Lead From The Heart: Transformational Leadership For The 21st Century by Mark C. Crowley

Lead From The Heart: Transformational Leadership For The 21st Century

Mark C. Crowley

304 pages, Hay House Business, 2022

There’s no doubt that the world has profoundly changed—and has become nearly unrecognizable—since my book, Lead From the Heart, was first published in 2011. In fact, when it came out, many business leaders heard the word “heart” and instinctively assumed its author had to be a spiritualist, a nut, or someone who didn’t get business. That word “heart” you see, has always conveyed soft, weak, and ineffective management.

In the decade since, however, there’s been a seismic shift in how people view leadership, their jobs, and the world of work as a whole, pushing all of us to reassess what management practices positively motivate human beings in the workplace.

Largely because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting “Great Resignation,” a fundamental shift has occurred in the relationship between employees and employers. And because people have grown incredibly weary of working for uncaring or even toxic bosses who ignore their well-being and happiness, we’ve reached an inflection point—a clearly defined moment in time—when organizations now must choose whether they will employ managers who will honor humanity rather than exploit it.

It’s now 11 years later, and I’m about to publish a fully revised and updated second edition of Lead From the Heart. In it, I make the case that we have an unprecedented opportunity to reinvent how we lead and manage people in our workplaces tied to the premise that when human beings are thriving, organizations naturally thrive as well.

One thing that’s changed for certain since 2011 is that virtually everyone now believes that our traditional model of leadership is doing more harm than good to employee well-being, engagement, and retention. And with employees the world over reassessing their jobs—and with organizations grappling with how to compete for top talent—the importance of leading from the heart cannot be overstated. I’m entirely certain that the need for the information and inspiration provided by this book is greater now than perhaps ever before. And, as you’ll read in the following excerpt, its message is backed up by emerging science which proves that how workplace managers make their employees feel is far more important to their success than they ever might have imagined.—Mark Crowley

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Someone once told me that if you learn just one new idea from every book you read, the time you invest will be well worth it. And while I surely hope you will acquire many useful insights from reading this book, there is a single piece of information I’m intentionally reiterating so you’ll never forget it: The majority of human behavior is motivated by feelings and emotions, whether we’re aware of it or not.

That’s not what philosopher René Descartes believed in the 17th century when he famously declared, “I think, therefore I am.” And his assertion proved to have great influence. Until the late 1980s, most psychologists still believed that feelings and emotions interfered with sound judgment and decision-making. “Scientists have long believed that rational thought was the dominant influence on behavior and that, when emotions played a role, they were likely to be counterproductive,” says Leonard Mlodinow, author of Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking. But today, we know things are different. “We know that emotion is as important to reason in guiding our thoughts and decisions.

When I originally wrote Lead From The Heart, I was already familiar with the groundbreaking research per- formed by Peter Salovey and John Mayer. In 1990, they not only introduced the first formal theory of emotional intelligence, they were also first to assert that Descartes was wrong. But in the years since the first edition of my book was published, several academics have gone on to reconfirm Salovey and Mayer’s conclusion—and to add stunning new findings of their own. Combined, their work adds uncommon guidance on how to successfully lead and manage human beings at work—and a consistent reminder that how leaders make other people feel matters greatly to their influence and success.

Emotions Influence Every Aspect of People’s Work Lives

“Our emotions are a big part—maybe the biggest part—of what makes us human,” says Marc Brackett, author of Permission to Feel, “and yet we go through life trying hard to pretend otherwise.”

“We believe that our ability to reason and think rationally is our highest mental power, above our unruly emotional side. This is a trick the brain plays on us. In reality, our emotions largely determine our actions. If we’re feeling something positive—confidence, optimism, contentment—we’ll come to one conclusion about what we ought to do. If our emotions are negative—anxiety, anger, sadness—our decision may be quite different even though we’re working with the same set of facts. The truth is, emotions determine what we care about in the moment. If we’re fearful, the source of that fear occupies all of our thoughts . . . And we base most of life’s decisions on how we think our actions will make us feel.”1

“Because emotions play such a role by driving employee performance,” Wharton Business School management professor Sigal Barsade told me before she passed away in 2022, “if you ignore them, you’re really managing with one hand tied behind your back. If you ignore them—or believe they aren’t important—you’re missing out on an entire area of data you can not only use to make people’s lives better, but also more effective.” As a guest on my podcast, Barsade told me, “Emotions matter just as much as cognitions because they influence what people are going to do at work—how long they’ll stay, how well they’ll perform, and how well they will interact with others.”2

Essentially, everything that happens at work is an emotional moment, says Brackett. Consequently, when we ask people what they think about certain aspects of their jobs, we should instead be asking them how they feel. In his own research, by the way, Brackett asked subjects to describe how they would most like to feel at work. The words they used included happy, excited, joyful, appreciated, supported, fulfilled, respected, valued, inspired, and accomplished.

The Power of Bad

Research by University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill psychology professor Barbara Fredrickson has shown that positive emotions directly affect human thriving. Positive emotions produce serotonin and dopamine, feel-good neurochemicals that exert influence on our thinking and behavior—and fill us with the sense that life is going our way. And while negative emotions are not always bad (they can warn us of problems deserving our immediate attention), whenever we experience them, our brains secrete cortisol, a stress hormone.

Positive Human Emotions: Happiness, Joy, Interest, Curiosity, Gratitude, Love, Contentment and Excitement

Negative Human Emotions: Sadness, Anger, Disgust, Loneliness, Fear, Rejection, Self-Criticism and Jealousy

Roy Baumeister is one of the world’s most prolific and influential psychologists. The author of 30 books, he received the highest award given by the Association for Psychological Science, the William James Fellow award, in recognition of his lifetime achievements. In 2021, he and John Tierney co-wrote The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It, a book that asserts that negative events and emotions affect human beings far more deeply than positive ones.

