The Power Of Love In Action: How Humane Leadership Transforms Workplaces With Marcel Schwantes

What if love was the secret to thriving workplaces? In a world often focused on bottom lines and short-term gains, acclaimed executive coach and author Marcel Schwantes invites us to explore the transformative power of humane leadership. In this episode, we dive into his insights from his book, Humane Leadership, and his popular Love In Action Podcast, exploring how cultures of care, connection, and belonging can empower companies to outperform the competition.

Marcel shares his personal "flashpoints," from a stress-induced physical collapse in a toxic work environment to discovering servant leadership under a truly empowering boss. He reveals why servant leadership is, at its core, "love in action," and how this approach — grounded in patience, kindness, humility, advocacy, and trustworthiness — fosters engagement, reduces turnover, and drives sustainable success. Get ready for a conversation that will challenge your perceptions of leadership and inspire you to cultivate a more humane and loving workplace.

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The Power Of Love In Action: How Humane Leadership Transforms Workplaces With Marcel Schwantes

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest, Marcel Schwantes. Marcel is a speaker, author, acclaimed executive coach, and an Inc. Magazine contributing editor with a global following. Marcel delivers presentations, workshops, courses, and coaching programs about the human side of business and how cultures of care, connection, and belonging power companies to thrive and outperform the competition. He hosts the popular Love In Action Podcast, which is heard in over 100 countries. He’s the author of one of the top business leadership books called Humane Leadership. He lives in Chattanooga with his entrepreneur wife, his baseball-loving son, and the boss of the family, their dog, Scotch.

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It is truly a pleasure to welcome you to the show, Marcel.

Thank you. It’s a pleasure. I know we have a lot in common. I can’t wait to have this conversation.

One of the things that has been present for me is seeing people who talk about the heart of leadership, bringing that sense of leaders who don’t just show up to lead but also see that there’s a heart of how we show up, and bringing love into that. A lot of people are saying, “Love in work? What?” We’re going to talk about that, I’m sure. Thank you for coming on the show.

My pleasure.

We’re going to start with what we always do, which is exploring your journey to getting to the work you’re doing through what we call flashpoints. Flashpoints are these moments in your life that have ignited your gifts into the world. I hope you’ll feel called to share what you’re feeling called to share, and we’ll pause along the way and see what themes are showing up. How does that sound?

That sounds great. There are lots of thoughts coming through my mind. I may have more than three, but I’ll try to narrow it down.

We have time, so we’ll do some exploration. That’s what it’s all about. In a moment, I’ll turn it over to you. When you’re ready, you can take it away.

The Toll Of A Toxic Workplace

The first one that I can think of takes me back to 2002, which started this whole process that has led to what I do as far as what my mission is in the world, as well as the book. In 2002, I was working for a hospital that shall remain nameless. That hospital was a very toxic work environment for me to the point where the stress became so unbearable that one day, as I stepped out of my shower to get ready for work, I collapsed and did a face plant on my bathroom towel. I was paralyzed from the waist down.

That began an interesting journey because I needed to understand what was happening physically. A lot of the research links what happens to you physically to what is going on inside you emotionally and mentally as well. There’s a correlation there. What was going on for me emotionally and mentally was that I was in such a pressure cooker, high stress, high anxiety environment. The hits kept coming day by day over such a prolonged period of time that my body could not sustain the cortisol and adrenaline rushing through my system. It couldn’t hold.

I remember being in the ER, and the ER doc was doing his assessment, asking me questions. One of the questions was, “What’s your stress level at work on a scale of 1 to 10?” I said, “About a 25.” He nodded like he had heard this a million times before. He was like, “Your injury is stress-related.” That was a process of recovery physically for about two months where I could regain movement again and I’m not crawling on my elbows and knees. The emotional and mental recovery took much longer because my body was traumatized by being in this pressure cooker environment. That was the first flash point.

