Embracing A Heart-Based Leadership With Mark Crowley

If you want your team to achieve optimal performance, you need to go beyond logic and speak to their hearts. Tony Martignetti is joined by bestselling author and global speaker Mark Crowley, who talks about the invaluable impact of heart-based leadership. He explains how he explored science-based data to emphasize how leaders should take care of their team’s well-being to unlock better productivity and dynamics. Mark also discusses why it is essential to include real-life experiences when writing books and how to turn your biggest challenges into your most powerful motivations.

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Listen to the podcast here

Embracing A Heart-Based Leadership With Mark Crowley

It is my honor to introduce my guest, Mark Crowley. Mark is the author of the groundbreaking book, Lead From the Heart, which is taught in eleven American universities, and his brand-new book, The Power of Employee Well-Being, which boldly argues that it is time to move beyond employee engagement and focus on something much more important. Research indicates that engagement worldwide has remained stagnant for over a decade. It’s crazy. New, compelling Oxford research shows a direct correlation between employee well-being in teams and organizational performance.

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It’s truly a pleasure to welcome you to the show, Mark.

Thank you so very much. I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Me, too. I’ve admired your work from all your books that you’ve written so far. They’ve all had a big impact on me. I’m thrilled to be able to share your story and unwind how you get to be doing all this amazing work. This topic that you are diving into is so wonderful. We’re going to have a good time. Before we get started, I wanted to share how we navigate on the show. We talk about what’s called flashpoints. Flashpoints are the moments in your life that have ignited your gifts into the world. You can share what you’re called to share, and along the way, we’ll look at the themes that are showing up. In a moment, I’ll turn it over to you. Are you ready?

I’m ready.

Awesome. Take it away.

Talking Straight To The Heart

Honestly, I could give you the whole journey because I realized that the whole sequence of why we’re even talking connects to my early childhood and all the way through to now. What I’ll try to do is encapsulate it as efficiently as I can. What I’m going to try to do is tell you my life story in the next three minutes. My mom died when I was young. No one told me she was dying. It was a major shock.

From that point forward, I was raised by my father. He is a very successful business guy, but an ineffective and destructive human being who psychologically and emotionally abused me for the rest of my childhood. He pretty much crippled my self-esteem and then kicked me out of the house right after I graduated from high school.

He was a wealthy guy. He could have paid my tuition. He could have given me the first and last month’s rent. He could have put food in the cupboard. There was none of that. I never went back for Christmas, and I never went back for a birthday. It was over. I had a real struggle to try to figure out how I was going to survive. I was working ten hours a week, thinking I was getting ready to go to college, and had the rug pulled out from under me.

It took me six years to graduate. I ended up pretty much getting myself stable. The first couple of years were brutal. When I finally got to the point of graduating, I graduated from a top university, which is one of the top ten public schools in the country. While I didn’t do well at the beginning, I did very well at the end. I started to see people who were graduating. They were going off to graduate schools and law schools, and I was feeling like, “Thank God I got through this.” I didn’t even believe that I had accomplished it.

I started thinking, “What is it about these people that made them so confident to go off to Harvard Business School? Nobody is going to want me. I don’t deserve to go to any of these great schools or even apply to them.” I realized what should be obvious. They had caring people in their lives. They had people who loved them, supported them, encouraged them, propped them back up when they weren’t doing well, or approved of them when they got a good paper, and all those kinds of things. Also, they had a place to go home to. If you went away to school and you came home for a holiday, you knew Mom was going to cook something for you. There was that love, and I didn’t have any of that.

When I started managing people out of college, I unconsciously decided to give people what I always believed would’ve made me infinitely more successful at that point in my life. I did it unconsciously until I was 43 years old, and I kept getting promoted. My teams did phenomenally well. I cared about them. I made them feel safe. I taught them everything that I knew. I wanted to grow them. I encouraged them. I loved these people while also setting very high expectations for being seen as a great leader. No one was looking under the hood to see what I was doing. They were like, “Give that guy more responsibility because he is good at this.”

One day, a woman who’d worked for me for 20 of my 43 years walked into my office and very aggressively said to me, “You realize you manage people very differently than everyone around you.” I’m like, “Calm down. What are you talking about?” She started to give me an illustration of the things that I did that were clear to me that my peers weren’t doing. They were managing with command, control, fear, and intimidation. They were like, “If you don’t get this done, bad things are going to happen to you,” and that kind of stuff. Whereas I’m coming at it with, “We’re going to hit our goals. I know we are. I believe in you. I’ve taught you everything I know. You’re supported. You’ve got everything you need. We’re going to nail this,” and we did.

