Author Mark C. Crowley, writer of Lead from the Heart, sits down with Money I’m Home! to discuss how workers and teams can benefit from a positive outlook in leadership.

 

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00:06 Lynne Jarman-Johnson: Money, I’m Home! Welcome in, I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson with Consumers Credit Union. From finance to fitness, we have it all for you. And today, we have a very special guest, somebody that lives across the country from Michigan, but I’ll tell you what … He is deep in the heart of something that we all really need to think deep about today, and that is, how to lead, especially during change. Mark C. Crowley is an author, the speaker of a wonderful book called Lead from the Heart, and he joins us today. Thanks, Mark.

00:37 Mark C. Crowley: Thank you, Lynne. Nice to be with you.

00:39 LJJ: Well, it’s great to be with you. I love the fact that you have a banking background, so not only are we going to talk about leadership, but we also get to talk a little bit about where your roots are.

00:50 MC: Absolutely. Yeah, I learned a lot of this in the banking world, or let’s just say I applied it to the banking world and proved that everything we’re going to be talking about actually works on bankers in every level and in every job, family, man, woman, you name it. It’s universal, what we’re going to be talking about.

01:09 LJJ: Well, we love our membership base. We have a wonderful membership of families, of business owners, of people who are looking at their finances and changing their lives. And we also have a group of employees that I can tell you right off the bat, they do lead from their heart. But it is something that we take very seriously here at Consumers. It’s a culture of love and respect. I’ll tell you what, though, Mark, there’s not a lot of companies that take that to heart, and really take what you’re talking about and bringing it home.

01:43 MC: It’s actually been a really difficult road, because the word “love” just flows right out of your mouth there, and it’s a word that most people trip over when it comes to business. In fact, and I’ve told this story before, but when the book was coming out … I’ll take a step back and tell you that the reason it’s called Lead from the Heart, it’s not metaphorical. There’s science that shows that our heart is really driving, our feelings and emotions are driving, a huge part of our decisions and our choices and our engagement, our happiness at work, and whether we want to be committed and hard-working, and loyal, and all those things. The heart actually plays a huge role in it. So, when I decided that this was the title, I was introduced to a woman who is … She’s basically a consultant to people like me. So, somebody who’s perhaps written their first book, doesn’t have much of a network, people don’t know who they are, I’m coming out of a corporate environment, etcetera.

02:42 MC: And so, her role for a $10,000 price tag, was simply to read my book, read my articles that I had written at the time, and give me a strategy for getting my word out. And what she said to me, Lynne, was … And I know this is a family show, so I’m going to clean it up. But everyone listening to this can interpret it. She used the literal word. She goes, “I’m going to tell you right now, you’re going to effing fail if you continue to use the words Lead from the Heart. And I had to make a decision because she was telling me, “You’re going to get punched in the stomach, and harshly, from people in business who think what you’re talking about is soft and weak and is inappropriate for business and will never work, and you don’t even understand business.” This was what she was trying to tell me, and she used that language. That was kind of her personality, and she meant it. She meant it, but what she was trying to tell me was, “The world isn’t really ready for this kind of a message.”

03:48 MC: And so, in many respects, she was right, because I think we haven’t gotten comfortable with this, and so I’ve had to be the Pied Piper to say, “Grow up and understand that we’re really talking about human beings and what human beings need in order to thrive. And if you approach it from that point of view, then everything else I have to say makes a lot of sense.”

04:09 LJJ: Well, what’s interesting, especially now … The whole world shuts down, and we are doing a podcast, technically, which is awesome so that I can see you, I can hear you, I can talk to you. But that true connection, I think, is what people are worried about that is broken. And what you’re talking about is all of us as leaders, no matter what role you have, have the opportunity to keep that love connection going. And yes, you can say “love” in business.

04:42 MC: Well, many people don’t even want to say the word “connection.” [chuckle] So it’s still a big hurdle. So, you guys are advanced if you’re using that word the way you’re using it. And really, what it boils down to … I’ll tell you an interesting thing. We know that human beings are hardwired to thrive on positive feelings and emotions. There’s all sorts of research that actually shows that we go into depression and we become sub-optimal in terms of our ability to perform when the balance of our experience of emotions is more negative than positive. And so, this golden rule is that, if we have at least four positive feelings per day in relationship to one negative, we’re going to be optimal, we’re thriving. So, interestingly, emotions are very short-lived. So, I say, “You look wonderful today.” That makes you feel good. That emotion will sit in you for a little while, and then it goes away. You go on a roller coaster ride, and you’re exhilarated with all that joy, and you get off and you’re like, “Okay, where’s the next one?” It doesn’t last very long.

