How To Be an Optimist Without Being a Fool
Problem
Recently my colleague Andrew’s niece and nephew, both residents in a Boston hospital, shared a photo taken at night in the hospital’s cafeteria. They look exhausted. And they are smiling. They love what they are going through.
Why? Is it a feeling of accomplishment? A feeling that what they are doing matters? You would have to ask them. What is clear is that they feel their exhaustion is worth it. The look on their faces says, “I want this life.” They are optimists, despite everything.
Technology disruption, social upheaval, geopolitical tension, job displacement — in an era when so many dark things are happening at once, is it possible to cultivate optimism without being a fool? Can leaders create a culture that gives teams the feeling that their work matters? That they matter?
Diagnosis
In the past two months, we have had multiple layoff announcements from leaders at companies telling employees that technology is coming for their jobs, sooner or later. Consistently missing is any idea of why employees should get behind this prospect. The emphasis instead is on why shareholders should be delighted.
Most of the people leading great companies in 2026 were trained to place the delivery of stakeholder value above anything. This value is reinforced by linking executive compensation to long-term shareholder returns. When a trade-off between returns and employees must be made, returns win.
That model is not sufficient for this moment.
CEOs, of course, wish to persuade shareholders of their tough-mindedness. They might instead be revealing helplessness disguised as realism — not a trait we associate with leadership.
Standard Chartered chief Bill Winters recently created headlines when he described the bank’s layoff of thousands of people as a replacement of “lower-value human capital” with artificial intelligence. Without meaning it Microsoft CEO Satyah Nadella sent a similar message when he remarked that Microsoft’s headcount is a “massive disadvantage” to profitability.
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What message did Winter or Nadella send to people across their organizations, who presumably feel committed to their employer and its goals? Or did, anyway, before being labeled a disadvantage.
Compare that to the leadership ethos taught in military academies, which is often called the “servant-leader model.” Religious leaders are also servant leaders. Like military officers, they train to demonstrate care for their people even in hard times. Failing to do so is considered a grievous thing.
Prescription
A scan of current business school curricula reveals that the pedagogy is shifting from shareholder primacy to a more sophisticated focus on creating sustainable value. Other stakeholders, employees included, are understood to matter in growing value over time.
Meta, for example, is acquiring this perspective the hard way.
Meta leaned hard into mass layoffs and restructuring, making it clear that its goal is replacing human assets with digital ones. Now it finds morale — and its share price — stuck in low gear. Chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth recently said morale, especially among long-time employees, is “probably the worst it’s ever been.” Meta is responding by increasing budgets for travel and snacks.
In tough moments, the message from good leaders is one that tells the team they matter, that there is a way out of a bad spot that can get all of us to a brighter place. This is not just about “faking it until you make it” — although that may certainly be part of promoting the positivity that makes the positive real in the world.
Instead of disincentivizing teams with a message of “look out for yourself,” leaders should be clear that everyone matters. A big part of how this is done is by appealing to our need to be wired to one another in our jobs, which is another way of saying shared commitment to a mission. A sense of mission animates us. It gives us membership in a community. It gives us context for understanding where we are going and motivation for getting there.
People always move toward the light. They gravitate to leaders with conviction about the way ahead. The conversation about how to demonstrate that conviction is already happening at places like Raise Us, which has raised $500 million in funding from giants like OpenAI, Anthropic and Bank of America to take state-based approaches not just to retraining but to reimagining the social contract between employee and employer.
Other times before our own felt unprecedented and just as dark. The lesson they teach is that there is no way ahead without optimistic leadership.
The challenge lies in being a realist who can encourage the conviction that tough times can be managed and that the future has a place for all of us.
Kevin McDermott is the founder of Collective Intelligence in New York. He is also a partner in the scenario-planning firm Futures Strategy Group. His most recent book is Paragraph 3: Conversations About Prepared Leadership in the Age of Perpetual Uncertainty.
This essay is written in collaboration with Andrew Green is a Managing Director with Securieon, a M&A advisory firm, and a Vistage Chair leading a CEO peer advisory group in San Francisco.