She started to give me these examples, and my consciousness was finally open to the fact that I did this all in response to my childhood and the whole way that I’ve been raised. What that taught me was that what I was doing was not only uncommon, but it had a profound impact on people. What that ended up leading me to was a 25-year career. I was named Leader of the Year for a business that I still have no business running. They said, “He is a good leader. Give it to him.”

When I left that and started to write a book, somebody challenged me. It was a friend of mine who I used to work with. He goes, “You know you’re going to have to explain what you’re writing about, the practices that you’re talking about, and why they would work for anyone else, because otherwise, people are going to think that they need a shitty childhood in order to lead this way.” I was sitting in the same place that I am right now and was like, “I never even realized. I thought people would take me at my word.”

To complete the story, I spent over a year researching, trying to look to see if there was validation for what I thought I was doing to people. What I thought I was doing to people was affecting them so deeply in their hearts that this is why they were motivated to scale mountains for me. It didn’t matter whether they were a man or a woman. Their age didn’t matter. It didn’t matter what job they were doing. Everywhere I went, it had the same impact on people.

I found science that confirmed that the heart and mind are entwined, that they’re communicating to each other all the time, and that we’ve been ignoring the heart in leadership. We think everything has to be rational. What I’m saying is that if you affect people emotionally, you’re affecting them in their hearts. Their hearts are communicating to the brain on how to act. When people feel supported and they have all the experiences that I gave them, it turns out that I’m setting them up for optimal performance. That’s what science has concluded. That’s what gave me the courage to call the book Lead from the Heart.

The next step of this is that there’s science that simply says, “Ask people how they’re feeling and respond to that. That’s all you need to do.” We don’t need twelve questions twice a year that no one pays attention to and no one’s accountable for. Regularly ask people, “How are you feeling about the culture? How are you feeling about the support you’re getting from your manager? How are you feeling about the growth that you’re experiencing in your job?” You do it with five quick counts, like, “five, four, three, two, one,” a bright green emoji, which indicates, “I’m happy as can be,” or a bright red that indicates, “I’m angry as can be.”

There’s Oxford’s research. I went there and talked to the economist who had done it. He is a professor there. He has shown that if people are generally in the green, feeling positive emotions regularly, even though the work is hard, you’re going to see productivity and all the key metrics that are important to you go up. When people are feeling the orange and the red, you’re going to see a decline. It’s like a natural progression of everything. I hope I didn’t take any more than 4 or 5 minutes to tell the whole story. That’s the fastest I’ve ever done it. I want to go, “You can do that.”

That was mind-blowing. There was so much you packed into that. You made it sound simple, and in theory, it is. It is that simple, but you know it’s not easy to apply. People have a hard time getting their head wrapped around this because of the fact that we’ve done it in such a different way for so long. It’s been so ingrained, like, “If we want to increase employee engagement, we need to do X, Y, and Z. We need to put all these perks in place and do all these things.” The reality is, how often are you speaking to the heart? How are you communicating?

I’m glad that you shared the early origin stories of where you came from. Oftentimes, we go and try to replace the things that we most miss. When we don’t feel that connection to people who see, care, and give us the compassion that we need, we find ways to almost give it even more to others. In return, we start to feel that more impactfully. In many ways, there’s no surprise that you were the person who started to give that because it was almost a void. I’m not trying to psychoanalyze you. I’m reflecting on what I heard. It was a sense that you were missing an element, so you decided to give it more fully to others.

I’ve had a lot of discussions around this because it’s the preface of Lead from the Heart. People have heard the story. I tell more of the story when I speak, so I’ve had a lot of interaction with people. The common reaction, and I know this to be true, is that most people who have the upbringing I have turn on people. They want to give people the same crappy experience because that’s what they know. It was like, “I didn’t get it. You didn’t get it.”

The unconscious part is what I find so interesting. There was something guiding me, but not telling me. It’s like, “We’re going to take over the steering wheel for the next twenty years of your life and let you manage to have this experience, and then we’ll give you the wheel back with the knowledge that this is what you were doing all along.”

The reason that I did it for all those years wasn’t that I was getting promoted and getting bigger jobs. It was because of the satisfaction that I was getting in seeing people grow under my leadership and accomplish that was healing. It was massively healing. A part of my consciousness was going, “If only you had gotten that.” It was a massive validation, but I had no knowledge of it. It was so amazing that this woman would say this so late. Forty-three isn’t old, but it’s long enough into a career to not be fully aware of what you were doing. After that, I paid close attention to what I was doing, refined it, and figured out exactly what the practices were that would inspire people to perform like that.

