Lead From the Heart

One of the through lines of this podcast is the idea that the COVID pandemic profoundly and permanently changed how people think about work – not to mention the value exchange we now expect from it. Consequently, in a post-pandemic world, our common and traditional ways of motivating human performance in our workplaces instantly lost any remaining viability, and now must be replaced with practices that inherently demonstrate to workers that they are valued, appreciated and respected in the most meaningful ways. What’s long been missing in leadership is heart – and if the nearly 100 million American workers who quit their jobs during the past two year-long “Great Resignation” have a message to send, it’s that they’ll no longer accept job offers where they don’t have a manager who cares about them, advocates for them, develops them and honors who they are as a person. One theme we haven’t spent enough time discussing is empathy, more specifically the managerial ability to better understand the lives, motivations and needs of the employees we lead before being able to give them the personalized support they’re seeking. Authors Heather E. McGowan and Chris Shipley have just published “The Empathy Advantage: Leading the Empowered Workforce,” a book that speaks to this directly – and this podcast with Heather is focused on exploring some of the less obvious ways managers can powerfully demonstrate empathy to their people. In his book, “The Future Normal,” our most recent podcast guest, Rohit Bhargava noted that both sexual identity and gender were emerging as a new form of diversity in workplaces. And Heather’s book more directly asserts these “have become the most rapidly transforming demographic in the workforce today.” So, in our discussion, we address this sensitive issue with Heather providing some rather humane and insightful guidance to managers on how to effectively maneuver as this change takes hold. With another through line of this podcast being that we all must learn to effectively navigate our new uncertain and non-linear world, Heather brings an optimistic view to virtually every topic we discuss.  A long-time listener and promoter of this podcast, my conversation with her replicates one you’d have with a long-time friend.  And it’s truly informative. The post Heather McGowan: How To Empower & Inspire Human Potential appeared first on Mark C. Crowley.

As life today seems to be becoming more complex & unpredictable by the minute, it sure would be nice if we had a crystal ball to see into the future. And, while seeing into the future with any degree of certainty is, of course, a fantasy, there are trends occurring in the world that some informed observers can determine with reasonable certainty are poised to impact our future lives. And this episode’s guest is one of the best at spotting those things – & the title of his new bestseller, “The Future Normal: How We Will Live, Work & Thrive In The Next Decade” pretty much sums up the theme of today’s episode. Rohit Bhargava is the founder of the Non-Obvious Company & is widely considered one of the most original thinkers on marketing disruption & innovation in the world. He is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of five books and teaches marketing and storytelling at Georgetown University. Rohit was also a recent speaker at the “South By Southwest” conference in Austin, Texas. Having a view into the future is always valuable, of course, but there are a few specific reasons why I wanted Rohit to join us. First, he doesn’t see technology as something to be feared or resisted, but rather as being a tool for creating a better world for all of us. He optimistically acknowledges that there will be challenges along the way, but believes that with the right mindset & approach, we can navigate those challenges & emerge stronger & more connected than ever before. And speaking of connection, Rohit recognizes that technology has the power to bring us together in new & exciting ways, but also knows it can be isolating & alienating if not used properly. In our discussion, he shares his best strategies for staying connected with our loved ones, & for building meaningful relationships, at a time when we’re now spending record amounts of time on our devices. So, what’s life going to be like in the months & near years ahead. Please listen in to my discussion with Rohit to find out! The post Rohit Bhargava: The Future Normal: How We Will Live, Work & Thrive In The Next Decade appeared first on Mark C. Crowley.

The post-pandemic world we’re all living in sure seems to be more volatile, more toxic, more stressful and more subject to radical change due automation, downsizing, and globalization than ever. And that just means it’s become much harder for any of us human beings to truly flourish in our lives. As if the past three years of COVID related challenges didn’t already make us feel weary! Martin Seligman is a University of Pennsylvania professor & the former president of the American Psychological Association. It was Seligman who first argued that psychological research would far better serve society if it focused more on discovering ways to enable human thriving than it does on treating people who already have psychological illness. And with that impetus, he launched the “positive psychology” movement. Recently, Seligman partnered with Dr. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman in writing the new bestseller, “Tomorrowmind: Thriving At Work With Resilience, Creativity & Connection – Now And In An Uncertain Future.” Trained in psychology herself – & having earned a medical degree from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from Harvard University – she is the chief product and chief innovation officer at human transformation company BetterUp. Much of Dr. Kellerman’s her work has resulted in identifying five psychological powers she and Martin Seligman believe have become essential to personal well-being & success in the future workplace: (“Resilience & Cognitive Ability,” “Meaning & Mattering,” “Connection & Rapid Rapport Building,” “Prospection” – the forward looking ability to emotionally and logistically prepare for change before it arrives – and, “Creativity & Innovation”). No one can deny that how we worked ten years ago, how we work today, and how we’ll work just five years from now are all likely to be profoundly different. The entire focus of this conversation with Dr. Kellerman, then, is to help you not just survive in the emerging and new work environment, but to bloom in it.  And it starts by fleshing out these five psychological powers in order that you can master them. It’s insight we all need assuming life’s about to become more demanding & challenging than it already is today. The post Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: How To Future-Proof The Uncertain World Of Work appeared first on Mark C. Crowley.