Discovering Servant Leadership

The second one is that I finished the two-year program. It was a contract. It was two years, and I was able to finish it and move on from the hospital. At the next hospital that hired me, I was under a completely different style of leadership. This is a person that I can name. I talked about him in my book. His name is Bruce.

Bruce led by empowering his people. He led by mentoring them, spending time with them, setting them up for success, and removing obstacles from their path. He was a prolific communicator. He always set clear expectations. We always knew the direction that we were going. Nothing was fuzzy. He also celebrated well. When we did well, we would celebrate as a team.

That was a new experience. I didn’t have a previous reference point to that kind of leadership style. I began my investigation. That’s the second flashpoint. It was like, “I experienced two completely polar opposite ways of managing human beings. What the heck is going on? Why do people lead this way?” The previous hospital led me to an ER to this other style of leadership that I am showing up to work with everything. Every part of me was engaged in the work that I was doing, physically, emotionally, mentally, everything. If you want to throw in spiritually as well, sure.

Every time I started to read the literature to get a reference point, the term servant leadership kept popping up. I began to study the art in practice and the literature of servant leadership and what makes servant leaders so successful in managing workforces, elevating the employee experience, and helping people to succeed.

I built my coaching practice around servant leadership for a lot of years, and then as I kept digging in, digging down further, and drilling down to the best practices, behaviors, the dos, the don’ts, and all that, that’s where the third flashpoint happened. It happened when I sat down to interview Ken Blanchard for my podcast. We were talking about servant leadership, because Ken is a servant leadership guy. In most of his books, if you scratch below the surface, he’s talking about servant leadership.

Servant Leadership Is Love In Action

He says, “Marcel, servant leadership is love in action.” Right there was a flashpoint. It was like the world exploded before my eyes in a very good way. Part of that statement became the title of my own podcast, Love in Action, but then I wanted to find out what he meant by love. That’s a bold statement. He mentions a practice of leadership in the business world that is very successful, which is servant leadership. People still misconstrue it and jump to the wrong conclusions about what it is, but for those of us who are well-informed, we know that servant leadership is a business practice that leads to results. You and I know that.

When he threw in the word love, that was a little monkey wrench for my thought process. I’m like, “What do we do with that?” As I continued to investigate, I realized that you cannot lead as a servant leader without practicing love. In this sense, love is not a fuzzy feeling or emotion. Love is in action. Hence why Ken said, “Servant leadership is love in action.”

If you take the words in action out of the equation, then you’re living in a fluffy, very idealistic world. If love is backed by compassion, empathy, respect, humility, and all of those tenets that you and I know make a strong leader, then we’re onto something. The conversation needs to evolve in that direction so that we’re not shying away from love. If you’re a spouse, partner, mom, or dad, you can’t possibly have healthy, strong relationships at home without love, so why is it that we aren’t talking about that in a workplace where we spend the majority of our awake hours in relationship to one another?

Boss to employee, peer to peer, and all your various stakeholders that make the world of business go round, everything is based on relationships. If you have a poor relationship, things are going to go downhill. That was the last flashpoint. The love thing became more apparent. You cannot lead unless you lead with love. Here we are. I’ll leave the rest where you want to go with that one.

I love what you shared. There are so many things that I react to on this, but first of all, the sense of the tension that we create in our bodies, and then all of a sudden, it starts to come to this point where we can no longer hold the tension that is showing up. I am talking about the events that have led you to this place where you said, “No longer can I be in this place of holding all that tension.” It wasn’t just physical, but it became emotional. You had to move to this path of finding different ways of seeing leadership.

The word servant leadership, I love that you went down this path of sharing what it is, because there are so many myths around it that people make up. The wording is almost a poor choice of words. I love that we need to move towards what it means. On the surface, it’s almost like, “I’m giving myself up for all these people.” That is what it is, but it almost feels like a defeat as a leader.

There are still a lot of misconceptions. In my line of work, I always have to dispel myths from fiction and educate people on the concept of servant leadership. I have to tell them and back it up with data. If I’m talking to the CFO, he wants to know the hard numbers. If he’s like, “How is this going to help our business grow or become more profitable?” Let’s have that conversation. I’ll present the numbers.

