#152 — Mark Crowley: Lead From The Heart, Build Belonging, And Boost Performance

Mark Crowley is a longtime financial services leader who led consistently top-performing teams over a 25-year career. He’s the author of Lead From the Heart and the newly released The Power of Employee Well-being, a frequent contributor to Fast Company, and host of the Lead From the Heart podcast. In 2013, Mark was the first to publicize Gallup’s finding that only 30% of U.S. employees were engaged—helping ignite a decade-long debate about what truly drives performance.

In this conversation, we explore why feelings and emotions—not dashboards—drive behavior, how the heart–brain connection shapes decisions at work, and why belonging outperforms “boss quality” as a predictor of retention. Mark connects lived leadership to research—from Oxford’s wellbeing–productivity link to HeartMath’s work on coherence—and shows how caring (not coddling) creates the conditions for sustained results.

Whether you lead a business unit, a project team, or a transformation office, this episode will reframe how you raise performance by raising wellbeing—with specific, near-term moves any leader can make this week.

In this episode we cover:

• Why traditional engagement efforts flatline—and why wellbeing is the more powerful lever for performance
• The Oxford evidence: how self-reported wellbeing maps directly to productivity in real work
• Belonging > boss quality as a driver of retention—and how leaders actually build it
• Caring vs. being nice: creating psychological and emotional safety without lowering the bar
• A practical definition of strategy: know where you’re going, plan with rigor, pivot fast when reality disagrees

Episode Timeline:

00:00 – Introduction

01:10 – Guest introduction and the case for feelings over dashboards

03:05 – “If you really know me…” and how Mark learned to lead from the heart

06:45 – Managing differently: proof from 25 years of top-performing teams

09:30 – Mark’s definition of strategy: plan hard, pivot faster

12:20 – Why wellbeing (not satisfaction) sets the stage for peak performance

15:10 – What wellbeing actually is—and why managers determine most of it

18:05 – Up to 95% of behavior is emotion-driven: implications for leaders

20:30 – Engagement stalled; the Oxford call-center study on wellbeing → productivity

25:40 – Caring vs. nice; HeartMath and the science of coherence

31:00 – Selecting and developing leaders who elevate others (not just individual stars)

36:10 – Belonging as the #1 driver of retention—and how to create it

39:20 – Where to start: know yourself, clarify values, design team-first systems

42:15 – Reward the team first (then individuals) to eliminate zero-sum competition

44:10 – How to keep learning from Mark + close

Additional Resources:

• Website: https://markccrowley.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markccrowley
• Books: Lead From the Heart; The Power of Employee Wellbeing
• Podcast: Lead From the Heart

Thank you to our guest, our executive producer Zach Ness, our editor James Pearce, and the Outthinker team. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, download, and subscribe. I’m your host, Kaihan Krippendorff—thank you for listening.

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