When hybrid cars first became mass produced over a decade ago, Honda and Toyota had two different strategies. Honda chose to produce a hybrid version of its wildly popular “Civic,” believing brand familiarity would help customers feel more comfortable with its brand-new technology. Toyota not only decided to produce an entirely new model car, they intentionally designed it so it would stand out. Which of the two models do you think ended up outselling the other one on a grand scale? According to Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics professor at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego, Toyota’s “Prius” continues to dominate hybrid car sales today – specifically because Toyota’s senior management understood how incentives work. One might think that acquiring one of the first energy-saving hybrid cars would have been motivation alone for people already inclined to do their part to help the planet. But Toyota knew it wasn’t. They understood that people buying the first hybrid cars would also want to “signal” to other people that they were the kind of eco-conscious person who’d be willing to sacrifice personal luxury & horse power in order to help the environment. So, Toyota intentionally built an edgier (literally) car to ensure other people “noticed” it. This is just one of the myriad examples Gneezy cites in his new bestseller, “Mixed Signals: How Incentives Really Work,” to show that incentives send powerful signals that aim to influence behavior. But often – especially when it comes to workplace incentives – there’s a conflict between what a company intends with their incentives & the behavior they actually motivate. Consider the leader who urges teamwork, but unintentionally designs incentives for individual success. Or the one who invites innovation but punishes failure. It might sound funny, but organizations have been known to tell workers that “quality is job one,” while launching incentives that pay for quantity. To help workplace leaders especially, Gneezy highlights how the right combination of economic & psychological incentives can encourage people to drive more fuel-efficient cars, be more innovative at work, & even get to the gym. “Incentives send a signal, & your objective is to make sure this signal is aligned with your goals.” This is a fascinating discussion that will not only teach you how to more effectively create incentives for your employees and even children – it also explains how incentives are used to motivate our behavior (and not always favorably) by people we all interact with every day (think doctors, plumbers, sales people et al). Wharton’s Adam Grant named “Mixed Signals one of his highly recommended books of 2023. The post Uri Gneezy: Avoiding Mixed Signals: How To Align Incentives With Your Values appeared first on Mark C. Crowley.

When you think about our world today, “turbulent” might be the first word you use to describe it. After a three-year long COVID pandemic fatigued us all, we’re now bewildered by a surprising number of employee layoffs occurring in all industries, & equally uncertain about how disruptive the AI-GPT technology will be to our work & careers. A crisis in Urkraine continues with no end in sight; it’s still undetermined where people will work most days – & unrelenting inflation is adding financial stress to all of our lives. To put it lightly, the world we live & lead in today is filled with uncertainty, ambiguity & complexity – & there simply are no signs suggesting we’ll ever again live in more simpler times. Our guest this episode is Jean Gomes, author of “Leading in a Non-Linear World: Building Wellbeing, Strategic and Innovation Mindsets for the Future, a book the Financial Times spotlighted as one its most anticipated books of 2023. Jean was the co-author with Tony Schwartz of the New York Times bestseller, The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working – & his new book shows how our mindset, more than our knowledge & expertise, has become our greatest asset in facing an uncertain future – & to making important decisions when little or no data exists. Tapping into emerging science & research which proves our basic understanding of the term, “mindset” is missing some important dimensions, Gomes’ book shows that our mindset isn’t just a set of beliefs that shape how we make sense of the world, but actually the interplay of our feeling, thinking, & seeing. While a lot of us (those of us in leadership roles, especially) instinctively go to our minds when we’re having to make difficult or spontaneous decisions, it turns out we have far greater & supplemental intelligence to leverage when we learn to listen to what our bodies tell us. Remarkably, science proves that our bodies know significantly earlier than our brains when we’re about to make a bad decision – & our feelings tell us the truth about situations that our rational minds often cannot see. While the expressions “lead with the heart” and “heart-led leader” are suddenly gaining traction in business, they’re almost always used as a metaphor. But, in the case of Mark’s book & this podcast, the title “Lead From The Heart” was specifically chosen because of the emerging science which proves our hearts are not just blood pumps, they’re also a source of intelligence that holds great influence over human choices & behavior. Because we no longer live in a linear world where both our problems & solutions are clear, our rational, thinking brains alone cannot adequately respond to the non-linear world in which we find ourselves today. And, so, Jean Gomes joins us to explain why tapping into the intelligence of our bodies – which very much includes the heart – provides a profound competitive advantage in leadership because it consistently leads to better judgments. This is absolutely cutting edge insight, & learning how to do this is easy. Listen in! The post Jean Gomes: How To Develop The Mindsets You Need To Flourish In An Uncertain World appeared first on Mark C. Crowley.

