuperBetter Classroom through an R&D partnership with Northern Illinois University. By empowering NIU’s team of educators, curriculum-writers and public health experts to contribute to the product strategy (and not just implementation), the project will now address much larger education industry needs and create significantly more impact.

The new SuperBetter Classroom products include a Teacher Wellbeing Program to reduce burnout and improve retention, and a Classroom Toolkit that can be used by teachers across all subjects to help students overcome learning barriers associated with mental health struggles.

Ensuring everyone’s voice is heard in a real and practical way requires fostering a safe and supportive culture and providing simple, clear pathways to request and share feedback. The culture must permeate the organization and be reinforced with leaders’ everyday language and actions. Perceived social risk, or fear of negative consequences to one’s career, will cause employees to hold back from sharing their concerns. Some employees may lack skills and will benefit from training and modeling to build their confidence to voice feedback. Adopting a shared language and beliefs across the organization can be a successful strategy to foster a safe and supportive culture that promotes resilience, thriving and open communication.

Everyone has heroic potential. Empowering employees unlocks their powers as individuals and teams. It means collaborating with employees to develop their strengths, foster a supportive culture, promote resilience and well-being, and reduce obstacles that inhibit success. Empowerment provides needed resources, environments, skills and clarity. It connects to intrinsic motivations for autonomy, mastery, purpose and social cohesion to promote job satisfaction and work quality.

The No. 1 urgent need in employee empowerment today is cognitive resilience. Mainstream adoption of technology over the past dozen years has dramatically changed the world in which our employees and their families live. Today, the human mind is under attack. The current rapid growth of AI technologies will accelerate the frequency and intensity of these attacks. When employee resilience is low, it negatively impacts the organization as a whole and key functions that include learning and development, employee well-being and cybersecurity. It lowers employee productivity, agility, adaptability and creative problem solving. It increases stress, burnout, difficulty sleeping, anxiety, depression and other mental health struggles. In cybersecurity, up to 88% of breaches are already caused by human error, and low cognitive resilience further increases risks of human vulnerabilities.

Building cognitive resilience starts with empowering employees with an understanding of how their brains work and how technology is weaponized to activate regions of their brains in ways that are at odds with their beliefs, values, goals, well-being and mental health. Then it goes a step further to teach and reinforce a sustainable resilience mindset. The good news is that resilience mindsets can be taught. SuperBetter is an example of an easy-to-teach resilience mindset. It’s backed by five published clinical and randomized controlled trials by Harvard, Penn and others showing its benefits for significantly reducing anxiety and depression and improving resilience and self-efficacy.