I love how you doubled down on the idea, like, “There’s got to be some science behind this. There’s got to be some way.”

Do you want to hear the truth?

Yeah.

Discovering The Science Behind Heart-Based Leadership

I would love to hear the things that have happened to me, but there have been so many synchronistic interventions. The guy that I told you about, his name was Doug Jackson. We’re having a conversation. He goes, “How’s the book going?” I’ve worked with him for many years. He was following what I was doing. I go, “I’m about to write it.” He goes, “You are going to explain how this works, right?” I go, “What do you mean?” He said, “The crappy childhood thing.” I realized, like, “Okay.” His final sentence to me was, “You need to figure out what it was you were doing that motivated people to perform like that so consistently.”

I’m looking out my window one day. I’m trying to answer that question. I did not know the answer, but I knew he was right. One day, it hit me. I was affecting the hearts of people. That initial was euphoric. The idea that I could have been affecting people that deeply with the way that I was managing people and they were thriving and doing great work was like, “Wow.”

Almost instantaneously, I turned on myself and was like, “I am so screwed because the people that I used to work with are going to hear Lead from the Heart, and they’re going to go, ‘What the heck happened to him?’” No one ever looked to see what I was doing. People who worked for me figured it out, but even then, they weren’t aware because you’re in the business setting all the time.

What it came down to was that I was terrified that people were going to go, “Did he have a mental breakdown? Did he have a religious conversion? This isn’t the guy we knew.” We all know you don’t bring heart into leadership. I, at the end of the day, told my wife, “I’ve wasted ten months of my life thinking about this book and planning out this book.” She said, “Don’t you already know it’s true?” I go, “What do you mean?” She goes, “Don’t you already know it’s true? You’ve already had the experience of your entire career. You know it’s true. Go out there and find something.” Had it not been for her pushing back, I may have put my resume back out there and said, “That didn’t work.”

I then go out and spend over a year looking. Everything that I found was massively confirming. The heart sciences, no one was talking about this years ago when I wrote the book. Now, people are beginning to say, “That’s impressive science.” We were all resistant to it for the very reason that you said a minute ago. We’ve been managing people so badly for so long, but that’s the way we’ve always believed we’re supposed to do it. When you introduce a new idea, the first reaction is, “That’s crap. We’re not doing that.” You have to hear it a bunch of times before they go, “What’d you say again?” It has taken over a decade for, “What’d you say again?” to sink in more generically.

We have been managing people badly for so long that when a new idea is introduced, our first reaction is to refuse it.

There’s something about the way you wrote this book, too. It’s the way the best books are written. It’s coming in with a thesis as opposed to an answer. Would you agree?

Tell me more about what you mean.

Sometimes, it’s like, “I have this book idea, but I don’t necessarily know the answer to what the book’s going to get to.” In the exploration, you start to uncover what the true answer is. That’s what makes the book interesting. It’s because you uncover the truth through the writing process.

Correct.

Why Authors Should Relive Their Experiences

That’s going to be something we’ll explore a bit when we talk about your next book, which I am looking forward to diving into, but not yet. I want to hear more about your journey and if there’s another flashpoint that you would like to dive into of when you got into this work and started to do more and more exploration about your leadership style and what made an impact.

This is a stream of consciousness. It’s whatever comes. You remember my father’s influence. Despite what he had done and the impact that it had on me, I figured out life. I ended up getting a job, doing well on the job, and making enough money that I could go to school. I then got into this routine where you wake up in the morning, go to school, go to work, and then go back to school. You keep doing this until finally, somebody tells you, “You don’t have to come here anymore. You got a degree.” I transcended what he had done to me, which was hard for me to see for much of my life. I’ve always been very self-critical because that’s what I was imbued with.

I put piles together of what I thought the original Lead from the Heart book was going to be. I started to write, and I was completely crushed by it. There was a voice in my head saying, “You’re not a writer. No one’s going to be listening to you. What do you have to say?” and all of that. There was something deeper. It was crippling. There were some days when I couldn’t do anything. It was overwhelming to me.

My wife and I would go for drives, and it would clear my head. I’d come back and be able to make a little progress, but it still wasn’t making the progress that I needed. It was almost like going to Lords. It’s like your last hope before you die kind of thing. You pray for a miracle. My wife says to me, “I’ve got this friend, and she’s like not from this planet. She’s a very spiritual person. Talk to her and see if she has any advice.” I was like, “I’m willing to do anything.”

