Mark C. Crowley

Transformative Leadership for the 21st Century

If you're focusing on EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
you're aiming WAY TOO LOW!
“Shift your focus to what really matters to your organization:
employee commitment, initiative, and sustainable high performance.”
– Mark C. Crowley
MARK C. CROWLEY
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These 5 Books Predict The Future Of Workplace Leadership

Posted by on Jun 25, 2014 in Heart Leadership In Practice, Leadership, Wisdom From Other Authors | 0 comments

Boos Stack“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

 – William Gibson

A close friend and former colleague of mine recently advised me to “go easy” on my use of the expression “lead from the heart.”  Fully aware that I’d written a book with that title, he nevertheless sought to warn me that many people in business continue to believe this is a particularly weak idea.

My friend was, of course, looking out for my best interests, and the truth is, I knew he was right.  I’ve met with with many senior executives who gave me their polite attention – but conveyed through invisible signals their deep resistance to bringing any amount of heart into workplace management.

You see, for as long as most of us have been alive, business has believed it best to lead with our minds – and never the heart.

But I’ve just finished reading five new books that collectively prove our views of leadership are undergoing a profound change.

Insight from a Stanford University professor, the all-time winningest NBA coach, two geniuses of innovation and design, a Pulitzer Prize recipient and best-selling author – and one of Wall Street’s most respected CEOs – all provide a clear view of the future.  What they unequivocally show is that the way to excel in managing human beings in the 21st Century requires breaking away from traditional beliefs.

Drawing upon extraordinary personal success in addition to unimpeachable new research, they prove that authentically caring about the growth and well-being of workers – and ensuring they’re consistently made to feel heard, valued, supported and appreciated – already have become the truly differentiated practices of our best leaders.  The bottom-line conclusion from this collection of thought: having a great mind alone no longer can make you an effective leader; you also need an active and engaged heart:

MINDSET: THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY OF SUCCESS/CAROL DWECK

The traditional view in business is that people are born with a fixed amount of intelligence and talent; individual capabilities are firmly set in stone.

This idea, what Stanford University professor, Carol Dweck, calls a “fixed mindset,” influences workplace managers to leverage employees who quickly display natural ability – and to invest little time and resources seeking to develop all the others.

Benjamin Bloom, eminent educational researcher, studied 120 outstanding achievers in numerous fields – world-class athletes, mathematicians, concert pianists, et al – and discovered few of them were remarkable as children. They only revealed their capabilities once their training began in earnest.

Predicated on this and other remarkable research, Dweck blows up the long-enduring paradigm of human limitation.  She proves that a person’s potential is “unknown and unknowable.”  Regardless of talent, aptitude and IQ – people can greatly expand their abilities through effort, thoughtful coaching, and experience.

Dweck’s work represents a hugely expansive idea in business.  She shows that leaders who possess a fixed mindset greatly limit employee (and, therefore, organizational) performance.  Alternatively, when managers foster a “growth mindset,” they intentionally challenge, mentor, and nurture the development of their people knowing their future contributions will expand as they sprout new competencies.

ELEVEN RINGS/PHIL JACKSON

Widely considered the greatest coach in NBA history, Phil Jackson won a record 11 championships – 6 with the Chicago Bulls and 5 with the Los Angeles Lakers – and led his teams to victory in over 70% of the games they played.

Jackson was a standout college player, and won two “rings” as a player with the New York Knicks.  But once he was given his own teams to lead, he broke all the traditions of coaching professional athletes.

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Gallup’s Profound Discovery: Engagement Is Driven By Good Managers With Rare Talents

Posted by on May 20, 2014 in Current Affairs, Heart Leadership In Practice, Leadership, Uncategorized | 0 comments

Searching For Talent “Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”

 – Schopenhauer

It’s been nearly a year since Gallup announced its stunning finding that engagement in the American workplace had fallen to crisis levels.

In what became the shot heard ‘round the world in business, the research firm revealed that 70% of the nation’s working population now admits to being disengaged in their jobs (i.e., content with collecting a paycheck while investing little of their hearts in their work) – and that nearly 1 in every 5 workers is so discontent that they’re perversely motivated to undermine the effectiveness of their bosses and organizations.

All of this profound unhappiness has a primary source, of course, and organizations across the land have scurried to create taskforces, introduce employee satisfaction metrics and experiment with innumerable strategies in their efforts at finding it.  Like any problem decades-long in the making, however, no new programs or organization-wide themes are likely to prove effective at creating a sustainable solution.