The authors explain that the survival of the human species essentially demanded that people approach life with a negativity bias. “To survive, life had to win every day. Consequently, our ancestors paid more attention to avoiding poisonous berries than to savoring delicious ones. One mistake could kill you. Death only had to win once.”3

Baumeister and Tierney assert that modern-day humans have yet to shake off this predilection, which explains why people today are often “devastated by a word of criticism, but unmoved by a shower of praise.”

Predicated on their discovery that one negative emotion hurts people far more than one positive emotion elevates them, Baumeister and Tierney reasoned that human well-being is dependent upon having a higher net-number of positive emotions every day. And they found their proof in the pioneering research of University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee professor emeritus Robert Schwartz:

Schwartz found that severely depressed people tended to have as many negative feelings in their daily experience as positive ones.
He showed that people with an equal number of positive feelings tended to be “mildly dysfunctional.”
People averaging two-and-a-half positive feelings for every negative one were identified as “normally functioning.”
And, people who averaged four positive feelings for every negative one were seen as being “optimally functioning.”

Based on these findings, Baumeister and Tierney introduced the expression “the power of four,”4 their reminder that it usually takes four good things to overcome one bad one.

According to Marc Brackett, Yale research found that high school students, teachers, and business professionals experience negative emotions up to 70 percent of the time they’re at school or work. Some of this, of course, can be attributed to the complexities and frustrations that come with normal life. But there are many ways workplace managers can mitigate and offset some of this negativity, starting by thinking about how their communication affects employees. Throughout my career, I always asked my assistant, Susan, to read every important document (including e-mail messages) I planned to send to my entire team. And I always asked her to tell me how my words would make everyone feel. Knowing my goal was to leave people feeling inspired, hopeful, and positive after reading my messages, she almost always challenged me to reword certain phrases or sentences to achieve a more powerful and positive effect.

Baumeister and Tierney also believe many managers unintentionally harm people when delivering critical performance feedback. While redirecting employee behavior is an essential leadership practice that can yield many positive results, it’s only effective when it is done correctly, “and most people don’t know how.”

One approach that always backfires is the use of what’s called the “feedback sandwich,” an ill-conceived practice where managers sandwich two pieces of praise around the one piece of criticism. According to the authors—and to anyone reading this who has ever been on the receiving end of it—“the feedback sandwich tends to demoralize people, and all the opening praise is often forgotten when they hear the bad stuff. And rather than inspire the worker, it does the opposite.”

According to researchers, more than three-quarters of people don’t want to be praised before being criticized; they want to be given the bad news first. And once the manager has given their employee the “bad” news, Baumeister and Tierney say their next best move is to simply stop talking. That’s because a pause allows the person to absorb the blow and it lets the manager gauge the employee’s reaction. And once the performance shortcoming is communicated, the manager’s focus should immediately pivot to how the employee can make things right.

As we now know that most people take it rather hard when receiving a critique from their boss, managers also should seek to leave their employees feeling encouraged, not deflated, before the coaching session ends. In The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle says the most thoughtful way of accomplishing this is to say, “I’m giving you this feedback because I have very high expectations of you, and I know you can reach them.”

Love Is the Supreme Emotion and the Core of All Positive Emotions

While working on an article I was writing a few years ago, I had an opportunity to interview Gallup Research CEO Jim Clifton. Knowing his firm had been studying workplace and leadership effectiveness for decades, I ended our conversation by asking him, “If you could boil down employee engagement to just one thing—one prime influence—what do you think it would it be?”

And in what proved to be an unexpected yet hugely confirming response, he said, “I think you’re going to find that what most people really are seeking is love.”

What made Clifton’s words so impactful to me was that he made no effort to explain away the truth. His conclusion was the result of years of research and he stated it without equivocation.

For the past two decades, Barbara Fredrickson has been studying the science of human emotions. The author of Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection, and the recipient of the American Psychological Association’s Templeton Prize for Positive Psychology, she happens to have landed on the exact same conclusion as Jim Clifton.

Fredrickson believes we’ve long misunderstood love to be one of the positive emotions when, in fact, “love is the feeling of any positive emotion when experienced with another person or group.” In other words, joy is an experience of love, interest is an experience of love, appreciation is an experience of love.

Fredrickson’s work proves the human body was designed to thrive on love — “to live off of it”— and that it changes how our brains work. Calling it the “supreme emotion,” she says, “love transforms people into making them more positive, resilient, optimistic, persistent, healthier, and happier.” Conversely, “the body’s biochemistry is very negatively affected when it’s not consistently received.”

In relating her work to how it affects our understanding of employee engagement, Fredrickson explains that no emotion is long-lasting and people need to frequently experience positive emotions in order for engagement to remain high: “As eating one stalk of broccoli isn’t enough to make us healthy, we need a steady diet of these momentary connections to have an impact. And, given that people spend more time at work than anywhere else, their ability to thrive is really dependent on them having these moments on the job.”

Coincidentally, I interviewed Fredrickson while doing research for the same article I was working on when I met with Jim Clifton. And it was also at the very end of our conversation when she told me that her research fully confirms that a person’s engagement at work is both established and sustained by feelings of love. “When people are made to feel cared for, nurtured, and growing, that will serve the organization well. Because those feelings drive commitment and loyalty just like it would in any relationship. If you feel uniquely seen, understood, valued, and appreciated, then that will hook you into being committed to that team, leader, and organization. This is how positive emotions work.”

The lesson I hope you’ll take away from all the recent research on human emotions is really the underlying theme of this entire book. If you dream of building an exceptionally committed and productive team, love your people.