I knew about her but didn’t know her. Her name was Lisa. I said, “Hi, Lisa.” Without asking me a single question, she starts telling me, “Here’s what’s going on. You’re writing a book. You are representing major social change. You’re going to be met with a lot of resistance. If you go out with a clinical, like, “This is how we need to do it in business,” you’re missing the point. What you need to do is to tell people your story, and you need to make it the preface of your book.”

I don’t know if you have an editor, but I’m going to tell you what I thought when she said it. I go, “There’s no way I’m going to tell my story because it’s going to force me to write it, and it’s going to force me to relive it. I can’t do that.” She said, “Not only do you need to do it, but you need to do it now. Tomorrow, you need to do this. That’s what will resonate most with your audience, how you went through this and how it impacted you.” She was 100% right. When I speak, people come up to me and they go, “I have the same experience. It resonates.”

I thought that the whole experience was going to kill me. I went from being, “I can’t do this,” to, “I absolutely can’t do this.” I was shaking. I then started to make sentences, and they started coming together. I’m 50 years old when I’m doing this. When I got to the end of it, I realized I’ve only now healed this by going through it and reliving it in sequence, which is massively painful. You get up the next day, forget all the horrible stuff that occurred, and try to make it today. When you look at it in sequence and all the different experiences, it could have killed me.

When I got to the other side of this, it was like, “That’s why she was telling me to do it.” She was also telling me to do it for my book, but she was telling me. She was like, “You've got to do this first if you want to write the rest of the book.” The rest of the book came out like a court reporter once I had healed that and that.

I can’t explain people like this who have that kind of knowing and intuition. I never told her anything. I never said, “This is the book I’m writing. This is what I’m trying to do.” She took it out of me. I find that remarkable that I’ve been able to attract people into my life like this right at the moment that I need them. They’re like, "Here's where we are. Here’s what you need to do.” I have come to trust it because I’m creating that on some level. I’m manifesting the people in my life when I need them the most.

There’s something about this. It resonates a lot with me because of this idea, like, “Why did I create this show?” When we go back into our past and start to look at the moments that made us who we are, we have to sometimes reconcile and say, “Okay.” Understanding and going over the past helps us to lead forward.

The fact that your book is called Lead From the Heart is because you had to almost connect with, “Who am I in my heart? If I don’t go back and look at the past stories of who I am, maybe I wouldn’t be able to write this book, be able to do the next book, or do anything else in a different way without facing all of those pasts and the way that I am.” Would you agree?

I completely agree. In fact, it’s a perfect moment to say that everyone should do this. You don’t have to have the upbringing that I had. There are people who have had far worse. I had a friend who is another one of these supernatural people. She says it’s her experience that most people are operating out of their childhood selves most of the time without realizing it.

They get into a conflict with someone, and they don’t realize the conflict isn’t with them. It’s with some stupid thing their brother said to them 30 years earlier that’s triggering them. The poor person is like, “What did I do?” When they say to not take it personally because it’s not about you and it’s about them, they’re right. It’s about whatever’s going on with them.

We’re not talking about the new book, but that’s the first chapter. Know Thyself. You can’t lead other people if you don’t understand that. In my case, I’m dealing with loss. Mom gone. Family gone. I didn’t tell you, but I had other brothers and sisters. My father moved me out to California and took me away from them. It was loss after loss. You’re having to deal with all these kinds of things and make peace with them.

Also, I found out that I could be sarcastic at times. Where did that come from? My father. I had to unwind that. I never wanted to be sarcastic. I picked it up out of observation. It was like, “This is what he did, and this is what I do.” If you go by and you go, “I have the best father in the world,” God bless you. That’s great. Green lights. Keep doing what he did if that’s the example for you.

It could also be your mom. Maybe you had an uncle. Look at it because there are aspects of all of our upbringings where you go, “I don’t need to carry that forward any further into my life. That doesn’t serve me well.” If people can do that, it’s not only these massive epiphanies of, “I have a bunch of people to apologize for because of my brother from 30 years ago that I’ve been blaming,” but also, “I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to do that anymore.”

There are aspects of your upbringing that you do not want to carry forward in your life.

It’s even the little things that show up in the way you do things. It’s the mannerisms, little habits, and quirks that come from all of that. Understanding it can help you maybe see if you want to shift that perspective and change those habits.

Completely.

