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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Ancient Chinese Philosophers Teach Harvard Students A Modern Way To Think

Posted by on May 5, 2017 in Heart Leadership In Practice, Leadership, Life Lessons, Wisdom From Other Authors | 0 comments

One of the most popular classes at Harvard University today is a deep dive into the wisdom of the great Chinese philosophers, scholars who lived over 2,000 years ago.

We all know their names – Confucius, Mencius, Zhangzi and Lao Tzu – Eastern sages who devoted their lives to exploring what it takes to flourish in life, and who often landed on counter-intuitive conclusions that stand in stark contrast to traditional Western thinking.

“Your lives are about to be profoundly changed,” Michael Puett tells his students on the first day of class. The professor begins every new semester knowing that the time-tested and spiritually informed ideas of the Chinese scholars will likely fully transform how his students go on to operate in the world.

After taking Puett’s class as a Ph.D. student, Christine Gross-Loh astutely realized that far more people than Ivy League students needed an introduction to classical Chinese philosophy. And she urged Puett to collaborate with her on a book – and to effectively make his research available to us all.

Just recently, the pair published, “The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About The Good Life,“ and it’s become a New York Times best seller.

While nowhere is it clear in the title, many of the book’s most provocative ideas also have direct application to workplace leadership. After fully digesting The Path – and then spending considerable time discussing it with Gross-Loh, I’ve spotlighted three pieces of ancient wisdom that are not only likely to challenge your personal views on how best to excel in the world, they might just send your own life into a positive new trajectory:

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How We Gain Power And Influence: Science’s Surprising Answer

Posted by on Mar 8, 2017 in Heart Leadership In Practice, Leadership, Uncategorized, Wisdom From Other Authors | 0 comments

In the late 19th Century, British historian, Lord Acton, famously asserted that “power corrupts.” And we surely needn’t look too deeply within business, politics and every day life to find examples that validate this timeless truth.

But new research from U.C. Berkeley social scientist, Dacher Keltner, confirms something few of us may ever have personally acknowledged with regard to Lord Acton’s insight: When we ourselves are given positions of power, we’re no less prone to abuse it.

In the American workplace today, over half of workers admit to quitting jobs in order to flee a power-abusing boss. And, of course, employee job satisfaction and engagement are mired in true crisis levels. What Keltner’s work reveals is that our common ways of applying power in managing people deserves much of the blame for these outcomes.

For the past two decades, Keltner has been studying human emotions and how they influence behavior. Tied to this work, he advised Pixar Studios in the making of their Academy Award-winning animated film, “Inside Out,” and guided Facebook executives in creating their new emoticons. And in his new book, The Power Paradox: How We Gain And Lose Influence, he explains why our traditional beliefs on leadership power must be tossed away if our goal is to succeed in motivating 21st Century workers.

I recently visited with Keltner and asked him to explain how our current beliefs about power were formed – and what new understanding must replace them. His conclusions have profound implications to the future of workplace leadership.

We’ve Held The Same Views On Power For 400 Years

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Five Magnificent Ways You Can Lead Like Google Without Spending A Dime On Perks

Posted by on Dec 14, 2016 in Current Affairs, Heart Leadership In Practice, Leadership, Uncategorized, Wisdom From Other Authors | 0 comments

Unknown-2As research for an article I later wrote for Fast Company Magazine, I traveled to Google’s Mountain View, California campus, and spent the day meeting with several of their talent management executives.

Within just my first hour at Google, I saw firsthand all the reasons why so many people in business consider the tech giant to be an incomparable outlier – an organization whose leadership practices bear little relevance to the real world, and to most other organizations:

  • Staged in the parking lot was a row of luxurious Wi-Fi-outfitted shuttles that transport hundreds of “Googlers” to and from work every day at no cost.
  • At eleven o’clock in the morning, I saw two young employees unabashedly playing a “Dance, Dance Revolution” arcade game – while others were gearing up to play eight-ball on a nearby billiards table.
  • I saw the bowling alleys, the laundry-room, the endless snacks, the gym – and I enjoyed one of the 75,000 gourmet meals Google provides its workers free of charge every month.

IMG_0196To the uninitiated, it’s no wonder that Google has been named Fortune Magazine’s “Best Company To Work For” an unprecedented five times. Who wouldn’t want to work at a place like this?

But Google’s methods for inspiring its 50,000 workers to commit themselves to doing amazing work far transcend the generous perks. And this is exactly the point that Google’s head of People Operations, Laszlo Bock, makes in his new book, “Work Rules! Why Google’s Rules Will Work For You.”

After reading Bock’s book – twice – I’m convinced that his (and Google’s) understanding of what drives human beings to consistently excel in their jobs is nothing short of brilliant.

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Science Agrees With Obi Wan: Trust Your Feelings

Posted by on Dec 14, 2016 in Heart Leadership In Practice, Leadership, Life Lessons, Wisdom From Other Authors | 0 comments

brain-heart-intuition-the-b-spotImagine you’re giving a presentation tomorrow to a group of your organization’s top decision makers. Your job will be to persuade them to approve, and invest in, a new initiative you’ve worked over a year to develop.

Heading into the meeting, you’re convinced you have a fantastic business case. You’ve studied the competition, run several lengthy pilots – and developed a keen sense that the venture will become a run-away success.

