Mark Crowley
Mark C. Crowley - Leadership and Management Author
Employee Engagement Won’t Get Better Until We Change How We Lead
Survey after survey reveals the top issue facing organizations today is employee engagement – more specifically, how to build a workplace culture that not only attracts and retains great people, but one that also delivers sustainably greater financial performance.
Making this happen is proving far more difficult than most companies ever imagined. In mid 2013, Gallup announced that only 30% of American workers were fully committed in their jobs. Gravely concerned by these statistics, organizations quickly mobilized by introducing ambitious initiatives to rapidly turn things around. And at the start of 2017 – three-plus years later – engagement has actually fallen to just 28%.
Whatever it is we’re collectively doing to fix the problem, clearly isn’t working.
It was Albert Einstein who famously said, “We can’t solve problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them,” and leadership and millennial expert, Mark C. Crowley, believes Einstein’s logic applies here.
It’s Mark’s conviction that “restoring high engagement will continue to prove illusive until we adopt entirely new leadership methods and approaches.” Mark’s challenge to ambitious, courageous and enlightened organizations is to embrace the idea that traditional ways of motivating human performance are mismatched to the 21st Century workplace.
Mark has devoted nearly a decade to studying what truly inspires greatness in the workplace – and that’s after spending twenty years as a high-performing senior leader in the dog-eat-dog financial services industry. And he’s made these important discoveries:
- More than anything else, feelings and emotions drive human performance – what people care about and commit themselves to most in their lives.
- Consequently, leaders and companies that intentionally make people feel valued, supported, developed and cared for experience phenomenal loyalty, commitment and performance.
- While we often think employee engagement is driven by attractive pay schemes, Mark’s research proves we have it all wrong. Employee engagement is a decision of the heart, not the mind.
Mark C. Crowley’s mission is to influence organizations across the globe to adopt new leadership practices that match up to what groundbreaking scientific research has proven: When we give employees what they need in order to thrive as human beings, they instinctively respond by committing themselves fully in their jobs.
Mark is recognized as a major thought leader in workplace leadership:
- His Amazon best-selling book, Lead From The Heart, is being taught at five American universities.
- He’s a frequent contributor to Fast Company Magazine, and has been published by USA Today, the Huffington Post, The Seattle Times, Reuters, Gallup, and The Great Place To Work Institute.
- Two of his most recent LinkedIn Pulse articles, Millennials Don’t Want Fun; They Want You To Lead Better and Employee Engagement Isn’t Getting Better, have been read over 1 million times.
- In its article, “Four Radical Leadership Practices That Will Dramatically Increase Engagement,” Forbes Magazine spotlighted Mark’s work saying his ideas “represent the future of workplace leadership.”
- As a former senior executive at one of the nation’s largest financial institutions, he was named “Leader Of The Year.”
- Mark was named a “Trust Across America 2016 Visionary” by TRUST! Magazine and has over 100,000 Twitter followers.
Mark has interviewed CEOs and senior leaders at path-cutting firms including Google, SAS, Gallup, Wharton, The Cleveland Clinic, The Conference Board and Parnassus Investments, and has discovered the unique leadership practices they use to drive extraordinary workplace happiness (and profits).
As a truly compelling keynote speaker, Mark has spoken to diverse groups including A&E Television, Yahoo!, the Washington Banker’s Association, UCLA Law School, and the Young President’s Organization’s (YPO) Global Conference. Mark also was invited to give the commencement address to Masters and Ph.D graduates at both Colorado Technical University and Brandman (Chapman) University.
The essence of the Mark’s message defies traditional business wisdom but is backed by ground-breaking medical science: When you lead from the heart, your people will follow.”