When Bob Chapman was thirty years old, his father died of a sudden heart attack – instantly making Bob CEO of a small, unprofitable manufacturing company his dad had only recently purchased. For the next two decades, leveraging an MBA from the University of Michigan, and a few years’ experience as a senior level accountant to prepare him, he led his company as most CEOs of his era did. He squeezed his workers as much as he could, and laid them off in times when the business’s profits were challenged. But in the late 1990’s Bob Chapman had a massive change of heart. He started caring about his employees in truly significant ways. With great intention, he reimagined the culture at Barry-Wehmiller, and went on to build a $3.7 billion (revenue) business via 60 acquisitions. And every time he took on a new team or a new plant, he went there personally to ensure his skeptical workers heard it from him: They were now working for a company based on trust and the ideal that “everybody matters.” During the Great Recession, Chapman never laid off a soul in any of his many locations. He personally forfeited 90% of his salary and then asked every employee to take a one-month unpaid leave. The way he saw it, “during tough times a family pulls together, makes sacrifices together, and endures short-term pain together. “If a parent loses his or her job, a family doesn’t lay off one of the kids.” As a result of his approach, Barry-Wehmiller remarkably emerged from the downturn with higher employee morale than ever before. In his book, “Everybody Matters,” Chapman says, “once you stop treating people like functions or costs, disengaged workers begin to share their gifts and talents toward a shared future. Uninspired workers stop feeling that their jobs have no meaning. Frustrated workers stop taking their bad days out on their spouses and kids. And everyone stops counting the minutes until it’s time to go home.”  In the eight years since his book was published, Chapman has become an activist in the world of CEOs. He realizes too few of them have embraced any of the humane leadership practices that have made his company so successful – and he spends much of his time working to persuade them to change. This podcast exists for the sole purpose of persuading managers around the world that there is nothing but upside for them once they begin to lead from the heart. Bob Chapman is the embodiment of that ideal – and a model leaders can follow if they not only want to drive performance and profits, but positively impact the lives of other people as well. The post Bob Chapman: A CEO The Business World Must Emulate appeared first on Mark C. Crowley.

Our most precious resource isn’t money. It’s time. We’re all given the same twenty-four hours a day – &, for most of us, that never feels enough. We flatter ourselves for being “so busy” in our jobs, yet end our days feeling depleted & without enough time to get to the gym, read the books we want to – or spend dedicated time with the people we love. And often, the recognition that we always feel “time poor” makes us resentful and unhappy. Social psychologist and professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, Cassie Holmes, has devoted her career to researching the role that time plays in our lives – with a specific interest in how different ways of thinking about & allocating our time might lead to greater life satisfaction & well-being. Tied to all she’s learned, she’s just published, Happier Hour: How To Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time And Focus On What Matters Most, named by Amazon’s editors as one of their “Best Books” of 2022. One of the first eye-opening observations she makes is that we don’t really need much more free time to make us content. A key study shows people are happiest with just 2 to 5 hours of discretionary time per day (ironically, when we’re given more than this, we grow bored & wanting more to challenge us). Another discovery is that, as people get older, they tend to find a higher level of happiness in ordinary events (say, a walk with a friend) in contrast to younger people, who mostly see happiness boosts from extraordinary events (a great vacation or show). “Realizing their time is precious, these people become more prone to savor even the simplest of moments.” Holmes observes that many of our daily experiences can be made to feel more meaningful when we, too, realize we won’t continue to do them every day forever. After admonishing her son to hurry up when he had literally stopped to smell the roses on the way to preschool, she says, “I didn’t realize that on that very morning I was trying to get Leo to hurry up, we had already completed 80 percent of those preschool commutes. Better to enjoy the roses on the last 20 percent.” “How we decide to approach our hours and spend our days determines the happiness we get to enjoy in life,” Holmes says. “And, when it comes to time & creating a good schedule, ‘we are the artist.’ We’re not just an observer, subject to passive viewing. This is our time. The mosaic we create is the magnificent life that we get to live.” This podcast, then, is dedicated to helping you become wiser in how you use life’s most precious resource — time — and in making decisions that will affect the happiness you experience every single day. The post Cassie Holmes: How To Live More Happy Hours appeared first on Mark C. Crowley.