05:55 MC: Same thing, you and your husband get into an argument. You start throwing the plates. You don’t go to the store and buy more plates. You don’t want to keep this thing going. And so, what this means is that that steady diet of positive emotions has to be continual. We have to find ways to give people that experience because that’s what creates optimal performance. A woman whose name … Barbara Fredrickson, she’s a professor at the University of North Carolina. What she has discovered …

06:24 MC: Is that we think about positive emotions, we think about joy and awe, excitement, appreciation and love. And what she has discovered, which will make you very, very happy to know, is that all of them are an experience of love. So, when you experience joy, you’re feeling love. When you’re feeling appreciated, you’re feeling love. And so when you … If you just take those moments and say, “When people feel positive emotions, it does something powerful. It transforms them in ways that makes them want to work hard and reciprocate and give back and take care of customers and do their work to the best of their abilities.” And if you’ll put that in the context of the way she’s presenting it, it’s sort of an academic understanding. It doesn’t get into the whole emotional side. Now I’m using that word emotion in a different way, where we just impulsively go, “Oh, he’s talking about like Valentine’s love or mushy love or whatever fantasy people have.” It’s what we human beings need in order to thrive, and if you give that to people, guess what? They’re going to perform in ways you can’t even imagine. That’s the essence of it.

07:40 LJJ: We like to call that a passion, having the passion for your work, the passion for your workplace where you go every day, and right now it’s different for quite a few people. But Mark, tell us, how do you build that? I know that I read in the book that it talks about how important intentional recognition is. Some people will say, “Oh, that just is … That’s fluff. Do you really need it? Can’t people just go to work?” Is that what you’re hearing?

08:10 MC: Well, you can’t just tell people to be passionate about their work and think that that’s going to happen. So, we have two forms of intelligence. If I say to you Lynne, “I really hope you’re going to be passionate when you work here.” There’s nothing inspiring about those words. There’s nothing that … But if you say, “If you bring your passion to work, you’re going to grow, you’re going to learn, you’re going to fulfill your dreams of work, you’re going to be rewarded, and this is going to be wonderful for you in your life.” Well, what did I just do? I talked to the heart in you. Now you’re feeling that like, “Wow, this could be wonderful for me. Yes, I want to be passionate about this.” So, to get somebody to be passionate, generally …There’s always the one person that comes in and just does exceptional work and they’re like, a wind-up toy. You don’t do anything to them. You can beat them up. You can love them. It doesn’t matter. They’re going to do great work

09:06 MC: But that’s not true of most people. Most people need to have a boss who cares about them, who supports them, who demonstrates in many, many ways that they’re valued, that they matter, that they want to help them grow, that they thrive in their success, they want to see them fulfill what it is that they came to work for beyond whatever the paycheck is, beyond whatever the compensation is. And, so yes, many people think, “That’s fluff,” but it goes back to what we were just talking about. You can come from your mind and say, “People should just come to work and do a good job because we’re paying them to do it,” or you can say, “Well, the science has proven over and over and over that that doesn’t work, so maybe we might want to be opening ourselves to a different way of managing people, of managing people in a way that makes them feel passionate.”

10:01 MC: So, it’s a feeling first, and then the behavior. If you just say, “Go out there and be passionate, everyone,” people are going to go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” And then you’re not going to get it, and you’re going to wonder why. So now we take everybody and we say, “Guess what, we can’t work in our offices anymore, and now we need to work from home.” Well, there’s some great stuff with that. Well, both of us are casually dressed than we wouldn’t normally be if we were working in our workplace. So, there’s some joy in that. There’s no commute. You don’t have to get on a train or get in the car and be stuck in traffic and pay the gas, and all of that stuff. And then, every once in a while, you can go smell the flowers. You can step outside your house and look around, and you’re like, “Oh, I had never seen these birds before.” And so, there’s this experience that’s pretty wonderful. You’re getting some things from this that you wouldn’t ordinarily have if you were in your office.

11:00 MC: On the other hand, you use the word “connection,” and the connection is heart. We need as human beings to be connected with other people. That’s how we thrive. So, a lot of people are missing that. They’re missing the ability just to run into people that they work with and just say hello and ask them what’s going on in their lives and have them ask what’s going on in their lives and tell jokes. And it sounds completely unnecessary until you realize, if you think back, maybe some of the conversations you’ve had with people lately where the conversation from a business standpoint should be over by now, but then they’re like, “Oh, I want to tell you about … ” And they’re going on and on and on, and you’re kind of like, “Why is this conversation going on so much longer?” It’s because we’re desperate for that connection, and this is the only way we’re going to get it.