I’ve always believed, of course, that our shared engagement problem is the direct result of ineffective – even destructive – leadership.  More specifically, I’ve shown that human beings have greatly evolved what they need and want in exchange for their committed efforts at work, while our traditional managerial practices have failed to keep up.

Last fall, Gallup helped confirm this assessment when their research revealed that too many people in supervisory roles today, across all industries, lack the requisite ability to manage.  Their important revelation was that employee engagement in the 21st Century is largely dependent upon having a good manager.

In a series of discussions I’ve since had with Dr. Jim Harter, Gallup’s Chief Research Scientist, I learned how he and his research team arrived at their conclusion – in addition to five specific talents they now believe characterize the most effective and influential workplace leaders.

The direct and immediate take-away is that some people are naturally imbued with qualities and talents that virtually preordain their leadership success.  The surest way of restoring high engagement, therefore, is to only select people with these traits into all future managerial roles.

Managers, Not Organizations, Drive Engagement

“We’ve long had the understanding in business,” Harter told me, “that organizations have an overriding culture – one that’s either highly engaged or not.  But when we mapped engagement data down to the team level, we started noticing that engagement – and all performance metrics – varied widely.  Our discovery was that culture varies by team.  When we got under the hood a little bit, it became more obvious that whatever was happening with a team was directly related to its manager and to the tone they were setting.”

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Why Your Personal Influence Is Far Greater Than You Ever Knew

Posted by on Feb 8, 2014 in Heart Leadership In Practice, Leadership, Wisdom From Other Authors | 0 comments

images“Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means.“

– Albert Schweitzer


Introduction:

Through a series of fascinating studies, Harvard-trained social scientists, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, have shown that human beings are profoundly influenced by the behavior of the people closest to them in their lives.

When we learn a colleague has voted, for example, we’re far more likely to vote ourselves.  When someone in our social circle quits smoking, eats too much in a restaurant, or is characteristically studious, we’re unconsciously persuaded to copy those same behaviors.

While the research proves something we may long ago have intuitively surmised – that we directly influence our friends and they influence us – Christakis and Fowler discovered that the true nature of that impact is far greater – and wider – than any of us may have imagined.

What you’re about to learn is groundbreaking information (not to mention incredibly interesting).  But it’s very possible that your behavior as a leader will be permanently and positively changed once you discover the full power of your own personal example.

Human Behavior Is Wildly Contagious

In what’s perhaps their most revealing study on influence, the two researchers sought to determine whether having an obese friend made people any more susceptible to becoming obese themselves.

To get their answer, Christakis and Fowler directed a team that painstakingly analyzed three decades of data collected from the famous, and still ongoing, Framingham Heart Study.  Dating back more than 50 years, 15,000 study participants – the residents of Framingham, Massachusetts – have visited their doctors every four years to have their key health indicators, including their weight, measured and recorded.  And before every check-up was finished, participants updated their list of family members, co-workers and friends.

By the time all the analysis was completed, the research team identified how 5,124 of the Framingham residents were connected, and linked them to over 50,000 friends, family and co-workers.

The study results were then published in the New York Times.  In a front-page article titled, “Are Your Friends Making You Fat?” the paper reported that the behavior of loading on pounds is highly contagious:

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Three Stunning Leadership Trends That Should Give Hope To Workers Everywhere

Posted by on Dec 9, 2013 in Current Affairs, Heart Leadership In Practice, Leadership, Life Lessons, Wisdom From Other Authors | 1 comment

Heart & Mind“The future ain’t what it used to be.”

 – Yogi Berra

Directly or indirectly, the common theme expressed in everything I write is that our traditional ways of leading people in the workplace are failing.

We’ve seen employee engagement fall precipitously over a generation, and now have irrefutable evidence that it cannot and will not recover until we collectively adopt leadership practices that intentionally support the higher needs of workers – human beings.

My goal for each new article has been to further explain why leadership must change, and how some enlightened organizations and visionaries already are contributing to the creation of an entirely new, and far more effective model.

As we approach the New Year, I see it filled with promise.  It’s clear that our collective view on how best to inspire employee performance is fundamentally and irrevocably shifting.  What’s stunning to me is that it’s happening so fast.

To give you a new glimpse into the future of leadership, I want to share three profound trends that are building wave-like momentum in business.  A major transformation is underway and it’s largely being influenced by some noteworthy reversals in our thinking.