Building An Online Platform

I want to shift gears a little bit because I do want to get to your new book. Before I do, I want to talk about when you published your book. What did you decide to do next? What was the work you got into? You’ve gotten into coaching, all of the speaking, and all the amazing things you’re doing. Tell me what the shift was.

Are these what you are calling these pivotal moments?

Flashpoints.

Here’s another one. When I was writing the book, in the process, I didn’t have a title for the book. It had nothing to do with the heart when I set it out. It was only in the process of you’re going to have to explain it to people. I then realized I was affecting the hearts of people. I needed to go confirm that. What I did was I met with a world-class cardio surgeon and laid it out. I asked, “Could I have been affecting the hearts of people with my leadership?”

I went and met her. She graduated top of her class at one of the SUNY medical schools in New York. She said, “You’re figuring out something that we’re figuring out in science. We’ve always believed the heart was just a pump. Now, science is showing that it’s not. It’s connected to the mind.” I had tears in my eyes when she was telling me this because it was a massive validation. It was like, “I was doing this.”

She introduced me to some people and gave me a very firm understanding of the science that was emerging years ago, which has now become more commonly known. I called the book Lead from the Heart. I didn’t have a platform. I had a speaking agent, and she goes, “You need to build the platform.” Do you know this story?

No, but I love hearing it. You keep them going.

What happened was that she introduced me to this woman. I paid her $10,000. That was way too much money, but at this time, years ago, I had no platform. I didn’t even know what a platform was. I was paying this woman to help me with it. Instead, she comes back and goes, “I’m ready to have a meeting. I’ve read your book. I’ve read your articles in Fast Company. I have Plan A and Plan B.

Plan A, you’re going to hate. Plan B is what you’re going to want. I want you to go with Plan A, but you’re going to fight.” I go, “Can you tell me what’s Plan A?” I apologize to your readers, but this is what she said. She goes, “All I’m going to tell you is you’re going to fail if you continue to call this book Lead from the Heart.”

She advised me to use it like a Trojan horse. She said, “One last thing. Don’t mention it ever. Stop talking about it because you’re going to fail in no uncertain terms.” That was helpful. $10,000 to be told that everything you’ve done at this point is not going to succeed. Are you familiar with a guy named Spencer Johnson? Does that name do anything for you?

It sounds very familiar.

Spencer, for your audience, is the co-author and, I have to say, the genius behind The One Minute Manager. He had written very short books and fables for children. He believed that people don’t have a lot of time to read, so if you can give them an important message in a short amount of time. The One Minute Manager is 100 pages. That was Spencer’s whole motivation. Give something where you can read it quickly and feel the accomplishment of reading a book.

He went and wrote Who Moved My Cheese?, which sold 35 to 40 million copies. I had dinner with him one night. This is another one of these synchronicities. It turned out my wife’s sister started working for him as his personal assistant and editor. She was like, “You've got to meet him.” She set up a dinner, and he was gracious. He has passed away since this.

What happened was he said, “Tell me your thesis. Tell me what you’re about,” and so I told him. I said that we’ve been managing people entirely misaligned to human nature, and that we think people don’t want to work when they do. We need to support their needs. I told him that the heart and the mind are connected and that we should be paying more attention to how people feel at work than how they think at work because feelings drive behavior. Up to 95% of human behavior is driven by feelings. Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” He was wrong, and science has proved that.

He listens to this and goes, “Are you up for a struggle? You’re going to have one.” It was deflating. I’m like, “I’ve heard this before,” in kinder terms from him than this woman. He then said, “Mark, what you’re speaking is truth, and truth ultimately prevails.” I had a fork in the rug. Do I listen to the, “You’re going to effing fail,” person, or do I listen to Spencer? You know what choice I made.

Somebody asked me, “If you knew it was going to take a decade before people figured out that you were right, would you have done it?” I go,  “I probably wouldn’t have, but maybe I would’ve. I don’t know.” You wouldn’t have had a lot of incentive if somebody from the future came in and said, “It’s not going to be for another ten years.”

I started writing for Fast Company with the intention of dripping on people so that they could go, “Not the nut I thought he was.” I then started a podcast a couple of years ago. One of the benefits of the podcast and the intention was that people could hear me and go, “He’s not crazy. He’s not insane. Some of what he’s talking about makes sense to me.”

I don’t know about that heart thing or whatever their fantasy was, but I started finding that a couple of years ago, there started a printing press of important, well-respected academics and researchers from the world’s greatest universities who were writing books and adding some dimension of validation for my original thesis. I kept parading these people. They're all important people, like Amy Edmondson at Harvard. I had her on before anybody was having her on.

