‘We've Never Taken This Seriously’
Management expert Mark C. Crowley has been making the same argument about what employees need for 15 years. Are CEOs finally ready to listen?
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In a field obsessed with the next big thing, Mark C. Crowley doesn’t bite on trends.
His consistent message: People have human needs. Meeting those needs drives performance.
For the people in the back: Caring about your employees is the single best thing a leader can do — for the employee and the business.
While management buzzwords have come and gone, Mark hasn’t moved.
Until now — sort of.
What’s new: A focus on employee well-being.
It turns out engagement was never it.
“Engagement is a multi-billion dollar industry. Everybody’s talking about it. Nobody’s doing anything about it. Because clearly if we were, it would have gone up a couple points — 10 points, something — but it’s still sitting at 30 percent.”
That pivot led to his latest book, The Power of Employee Well-being — and I’ll just say it: it’s genuinely excellent. Short, sharp, and long overdue.
In this interview, we dig into how companies that invest in well-being outperform the stock market, what belonging looks like in the age of agentic AI, and why he’s optimistic about the future of work.
I’m a tough customer — in my comments on Mark’s LinkedIn posts and this interview. When I asked him about whether we’ll ever be able to outmaneuver the patriarchy in supporting well-being, he didn’t flinch.
And in the end, he may have even warmed my skeptical soul.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. The full interview is on my YouTube.
Ellen Griley: Your book was one of the first things that I read that really just came out and said, “Treat your employees like humans.” And it’s not a huge book. It’s a primer. I think I read it in maybe two nights, if not one night. Why did you want to write this book right now?
Mark C. Crowley: That word — “primer” — I forget if I’ve told the story, but when COVID hit, and the gyms closed, I just impulsively woke up the next day and said, “I’m going to go walk on the beach.”
I walked on the beach every morning and found out it was the most wonderful thing — never go back to a gym at five o’clock in the morning if you don’t have to.
So, one day I’m coming off the beach and all of a sudden this word “primer” hits me. I was like, am I supposed to pay attention to this?
I asked a friend of mine who’s sort of spiritually in the know: “Am I supposed to take advantage of this? Am I supposed to do something with this?” And she goes, “Yep, that’s your gift from the universe.”
In his book about creativity Rick Rubin basically says that that’s the way it works: You download this information [you are sent], and if you don’t take action on it, it’s going to be given to somebody else — not to punish you, but because of the timing.
That was one reason.
[Another was that] I wrote an article in 2012 or 2013. Gallup gave me permission to be the person to say that engagement in America is at a crisis level. Only 30% of Americans are engaged. And [at the time] I’m like, “Oh my God, that’s horrible. What would happen if we could change that? When people are really fully engaged, what would happen to organizations?”
Then, a year-and-a-half ago, I get this email from Gallup. I open it up and it says, “Engagement falls to 11-year low.” And I’m thinking, well, how in the world is that possible after all the focus that we’ve put on this? The numbers are the same as they were when I wrote that article all those years ago. And I instantaneously said, “We’ve never taken this seriously. We’ve got to stop talking about [engagement].”
Engagement is a multi-billion dollar industry. Everybody’s talking about it. Nobody’s doing anything about it. Because clearly if we were, it would have gone up a couple points — 10 points, something — but it’s still sitting at 30 percent which just says Wall Street never cared about it, CEOs never cared about it, no one was ever held accountable for it.
It ends up just annoying people because they get surveyed, they go, “I’m working for a really toxic manager and I’m going to leave if you don’t fix it.” And then 90 days later, or six months later, they’re asked, “Tell us about the conditions of your workplace and what suggestions you have.” Their answer is: I’m still working for the same person. Nothing’s ever been done.
So it was the combination of the word primer, that email, and one more piece of evidence that came out weeks later. That’s the research that you read in the book from Oxford that basically showed that employee well-being has a direct correlation to all good things: elevated productivity, elevated retention, elevated loyalty, elevated profitability.
When I saw that — that’s just confirmation of everything that I’ve been talking about for the last 15 years.
So it was like, I’m supposed to write this book. I’ve got to make the point that it’s time to move on from engagement.
Ellen Griley: Your book made me think of Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer’s book Dying for a Paycheck. It has very similar research and he pulls on the same threads. I also read Work Forward CEO Brian Elliott’s Substack. The three of you say very similar things.
And the three of you have something else in common: You all — with all due respect — look like a CEO. You look like a person that a CEO would have in his C-suite as a trusted advisor. So, are CEOs listening to you?
Mark C. Crowley: Some are and some aren’t. When I came out with Lead from the Heart, I thought it would be an advantage that I was a man — like, “Huh, didn’t expect that. We would much more likely attribute that kind of a title to a woman.”
But on top of that, you know, I managed stockbrokers. I managed investment advisors. That is sort of a dog-eat-dog world where people are on commissions. They don’t get paid unless they sell. So it’s, you know, throw meat at them. That’s the mentality.
So I thought I had an advantage.
But [as a society] we have a deeply entrenched belief system that says people will not work hard unless you force them to. And so when I say, “Care about your people,” it’s like, are you insane? Have you ever worked in a workplace?