For others, they don’t need that hard evidence that speaks to profitability, top or bottom line, or all those things. They want to make sure that their people have an environment where they enjoy coming to work. They are bringing their full selves to work. In servant leadership, the principles of love, if you will, help in that process.

When you start to care more for your employees, it creates all kinds of happy things in the brain. I’m not a neuroscientist by trade, but I’ve done enough research and have read enough studies that say that when you have positive emotions in the workplace where trust is high, it releases the exact kind of chemicals in the brain that I was getting in that first hospital where I was running for my life. You have cortisol. In workplaces where you are trusted, there are trustworthy leaders, there’s high collaboration, and people like each other. It releases serotonin and oxytocin. Those are feel-good hormones that open up so many avenues that the business world has not tapped into yet.

In workplaces built on trust, where leaders are trustworthy, collaboration is high, and people genuinely like each other, the brain releases serotonin and oxytocin—feel-good hormones that unlock powerful opportunities the business world has yet to fully embrace.

When I think about that sense of feeling of love in the workplace, it’s that. It’s those hormones that are being tapped into. It’s feeling like, “I feel this sense of being seen, heard, and valued.” That’s what we’re getting into. I was going to share this because you’ll relate to this idea. I write poetry. I wrote a poem a little while back that was more a personal reflection, but it also has resonated with a lot of people. It was, “Instead of trying to be of value, I want to be of love.”

It is this idea where oftentimes, we try to be of value to a lot of people, and that’s about giving, but it’s about starting with this idea of how we can be of love to other people. That means caring and showing them that we care about their experience of work. You’ve gotten to this place where you’re doing this work inside these organizations. You’ve gotten to this place of understanding love in action. How did this influence what you’re doing? I want to understand the actual work you got into.

My work has always been a mission, but it is becoming more of that in the sense that there is a bigger purpose behind what I’m doing. When you’re talking about, for example, the title of my book, Humane Leadership, it’s not necessarily a way that most businesses operate, even in the year 2025. People are like, “Get your job done. You better be producing so that we’re meeting our shareholders’ expectations and our board is happy.” We don’t have time to create these fuzzy, humane environments.”

Humane Leadership For Long-Term Success

I beg to differ that it’s humane leadership that’s going to help your business be set up for even bigger success down the line, but we have to stop seeing the world through short-term, quarterly lenses, this kind of environment I speak of. I walk clients through it. I say, “It’s going to take a few seasons. You have to be patient.”

If you are experiencing high turnover and your employees are disengaged, and the morale is low, you need to do some kind of an overhaul. You need to fix your systems, your processes, and your leadership structure. That’s not going to be a flip of the switch. It’s going to take some seasons and time. The humane leadership aspect of doing that is always looking at the long-term. It’s always looking at sustainability, not short-term results.

If you’re a CEO and you can convince your board and those others that you serve, “We’re in it for the long haul. This kind of leadership style is going to give us what we need 2 or 3 years down the line so that our turnover is never as high as it is,” then it works. That takes belief and mindset. You have to have the belief.

These styles of leadership, servant leadership, leading through love and care, and humane leadership, you have to have a champion at the top who says, “We get the stuff because we know it works. This is how we operate. This is how we want to operate.” Then, trickle that down to your operational level or your middle managers because they have to have the same belief and mindset as those above them. The C-Suit, partners, and founders have to believe in it. Those below have to fall in line and jump on board. That doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a few seasons.

The bottom layer is your frontline employees at the ground level. If you’re in a manufacturing environment, those are the people putting parts together. If you are at a hospital, like in my first example, you’re taking care of your healthcare providers. Those are your nurses and anybody who’s facing a patient.

Down to that level, that’s where the impact happens the most. When you’re talking about all these fuzzy things, like humane, love, and servant leadership, it doesn’t mean a hill of beans if the concepts, practices, and habits don’t come down to the ground level where people are serving other people to produce good work so your businesses grow. That’s where the magic happens.