Why would I have a professor on? It was because she was writing about psychological safety. I said to her, “Can we add a dimension to this that it’s also emotional safety?” She goes, “Absolutely.” In my book, in the second edition, it says psychological and emotional safety because it’s how people feel. What has happened is that people have finally come to realize, “Not that I needed this, but I was right all along. In the progression of what I’ve learned, I’m even more firmly certain than year-to-year, week-to-week, day-to-day. Every day, I’m learning something new that is another piece of validation.” The world is coming to this because there are so many people who are bringing some dimension to this. That’s where we are.

All good things take hard work to get there. The process of putting good thought leadership into the world is committing to the process of showing up even when people say, “You’re crazy,” or, “That’s never going to work.” Ultimately, that’s where the payoff comes from. It’s this ability to say, “I know in my heart that this is right. There’s something to this that we need to listen to.” Eventually, the haters will start to turn around, or not the haters, but they will start to see.

I agree with you. The thing is that you don’t feel successful in that gap. For someone who was raised the way I was, that created a lot of emotional friction. You’re like, “I know I’m right, but I’m not getting any validation for it right now.” You could easily say, “I’m going to go back to where I was most successful to get that feeling.”

I have neighbors across the street from me. This goes back to before I even wrote the book the first time. They’re both doctors. They were getting up every morning, and I’d be making coffee and seeing them go off to work. They were a reminder that I used to do that myself. I had a place, and I had a big responsibility that was all-consuming. I’m like, “Who am I? I’m not an author because I haven’t written anything yet. I’m not an executive anywhere anymore.” You’re having to live with that.

You find out, “I’ve accomplished it,” and you’re expecting a parade. You’re expecting people to go, “Look at what he’s pulled off. He’s going into medical science to demonstrate that we need a whole new paradigm of leadership.” I’m getting, “Sorry, but we’re not interested.” You’re having to live with that for a long time.

There were days when I was honestly arm wrestling with myself, like, “Do I keep doing this?” There was an inner knowing that when the days got where you’re close to going, “I’m going to send some resumes out and get done with this because this is never going to happen,” kind of a thing that you go, “This is why you’re here. This is what your purpose is. You’re stuck.” I’m glad that I made every decision that I made, but those were difficult decisions to make.

I hear that. There are so many people who are reading this and can say, “I had those moments, too, where I doubted myself, like, ‘What am I doing?. Maybe I should retreat back to safety. It’s time for me to give this up.’ The reality is sticking around a little longer and seeing if maybe I’m in the liminal space or that middle space. If I commit a little longer to this process, it’s going to pay off.” Luckily, it does.

People have regrets years later when they made the decision to flee to safety. It felt good at the moment. I know that when I die, I’m not going to look back and go, “I’m sorry that I quit on something that was so important to me.” I’ve read since then that people have advised smartly that if you’re going to do something like we’re doing, you don’t give up your day job.

You keep doing what you’re doing, and you do it on the side so that you’re not vulnerable. Pass the baton from traditional work experience to being an entrepreneur when you’re ready to move and you don’t feel that vulnerable. It’s hard to start from ground zero, especially with an idea that people are like, “I’m not so sure.”

Hindsight is 20/20. We choose our paths and do what we need to do. At this point, you’ve already chosen that battle.

In many respects, the path was chosen for me.

Recognizing The Power Of Employee Well-Being

When I think about your next book, and I think about the challenge that is ahead of you on this one, it’s related but unrelated. It seems like you’ve chosen another big, audacious goal. I’d like to hear from you. Tell us about this new book. How do you think people are going to receive this one?

That’s so massively astute of you to say what you said. I’m like, “Why can’t I write like a simple book, challenging anybody’s assumptions?” I’m challenging 2 assumptions, and 1 is big. I wrote this article in 2013 with the support of Gallup, which said that only 30% of Americans are engaged at work. This was 2013. Since then, engagement has been the biggest topic in the world. It’s like, “Here is what you need to do.” We start surveys as consultants. There are hundreds of books that have been written.

I’m looking at this one day and I’m like, “This is ridiculous. Twelve years later, and the numbers are the same?” It was instantaneous for me because I’ve been living in this for so long that I was like, “No one has ever taken this seriously. No one has ever been held accountable for it. They only give it twice a year. It takes them a month or two to get the results out.”

Somebody’s complaining about something that happened in April, and then you’re doing your survey in December. The manager sees it and goes, “That happened so long ago. I’m not taking that seriously.” Wall Street never took it seriously. CEOs never took it seriously. It was this check-the-box activity. Gallup keeps presenting this as a dire situation where the companies keep meeting their goals, and the market keeps going up. It’s almost irrelevant, this idea of engagement.