But if your company operates anything like most traditional businesses, you know you’ll need to stick to the analytics while making your pitch; sharing any of your informed “feelings” about the potential outcome could potentially derail your project and even harm perceptions about your own managerial prowess.

And why is it that one’s feelings can’t be brought into the boardroom without drawing concern? It’s because we remain highly squeamish about the reliability of human intuition.

Nearly 400 years ago, René Descarte famously declared, “I think therefore I am,” and an emphasis on rational thinking has dominated business operations ever since. In the modern era, MBA programs have intentionally focused on developing left-brain, rational abilities – and to teaching future business leaders how to figure everything out. Even the high-compliment of saying that someone has great “business smarts,” inherently means they possess an unusually developed intellect – a good “head” for business.

Intuition: Friend Or Foe?

But curiously, some of the world’s greatest “thinkers” of the past century – a list of acknowledged geniuses that includes Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Nikola Tesla and Albert Einstein – all very consciously leveraged intuition in their work. And so convinced that intuition had profoundly influenced his entire life’s success, Steve Jobs repeatedly said that it wasn’t just potent, it was “more powerful than intellect.”

So there lies the conundrum. Most of men, mere mortals, steer clear of allowing any feelings or intuition to influence their business dealings, while the stunning achievers of society clearly chose to operate from an entirely different manual. Whose lead should we now follow?

For nearly three decades, the Institute of HeartMath has been researching intuition and running numerous experiments for the purpose of better defining what it is and how it works. I recently met with its director of research and co-founder, Dr. Rollin McCraty, and asked him to share some of the key insights he and his colleagues have acquired. As you might suspect, along with other researchers, McCraty has been able to show that folks like Jobs and Tesla figured out something long before the rest of us, and that intuition – when fully understood – can surely help us be more successful in our careers and lives.

Mark C. Crowley & Dr. Rollin Mccraty

Mark C. Crowley & Dr. Rollin McCraty

Here’s what you need to know:

Highly Successful Serial Entrepreneurs Act On Intuition

Over a period of many years, the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship conducted in-depth interviews with repeat entrepreneurs – people who had built businesses multiple times with great success.

Noting that Gallup already had shown that over half of all new enterprises fail in five years, they met with business creators in Great Britain, the US and Australia in hopes of identifying the commonalities of people who repeatedly defied the odds.

And they found two. Most importantly, they discovered that 80 percent of the successful entrepreneurs intentionally relied on their intuition and knowingly integrated it with their cognitive processes in making all final decisions. Contrary to what you might imagine, they were highly practical people who routinely employed a rigorous system of financial analysis and business projections. But in the end, they acted on their hunches, and repeatedly relied on feelings to indicate what choice was best.

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What My Near-Death Experience Taught Me About Life And Leadership

Posted by on Dec 14, 2016 in Heart Leadership In Practice, Leadership, Life Lessons, Wisdom From Other Authors | 0 comments

aaeaaqaaaaaaaacaaaaajgzhyzdhogrjltriywitngjioc1izdezlwjlnjrizwfjngnkmwEarly one morning just a few weeks ago, I woke up with the intention of starting my day at the gym.  But before I ever made it out of the house, I completely blacked out, fell on a cold travertine floor and broke my ribs.

The pain from that fall was excruciating; and it immediately restored me to consciousness.  But the sheer terror of the moment instantly grew worse; I thought I was suffocating.

Hearing my moans, my wife found me splayed on the ground and largely incoherent.  Stunned and petrified, she kept asking me what had happened. But by this point, indescribable fear had set in, and all I could do was cry the words, “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe!”

Despite my grave condition, I resisted my wife’s pleas to call an ambulance.  In disbelief over my characteristic male stubbornness, she figured out a way to get me in the car and transported to the emergency room at Scripps Clinic, La Jolla. And this is when a team of brilliant doctors and nurses mobilized with the purpose of saving my life.

I could immediately see in my doctor’s face that he was highly alarmed by my condition.  Consistently – as he hurriedly worked to check my vital signs and make a diagnosis – he took time to scold me for not calling 911.

Even in my diminished state, it was obvious to me that every nurse on this triage team had a unique role to play.  As if I was watching a movie of someone else’s experience and not my own, I marveled at how brilliantly orchestrated everything was.

But a sobering reality instantly set in when my doctor told me he was rushing me into the operating room and that I’d be going under anesthesia.  It was at this moment that a nurse called my name.  Looking me straight in the eye, she pierced me with the words, “You’re going to be alright, Mark.  We’re all going to make sure of it.”

Hours later, when I came out of sedation, I learned that my left lung had collapsed in the fall, and that my heart had endured tremendous stress.  But far more disconcerting to my doctors was their discovery of a “pulmonary embolism,” a blood clot in my lungs similar to the one that recently took the life of PBS radio anchor, Craig Windham.

When I was told I was being moved into the Intensive Care Unit, only then did I fully acknowledge that my life was indeed in great danger.  I found out later that it was at this same time when nurses asked my wife if I had signed a Do-Not-Resuscitate Order.

But here’s the truth.  From that moment on, I never really feared for my life.  And it wasn’t because I was inordinately brave – or even exceptionally delusional.  My conviction that I’d fully recover had everything to do with how my doctors and nurses treated me – how they made me feel.

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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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