When you lead like this, you’re going to get the best out of your employees. They’re going to be engaged. They’re going to want to come to work in the morning. They’re not dragging to work. I said that’s the magic. That’s part of the magic. The other part of the magic is that it has a direct correlation to your customers, whoever your customers are. In the hospital sense, that’s your patient. It’s going to have a direct correlation to how they feel about the customer experience or the patient experience and how they're being taken care of as customers, clients, etc.

I did a full circle view. Start at the top. Have a champion, a CEO, who says, “It’s a risk for us, but we’re going to go and do it.” Then, go through a 2 or 3-year process of reshaping your organization from the inside out with this kind of belief system, the mindset. Train your managers to lead through more of a servant leadership model. You will see the results that you want.

I’m telling you this because the data is all over the place. It proves it over and over again. If you are looking for high engagement and low turnover, this is the way to go. Human beings are innately designed to experience positive emotions. We have to consistently bring that to them to create positive workplaces that will lead to high performance. That’s what we need to shoot for.

Human beings are naturally wired to experience positive emotions. To build high-performing workplaces, we must consistently foster those emotions.

There’s something approachable about the way that you described this. Oftentimes, you hear people talk about these concepts, but you made it easy to understand for people. It is this idea that it starts with a belief that you want this to happen, and that you believe that it’s valuable to do this work. Then, it’s about doing the work and then allowing it to ripple through the organization.

Borrowing the term from Judith Glaser, everything happens through conversation. The action is through having those conversations that ripple through the organization and show up in every person’s conversation that they have from the CEO to the next-line management to the management down the line. It could even be skip-level types of conversations that ultimately ripple out to the people they touch outside of the organization. When people show that they love what they do and they love the organization they’re part of, they start to show up differently. That has the impact of a circular moment, that everything starts to come back to you. Would you agree?

Leading Up: When The Top Isn't On Board

I would agree wholeheartedly. There is one caveat to what I mentioned, which is that the belief system and mindset have to come from the top. I’m going to play devil’s advocate on myself. I sat in a webinar not too long ago. In the Q&A session, a manager threw this question at me. It was more of a statement with a question. He said, “Marcel, I’m in an environment where I want to lead this way. I would love for us to have role models at the top that are mandating this kind of leadership for us managers, so it’d be that much easier, but the top people, the CEO and the C-Suite, don’t buy into this stuff one bit. They think it’s hogwash. What can I do if the people above me aren’t on board?”

I said, That’s a great question. First of all, thank you for that.” There are a lot of people tuning into this show who may be in that position. I said, “You don’t have to wait for the CEO to bring down the ten commandments from Mount Sinai. You can affect the people around you. If you’re a middle manager and you have a team of eight, start there. Start modeling the behaviors to your immediate sphere of influence, your teammates. Lead through that and say, “Here’s what’s going to happen.”

If I have my crystal ball right, most of the time, this happens. You begin to see a change in how your subordinates are responding to that kind of leadership. They like it. There’s more energy. There’s more synergy. People are collaborating better. Communication is great. It’s open, clear, etc. That sometimes gets the attention of those very people at the top who are skeptics and naysayers, who may go, “What’s going on over there in accounting or in IT?” That will trigger curiosity. They want to know how their engagement numbers are so much higher than any other department.

You can have that discussion with your VP and say, “Here’s what I’m doing differently. I think this is going to work for other departments as well.” This is a classic example of leading up. You’re a middle manager leading up to those who are skeptics, and you’re saying, “This has been working for me. It’s great. People are engaged. We can do it for other departments as well.”

It’s so wonderful. The way you described. First of all, that was the exact question that I was going to lead you towards. You read the tea leaves on that one. I also think it’s such a wonderful way for the people who are sitting there and saying, “This organization is frustrating.” It can be challenging. There’s something I always talk about. It is this idea that human beings are so adaptable, which is wonderful, but if you’re adapting to a toxic environment, that’s not helpful.