Meanwhile, people are making money off of the idea.

Completely massive. You can imagine. I’m not saying completely cave in on engagement. What I’m saying is that we need to stop talking about engagement. We need to stop measuring twice a year, thinking that we’re doing something with any sincerity. We need to create a system that’s going to ensure that if you do ask people how they feel, which is something that is essential, you need to do it more regularly, and there needs to be accountability for it.

There’s technology. I can send you a survey and go, “Tell me how you feel about working for Mark and his support.” It’s bright green, bright red, and everything in between. I do this to you and 30 other people who are working for me. The very next day, I get the results, and I see how people are feeling and their comments. Guess who else gets my feedback? My boss, his or her boss, and on and on it goes. HR is seeing it.

Let’s say I’m a toxic manager. Let’s say that I get results every quarter. Everybody thinks I’m a star, but then they start to see this trend. You’re asking people, “How’s Mark as a supportive person? How’s Mark in terms of growing your career? How’s Mark in terms of appreciating you?” You start to see this trend that this star we think we have is someone who is disabling people, undermining people, and making people hate their jobs and probably quit at some point if we don’t deal with this. This is a gap that’s profoundly missing with engagement.

Changing roles here, let’s say I work for you. You get the feedback and go, “Amongst all the people that work for me, Mark’s not getting very good grades. He’s getting a lot of red.” You can meet with me immediately and go, “Did you see the surveys? Did you see everybody else’s surveys? Everybody’s in the green. You’re in the way red. We need to fix this. I need you to think about it. Go talk to some people in the green, come back to me in a week, and tell me what your plan is to turn this around. If you need some support from me, I’m going to do it.” You’re making people accountable.

Stop talking about engagement. Instead, create a system that asks people how they feel.

If you don’t improve Mark’s behavior as a manager, then you can have a different conversation and say, “If you want to continue to be on my team, i.e., a manager, you have 30 days to turn this around. You can’t go and browbeat people into giving you better results. You need to change as a leader.” This, to me, is a profound thing.

I agree.

Part of it is pulse surveying regularly as opposed to doing an insincere check-the-box massive study that is way in arrears, too late to get anything, and no one ever responds to it. It builds resentment. It ironically lowers engagement even further when employees go, “What a stupid exercise. Nobody's taking this seriously. No one’s going to do anything about it.”

The other dimension of this is that there is such an amazing study. An economics professor has done a multi-year study. Jan-Emannuel De Neve is his name. He’s at Oxford. What he’s shown is that if you ask people, “How did you feel after this work week?” You don’t go, “Before you give me a grade, you don’t have any marital problems, do you? You’re not stressed out financially.” You need to take all of that into consideration, but they just said, “How did you feel at the end of this week?” They didn’t ask for anything. No caveats, in other words.

What they did was week-to-week, they monitored the responses and then monitored their key performance metrics. They were able to demonstrate that they went up significantly and down significantly depending on people’s well-being. You were laughing and smiling earlier when I said this. I loved it. You don’t need to ask them twelve different questions in an engagement survey. You have to ask them specific to this topic, “How do you feel?”

Feelings drive behavior, which is my thesis. Even though I’m challenging assumptions again and there are going to be people who are going to want to resist what I’m talking about again, it’s directly aligned to everything that I’ve been talking about. Well-being is attached to feelings and emotions, so I know I’m right with what I’m saying.

The final part of your question was how you think it’s going to be received. People realize that I’ve paid my dues.” They can see that what I’ve done proved to be right. What I’m hoping is that people take a leap with me. With the early feedback so far, I’m not getting, “That’s wrong. That’s stupid. You don’t bring heart into leadership. I’m not getting that this time.” Maybe I’ll get my parade after all.

You deserve a parade for this one. This is a good one. Here’s my perspective. One of the things about this, for the data geeks out there, is that this is a good data point, too. It’s allowing people to see that we’re collecting data on an ongoing basis, but it’s based on something that’s real. It’s based on human emotions. It also allows you to see that it’s not just how people are working. It’s about how they are as humans and how they are showing up.

It’s not just about the work in general, but about all aspects of their lives. You said you’re not having them check themselves at the door. You’re saying, “How are you?” What’s great about this, and I hope this is also part of what you’re thinking, is this idea that you’re not going to come down on somebody for saying, “Everyone on your team’s red. Therefore, you’re fired.” It’s more about, “Let’s talk about it. Let’s take a compassionate lens.”