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The Single Greatest Reason The World’s Workforce Is Disengaged

Posted by on Oct 14, 2013 in Current Affairs, Heart Leadership In Practice, Leadership, Wisdom From Other Authors | 0 comments

Gallup Poll“No problem can be solved until it is reduced to some simple form. The changing of a vague difficulty into a specific, concrete form is a very essential element in thinking.”

–J. P. Morgan

 

In the early part of this past summer, Gallup released its “State of the American Workforce” report – a massive research undertaking that identified how connected and contented people feel in their jobs.  It’s from this study, 150,000 personal interviews over the course of a year, that researchers determined only 30% of us are fully engaged at work.

The news got even worse a few days ago when Gallup announced the results of its global workplace study.  Across 142 countries, they discovered only 13% of the working population does much more than show up on time and meet the minimum expectations for their jobs.

Take a look at these worldwide results:

  • 13% Engaged: Employees feel a strong connection to the success of their organization – almost as owners – and invest significant discretionary time and effort. 
  • 63% Not Engaged: People feel less connected to their work and are disinclined to display initiative.
  • 24% Actively Disengaged: Workers who are unhappy, unproductive – and liable to spread their negativity to co-workers.
  • This means 87% of the world’s working population is not meaningfully engaged in, or otherwise enthusiastic about their jobs.
  • Worldwide, actively disengaged employees outnumber engaged employees by nearly 2:1.

Soon after the U.S. engagement report was released, I interviewed Dr. Jim Harter, Gallup’s Chief Research Scientist, and wrote a subsequent article for Fast Company Magazine.  Leveraging much of Gallup’s research, I listed the key reasons American workers have grown so distressed in their jobs, and described the most effective ways managers can address them.

But now, four months later, I’m left to wonder how the world’s economy succeeds by having just 13% of the working population fully committed to excellence? Clearly, we manage, but is this really the best our global society can do?

With the hope that Gallup’s new research might shed new light on this engagement crisis, I reached out to Dr. Harter again.  To frame up our conversation, I asked him just two questions:

(1)  Is there one universal root to why people across the world are so disheartened in their jobs?

(2)  As a society, can we fix this so that people can instead thrive at work, maximize their own potential, and help drive greater performance for their organizations?

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A Balance Between Masculine And Feminine Traits: The Requirements For Success As A 21st Century Leader

Posted by on Jun 30, 2013 in Heart Leadership In Practice, Leadership, Wisdom From Other Authors |


The Athena Doctrine“I think we need the feminine qualities of leadership, which include attention to aesthetics and the environment, nurturing, affection, intuition and the qualities that make people feel safe and cared for.”                      

 – Deepak Chopra


Just before my book, Lead From The Heart, was published, a public relations executive told me directly: “Your book is terrific, but no one in business is going to take it seriously unless you change the title.”

In the context of workplace leadership, it’s the word, “heart” that instinctively strikes many people as being soft, sentimental and weak.  From my PR friend’s perspective, managing with any degree of care or advocacy simply isn’t regarded as being manly.  And, since men largely dominate leadership positions, he urged me to rename the book.

I chose to go forward with the title, of course, full knowing I’d face some initial resistance.  And ever since, I’ve made it my intention to find as much compelling evidence as possible to prove the solution to the world’s employee engagement crisis lies in leadership practices that positively affect the hearts in people.  This is all I write about.

So I begin this blog by expressing my profound appreciation to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Michael D’Antonio, and his best selling co-author, John Gerzema.   Their new book, The Athena Doctrine: How Women, And The Men Who Think Like Them, Will Rule The Future, offers remarkable insight into what it takes to excel as a leader in the 21st Century.  And, just as Deepak Chopra insightfully suggests in his quote above, their conclusion is that effective leadership today requires a greater balance between male and female traits and values – equilibrium of mind and heart.

Gerzema and D’Antonio initiated a survey of 64,000 people – all chosen to mirror the populations in 13 countries (e.g. the US, Mexico, South Korea, Germany and the UK) that represent 65% of the world’s domestic product.  As experienced researchers, the authors intentionally sought a wide range of cultural, geographical, political, religious and economic diversity.

To summarize what they discovered: The skills required to thrive in today’s world – such as honesty, empathy, communication, appreciation and collaboration – are widely regarded as being on the feminine side of human nature. Consequently, we’ve reached the end of the hyper-masculine era in leadership as these and many other feminine qualities have become more highly valued.

Here’s a summary of their findings:  

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