The problem is we need to be able to say, “Do I want to adapt to what is, or do I want to create something that others will adapt to?” That’s what you created. It is a sense of having the courage to say, “I don’t want to accept what is. I want to create something that others might want to adapt to to this new world.”

That would be very powerful if you could do that from where you are, whatever layer in your hierarchy, to create that kind of change and impact right where you are.

We’ve covered a lot of ground already. We talked about the book, but I’m not sure if we covered all the ground in the book. Is there anything about the book you want to share? Any other tidbits or things that people will expect? We want them to buy the book.

The CliffsNotes version is that as I was looking at models for how to lead with love, I started to investigate the religious world, or the faith-based world, and what they have to say. In healthy, collaborative faith-based spaces, you get to see a lot of love between members of such a community, whatever your religion is.

I started to poke around, and then I landed in a piece of scripture. That led me to dissect that piece of scripture. I realized, “These are great.” I boiled it down to five. I said, “Let’s see what the science and the world of organizational literature, leadership, and positive psychology have to say, because then, I’m just writing a faith-based book.” I had to back it up with science.

The 5 Tenets Of Humane Leadership

Sure enough, the five tenets are all over the literature and all over the best practices. There are countless case studies. I boiled down love in action to a framework. If you want to lead through humane leadership, it comes down to five core principles. Leadership is patient. Leadership is kind. Leadership is humble. Leadership advocates for people. Leadership is trustworthy. That’s the premise of the book.

Humane leadership is rooted in five core principles: it is patient, kind, humble, advocates for others, and earns trust.

It’s wonderful. It’s something that’s not necessarily new, but it’s also something we need to hear. I love the fact that you went on the exploration. In many ways, it’s what you need to do to figure out your path forward to say, “How do I make sure that these are the right principles?” Go and do the research. Do the diligence. I love it when authors or thought leaders do that. They go back and say, “I've got to know if I’m onto something here.” That’s wonderful when you arrive at these tenets that are powerful. I can say that each one of those resonates with me, and I’m sure it’s going to resonate with a lot of the people who are reading.

Thank you for that. I want to make sure that the skeptics who are reading understand that this approach does not compromise results, profit, and excellence. It is tightly sealed to ensure that those five principles that I mentioned are transferable skills. If we develop our leaders that way, it will make business sense down the line. The book is full of practical things. It’s not a pie in the sky up here in the clouds book. I bring it down to how you are going to apply this to your day-to-day if you are a leader. If you’re a CEO, this is the framework you want to start developing your managers to begin to apply these day-to-day.

The World's Most Powerful Leadership Principle

Before we come to the close here, I wanted to ask this. Is there anything you want to share, like an insight or something? You write, first of all, amazing articles. Every article, I’m like, “Marcel is right on point.” Thank you for what you do. Is there an insight that you’d like to share with the audience that you haven’t shared already? Maybe it is something that’s top of mind.

I would boil everything down to what I experienced under Bruce, if you recall back, which started this whole conversation of why Bruce leads this way. I am a living proof. I was a high performer under Bruce. We were a high-performing team. We shattered all kinds of records. We were grant writing and helping the community become a healthier organization. There’s a lot of organizational development there, teaching nonprofits how to bring the best out of their people and serving communities.

That would never have happened had I not been under a servant leadership style environment. It brought out the best in me for me to then go and serve my community and my teammates as well. That’s the note I would end on. If you want to create impact and high performance in others, start by serving their needs first, and then watch what happens.

I love that you say that. It is also something that is underneath the current of all of this, which is to say, “I’m a strong believer in leaders who believe in others.” When someone believes in you, you rise to their level of expectations and their level of belief in you. There’s something about that. Leaders need that. We need to see our people in all their brilliance. That unlocks another level in them. It’s wonderful.

Can I drop something else on you?

Please.

Why Some Shouldn't Be Leaders

This is a bit of a hard truth, but tell me if you agree with this. You are a high-performing individual contributor who is being looked at for a management role where you, all of a sudden, are going to be thrust into an environment where there are 20 people reporting to you, and you don’t love people. In other words, you don’t have a natural inclination to be around people and like people.