According to PepsiCo’s award-winning, and first, Chief Design Officer, Mauro Porcini, “our world is radically changing, and is forcing us to innovate as never before. And, we are entering a new, modern renaissance fueled by the reborn, humanistic necessity of putting people at the center of everything.” And when Porcini says, “put people at the center of everything,” he’s not just referring to the human beings (consumers) for whom companies design products and services, but also explicitly for all of the human beings who lead and participate in the innovation process – (an organization’s employees). Porcini, who also was the first ever Chief Design Officer at 3M – one of the most innovative companies in the world – has just published, “The Human Side Of Innovation: The Power Of People In Love With People,” where he makes the uncommon assertion that: “Innovation is an act of love. It is a gesture of empathy, respect, generosity, of one human being’s devotion to another.”  And, recognizing that humans have all of the ideas that make innovation happen, he’s an advocate for loving employees as a condition for drawing out their greatest creativity. When hiring people to work on his design team, Porcini not only focuses on finding candidates who “are in love with people” – and who have a genuine fire in them to create meaningful solutions for actual human beings – but people who also possess the specific traits of kindness, optimism, curiosity, and humility. Leading any team of human beings, he believes, inherently requires managers possess these exact same qualities. We don’t often think about how a company’s culture will impact its ability to drive change, transform product offerings or reimagine processes; but one of the world’s top design thinkers believes any leader who fails to see the direct connection will fall by the wayside – transcended by people, and organizations, who do. Mauro Porcini isn’t just inspiring in this conversation. His philosophy and leadership thinking will likely transform you. The post Mauro Porcini: If Your Organization Wants To Innovate, Love Your People appeared first on Mark C. Crowley.

You might not think a book on philosophy could be a bestseller these days, but the title of MIT professor, Kieran Setiya’s new book, “Life Is Hard” clearly has wide appeal.  We’ve just come out of a two-year global pandemic, have experienced record inflation due in part to a seemingly endless war in Ukraine – and are heading into a recession that could put many workers’ jobs in jeopardy. And these are just the headline issues that make our lives especially difficult today. It’s rather confirming (soothing even) to hear a respected academic say the words, “life is hard” if for any reason that we’ve all been influenced to believe that, when it comes to dealing with life’s challenges, we’re just supposed to suck it up, plow through and keep smiling. Setiya’s book (and the focus of this podcast) is about making the best of a bad lot. It offers guidance for coping with pain, grieving loss, getting older, failing with grace, confronting injustice and searching for personal meaning. Pop psychologists simplistically advise us to “find our bliss” and “live our best lives,” while Setiya acknowledges that, at times, the best can often be out of our reach. As a contrast, he asks how we can better weather life’s adversities, find hope and live well when life is hard? Our first episode of the new season welcomes an educator from one of the world’s top universities. A philosophy expert and a philosopher in his own right, Setiya joins us to share wisdom of the ages we can apply to better manage all of our life’s challenges. And since many of our biggest difficulties and daily stresses too often occur at work, we’ve asked Setiya to share wisdom that can directly help you become a more grounded and confident leader…no matter how hard your life gets. It’s a truly brilliant and inspiring conversation you won’t want to miss. The post Kieran Setiya: How To Live Well When Life Is Hardest appeared first on Mark C. Crowley.

For our 100th episode – and our final episode of the 2022 season – we bring you a guest who is the true embodiment of the Lead From The Heart philosophy. Bill George is formerly the CEO of Medtronic – a Fortune 200 medical device company which has 90,000 employees across 120 countries. And, for the past twenty years, he’s been a professor at the Harvard Business School where he’s long insisted that workplace managers at all levels possess a “moral compass” to guide their actions. He believes ‘the four most important qualities of leadership are passion, compassion, empathy and courage.” It may come as a surprise that any top business school professor would so strongly emphasize a leadership philosophy tied to values, character and, heart – but George is also the author of the leadership classic, “Discover Your True North” which he’s recently revised and republished. In his new edition, he makes some stunning assertions – starting with his belief that people running large companies today have lost touch with the needs of younger workers & must step aside. In his words, “current business leaders must move the next generation of leaders to their rightful place.” George also believes business – and society as a whole – would be wise to repudiate CEOs who intentionally harm people by their actions. In no uncertain terms, he calls out Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg for being as a leader who lacks both ethics & any spiritual center. And, most remarkably, he says business has long valued intelligent, intellectual workplace managers when what leadership truly needs today is a shift to the heart. He believes this approach to managing human beings is truly reflective of the future style of leadership. And he explains why in the compelling conversation. The post Bill George: Harvard’s Senior Fellow Urges Managers To Lead From The Heart appeared first on Mark C. Crowley.