America Inc: Stirring Calm in a Stormy Teacup

In an environment of socio-political uncertainty, US business leaders are reassuring anxious employees through messages of empathy and solidarity.

- Abhilasha Khaitan

“Tolerance is for cowards. Being tolerant requires nothing from you but to be quiet and to not make waves, holding tightly to your views and judgments, without being challenged. Do not tolerate each other. Work hard, move into uncomfortable territory, and understand each other.” In an email to his team in October, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson had addressed the uncomfortable issue of racial tension, which has heightened over the last couple of years in several pockets of America, taking cognisance of #BlackLivesMatter, a movement started in 2013 after police shootings of unarmed African-American men.

This wasn’t about just jumping on a Twitter trend.

Stephenson is one of several business leaders to go beyond the traditional messages of profitability, revenue targets and mergers & acquisitions in group addresses in recent times.

Top-down social messaging in an uncertain climate is becoming a norm to reassure anxious employees who are anticipating negative changes in their socio-cultural environment. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the US, which while grappling with racial strife, now copes with a divided political climate.

In the few days since the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, was voted the next president of the country, several heads of companies have shown little reticence in acknowledging employee fear and insecurity triggered by the campaign rhetoric of America’s president-elect.

The other factor, of course, is that these are all global companies, catering to diverse markets, with employees—particular in the tech verticals—from varying backgrounds. Beyond humaneness, there is also commerce to be considered. Little wonder that empathy was the running theme, in the days after.