If you don’t have that as a natural inclination, my advice is not to take that promotion because you’re not equipped for it. You might succeed in lots of different management styles that come with the job setting, strategy, hiring, firing, and the nuts and bolts of the job, but I am begging you. If you are being looked at as the next manager and you’re an individual contributor whose natural inclination is not people-oriented, save yourself from a lot of heartache, not only for yourself, but for people around you. Don’t take the position unless you are fully committed to exploring yourself, developing yourself, and growing as a leader. That’s what I wanted to convey there.

That’s very insightful. Thank you for that. There is one last question we have for you. It is a very different one, but I’m curious. What are 1 or 2 books that have had an impact on you, and why?

The first one set up my whole understanding and the worldview of servant leadership. This book came out in the ‘90s. It’s a book by James C. Hunter. It’s called The World’s Most Powerful Leadership Principle. That hints right at what the book is about. It’s a book on servant leadership. I needed to dive into the world of servant leadership, and that book does a splendid job of helping you with that.

For the second book, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a well-known organizational psychologist. He wrote a book a few years back called Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How to Fix It). It’s a book where he’s calling out the narcissists of the world who rise to power, who then create toxic organizations. He is calling out people who put those people in positions of power and influence to say there’s another neglected layer of people that are out there that have emotional intelligence that leads through humility, etc.

He is also pointing to a lot of feminine traits. We would then address the issue of getting more women to rise up to the leadership ranks at the highest level because the feminine traits lend to better leaders. That’s not a question of gender versus gender. If we all rise to the occasion, what does it truly take to be a good leader? Whether you’re male or female, it’s the same traits that you see females naturally expressing more of. If we get everybody on the same page, we raise their capacity to lead through more caring and emotional intelligence so they’re communicating better, seeing the world differently, and raising self-awareness about, “Why don’t things work around here?” Let’s figure it out.” Be curious.

All of that’s to say that the book is calling us to elevate those styles of leadership and stop this flow of narcissists that we falsely assume are going to become good leaders because they’re charismatic. They show up with a lot of confidence, or they walk in and light up a room. These are not sustainable behaviors for good leadership. They only last short-term, and then people start to see right through those narcissists. That’s the book right there. That book made a huge impact on me. It’s called Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How to Fix It). Check it out.

I love that. It’s a great take. I love what you shared. Another myth that we’ve had to debunk over the years is what confidence means. Oftentimes, we see confidence as this hubris that is like, “I stand fast to what is the truth or what I think is the truth.” The reality is that sometimes, we have to be more open, more curious, and more humble. That is where I think Tomas is getting into. It is a sense that we need to stop all of that machoness, if you will.

He says that a lot of people still hire based on this perception, “We have to have confidence in our next executive. Confidence is great, but what’s happening is if you equate that as a leadership competency that you have to have confidence, it wears off. Sometimes, the confident leader becomes overconfident. That’s when hubris and narcissism kick in. You then have a disaster in your hands.

I could have this conversation all day. Thank you so much for all that you shared. This was wonderful. I love what you’re doing in the world. I’m so thrilled that we had this conversation. Thank you for coming on the show.

It’s been a blast. Like you, I can talk about this stuff all day.

Before I let you go, I want to make sure people know where they can find you.

The best way is LinkedIn. I am @MarcelSchwantes on LinkedIn. If you want to subscribe to anything I do and get awesome articles, tips, and leadership strategies, I am on Substack. Find me on Substack.

That is a wrap. Thank you for coming on the show. I’m so thrilled to share this with all of you. Go out and check out Marcel’s new book, and go out and take some love into action in your world. Thank you so much.

Important Links

• Marcel Schwantes
• Marcel Schwantes on LinkedIn
• Marcel Schwantes on Substack
• Love In Action Podcast
• The World’s Most Powerful Leadership Principle
• Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How to Fix It)

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