11:49 MC: I was talking to an older brother of mine the other day, and it just went on and on and on. And we really weren’t talking about anything. It was just like, “I’m talking to my brother. I need to talk to my brother, and I’m not letting you off the phone.” And that is an inclination that says, “I need that. I’ve got to have that.” So, bosses who see the value of getting on the phone and calling people and asking them how they’re doing and how they’re handling it and what challenges do they have. We have kids at home, we’ve got to teach them. We’ve got a husband and a wife and kids all in the same house and locked down, and everybody’s trying to get their school work done and their real work done and not want to kill each other. It’s tense, and it’s challenging. So, if you have a boss that just calls you and says, “How are you doing, Lynne? And what can I do to help you?” It’s like, “Thank you. Thanks for not forgetting me that I’m out here working every day.” And so, if we just ignore people, we double down on that loss of connections, and we’re actually harming people in a really profound way.

12:58 LJJ: I tell you, one of the things too that you talk about in your book is the importance of words. And you just mentioned the fact that, yep, we can all say we want to be passion … The word passion as an example, but sincerity and how we are talking with people is a huge focal point of success for a leader.

13:20 MC: I had somewhere along the line just this idea that I never wanted people working for me to go home on a Friday night worried about where they stood. I didn’t want them to go, “Is Mark happy with my work? Am I in trouble?” ‘Cause that’s where we go. We don’t go, “I haven’t heard anything from Mark, so he must be thinking I’m doing a great job.” It’s the other way around. “I haven’t heard from him. He must not be liking what I’m doing. I’m in trouble.” And so, people sort of marinate in that, and it’s in their minds all the time. So, I always believe that it was really important to let people know how they were doing, and Lynne, if they weren’t performing, they knew it. So, there was never any ambiguity. And we were very clear with reporting, so people could see for themselves how they were doing in relationship to everybody. These are branches, and it’s a very large network of branches, and so people could see how they were doing on all the key metrics. I didn’t need to be reminding them all the time.

14:20 MC: But what I did do, was to say, if somebody is performing well, I would use the hearts. “Do you have any idea how grateful I am that you’re on my team? Do you have any idea how happy I am that I found you, that I hired you, and what a great hire you have been for me?” And that pierces people in the most positive way, but how often managers are thinking, “Well, I’m never going to say anything like that because then they going to get soft around the middle, and they’re going to take advantage of me, and they’re not going to work hard.” And so, you asked me about recognition a moment ago, and I’ll sort of tie these two pieces together. You can never over-appreciate people unless you just, “I love you, Lynne. I love you, Lynne. I love you, Lynne. I love you, Lynne.” Nobody in the world does that. In the real world, people are fighting and working hard all day long. And if they have anybody that tells them they’re doing good work once a day, that’s like, more than most people get.

15:22 MC: So, I have learned that if you can thank people and acknowledge people and make sure that they hear it directly from you, it sustains them when things are really difficult. It’s like, “Do I really want to stay here another hour and get this one last checking account or one last loan or whatever it is that we have to do here?” And when they know that they have a boss who really, truly has their back and cares about them, then it becomes, “I want to do it for Mark.” It’s not about, “I want to do it for my organization. I want to do it for him because of what he gives to me.” So, I’ll just punctuate this and say, “You cannot over-appreciate people. And if you want to lean in one direction or the other, lean in the direction of over-appreciating people.”

16:10 LJJ: Well, Mark I’ll tell you what. We believe truly at Consumers that our members are our owners, and they are our boss. And I cannot be more grateful for our members. [chuckle] What you just said is so true, and I know that everyone in our team feels the same way. And this podcast is specific to help small businesses and people who are working every single day to improve their lives from finance to fitness, and you sure helped do that today.

16:38 MC: Well, thank you very much. It’s been my pleasure.

16:40 LJJ: Mark C. Crowley. And all you have to do is go look on Twitter. He’s awesome on Twitter. Plus, do us a favor and download his book. It’s called Lead from the Heart, or you can purchase paper too. They’re still traditional.

[laughter]

16:55 LJJ: Thank you so much, Mark.

16:56 MC: Thank you, Lynne.

16:57 LJJ: I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson with Consumers Credit Union. Thank you so much Jake Esselink for your production skills. You’re always working magic. And we’ll talk to you all next week. Just send in some information on anybody you’d like us to have as a guest, and we’d love to chat with them. Lynne Jarman-Johnson. “Money, I’m Home,” with Consumers Credit Union.

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