Not only that, but even with the feedback itself. You go out to your 30 people and you say, “How are you feeling about the culture right now?” You get some critical feedback, like, “What is the culture? It seems vague to me. We’re not living up to the values.” You’re like, “This isn’t what I was hoping for. I wanted people to go, ‘Everything’s great. I love working here.’”

Instead of going, “That’s too bad,” the way that I’m recommending this is that you’re going to have a conversation with your people. You say, “This is what the feedback was. How do we make it better? What can we do?” You can’t solve every problem. You have to be clear with people, “I’m not in control of the world, but I can control what I can control. What can we do within our team to make this better?”

You’re also going to be able to share that with your manager, other managers, and peers so that everybody’s getting the benefit of all these conversations. How can you not improve an organization’s engagement, ironically, by not doing that? If we come back five years from now and everybody’s been doing this, engagement’s going to be at 80%.

I love your approach to everything you do. It’s groundbreaking but also simple. The problem is that we have had some resistance for so long that it’s been hard for us to break through those barriers. I’m so glad that you do the work you do.

Thank you very much.

Mark’s Most Recommended Books

Time-wise, we’re running out of time. I want to make sure we leave some space for some of the important questions that I like to ask, and that is the last question. What are 1 or 2 books that have had an impact on you, and why?

The first one is called The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, which is one of the most magnificent books I’ve ever read. All I’ll say is that I was walking on the beach one day, and I had this word pop into my head as I was getting off the beach after an hour. It was primer. I was like, “That’s a word I don’t use. That’s a word I don’t see. That’s a word I don’t hear. What’s that about?” I started thinking.

I asked one of my clairvoyant friends. I go, “Am I supposed to do something with this? It feels like I’m supposed to write a primer.” She goes, “That’s your gift from the universe, so you’re supposed to do it.” That was it. There was a tug of war because I remember how painful it was to write originally. I was remembering that. I’m like, “Do I? Do I not?”

I read in Rick Rubin’s book that the way that creativity works is that there’s creative energy out in the ether, and that creative people know how to download it. There’s an antenna. Everybody’s creative is his point, but the ones that look like they’re not creative don’t do anything with it. He goes, “The way this works is you’re going to be given the gift, and if you don’t do anything with it, it’s going to be given to someone else.

It’s not because the universe wants to punish you, but because the timing for the information is right.” I’m reading this, and I swear to God, I was like, “Don’t take it away from me. I’m your man. I’m going to do this.” I’m not kidding. I had this sense of urgency, like, “Don’t take it away from me. I’m sorry that I resisted this idea.” I got the books not long ago.

The other book is going to sound like it’s completely out of context, but it changed my view. I’ve told you about these people who have come into my life and have had these impacts. I’m like, “How do you explain that?” It’s called the Autobiography of a Yogi. It’s the most successful spiritual book ever sold by Swami Yogananda.

The hermitage where he wrote it is about 30 miles from me. When I was struggling, I went up where he wrote the book and said, “Help me out here, Swami.” I’m not kidding. I was like, “I’m struggling here.” That's when everything turned for me. It’s mystical and amazing. There are real people from when he wrote it many years ago. It was a life-changing book.

Get In Touch With Mark And Buy His Books

Both books are remarkable. Your perspective on both of those books is so spot on and amazing. I can’t thank you enough for sharing that. I don’t want to end this, but we have come to a close. I’m so grateful for you sharing your stories and your insights. It has been a wonderful conversation.

Thank you so very much for having me on. I  appreciate it. I loved having a conversation with you. Thank you so very much.

I appreciate it. Before I let you go, I want to make sure people know where to find you. What’s the best place for them to find your work? Your podcast is amazing. Make sure you mention that as well.

Thank you. When I wrote the book, I was Mark Crowley. When I started to go out and promote it, I realized there was another Mark Crowley in Ohio. He still gets annoyed when he gets my emails, so I had to add a C. All roads lead to my website, which is MarkCCrowley.com. You’ll see the new book, the old book, and the podcast. Everything’s there.

Thank you so much again. Thanks to the readers for coming on this journey. I know you’re leaving inspired and ready to pick up Mark’s books and read them. You won’t be disappointed. This was a wonderful conversation. Thank you.

Important Links

• Mark Crowley
• Lead from the Heart Podcast
• Lead From the Heart
• The Power of Employee Well-Being
• The One Minute Manager
• Who Moved My Cheese?
• The Creative Act
• Autobiography of a Yogi

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