“Outlier nut job” is the way I think people saw it.
So I started writing for Fast Company. I just had my 50th and 51st article come out. I did that on purpose. I thought it would be, I’m just going to drip on people so that they can go, hey, he’s not insane. That makes sense.
I did the podcast — same reason — eight years ago, so actually people could hear me and go, huh, he’s not insane.
Today I’m getting more invitations from CEOs to come speak and consult. I’m having to say no to some, because something is happening.
We started talking about this before you were recording, but I think this is because it’s bottom up. CEOs are realizing that people are really unhappy. They’re getting the feedback.
And people, you know, you’ve got it in your report. Burnout is at a record high. People are incredibly stressed.
So some CEOs are getting on board with this. I just spoke to one of the largest law firms in the country and they were all over it. And I left there just like, you know, Jiminy Cricket! I was so excited because they were on board.
But I also spoke to another firm that’s in an industry that you wouldn’t even think would have me in — I won’t call it out.
There was sort of like, hey, not so sure kind of a thing afterwards.
So it’s happening. It’s just continuing to happen slowly.
Ellen Griley: I’ve been reading about the neuroscience of organizational change lately, and there’s a study that blew my mind: if you’re standing at the bottom of a hill estimating the incline, having someone next to you makes it look less steep. Just thinking about climbing it with someone makes it seem easier. I just thought that was so incredible and just such a great underscoring of what you point to in your book about belonging.
You make the case that belonging is one of the most overlooked drivers of well-being. When so much right now is chipping away at it — DEI programs being dismantled, the threat of the forever layoff — how do people find belonging in organizations today?
Mark C. Crowley: I mean, there are other things going on, too. When COVID hit, we got comfortable being by ourselves because we had to be, right? We can’t go out, can’t go be with anyone, can’t be doing anything social.
So we got used to having food delivered. We got used to staying in and streaming or watching Netflix.
In other words, we’re coming at it at a deficiency already.
Most leaders don’t even understand the importance of belonging. It’s just like, “Hey, Ellen, I need you to do this. Bill, I need you to do this. Tom, I need you to do this. Go do this.”
Instead of saying, “Hey, I’d like for the three of you to work on this together because it would give you something that you would need as a human being in order to thrive.”
We just simply don’t think about that.
But then you create an environment where some people feel a lack of fairness, and you’re never going to have any belonging. Belonging is actually a pretty sophisticated thing.
The Oxford researchers, they asked millions of people, of all the things that mean something to you in terms of your well-being, what do you point to as being the most important? And they said, “Belonging.”
So we need to pay attention to this because if you want a thriving team, you better knock off the one that’s the most important aspect of it.
We hire people into the organization and then we somehow decide to marginalize some over others, right? Fairness is a big component of this. Is everybody being treated the same way?
I think it’s also irrespective of whether there’s a DEI program or not — it’s whether people feel that they can be who they are, in all dimensions.
So, you went to Notre Dame. I went to UCSD. If those schools were rivals, I’m not going to treat you as well because I don’t want your football team beating my football team.
It sounds crazy, but this unfortunately plays into how we do things.
So it’s just understanding that what people want are the two drivers of belonging: knowing that you can be who you are and that you have psychological and emotional safety.
You can speak your mind, you can be who you are, you can carry yourself as who you are, and that’s respected not just by your boss — which is critically important, because if you don’t, you’re going to be out the door — but by the people you work with.
Ellen Griley: When we see this in the context of what we saw this week, where Coinbase is laying off —
Mark C. Crowley: Ten percent.
Ellen Griley: … yes, 10 percent of its employee population, and talking about teams of one with a bunch of different AI agents — how do you achieve belonging in that kind of environment?
Mark C. Crowley: I mean, we were talking earlier before we started recording here about the idea that we have to take things too far before we realize we’ve gone too far and we need to reverse.
That’s going to be one of them. You’re not going to have belonging if you’re working with agentic AI. Because right now, I guarantee you there are people out there that are thinking I can lay off the leadership team, bring in agentic AI and tell them, “You tell these managers what to do,” or “You tell these employees what to do.”
So they’ll actually end up reporting to AI. That is dystopian — and I think patently wrong — but somebody is going to try it.
But how in the world are you ever going to feel a sense of connection if you’re talking to technology as opposed to another human being?
So interestingly, if you were to do that, the people who have an inclination to be more independent — the ones that say I don’t need connection — the minute you put somebody working for AI, they’re going to go, I need people, where are the people?
I don’t see that working out.
But it’s being experimented with in the tech firms. And part of me thinks that it’s almost a sales pitch. “Look at us, we’re letting 10% of our people go. And if you use our technology, you can let 10% of your people go. You don’t need to have managers that are highly paid. You can just use…”
None of this has been proven.
So to the companies that just take the leap because they can show the bottom line has been affected by eliminating people at a higher salary — you’ve lowered the cost structure of your organization, and that means more profits for shareholders — I’ll say: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. There’s going to be consequences.
I would say to anybody that’s even thinking about doing that, you might slow it down a little bit, and test it because I don’t see it working well at all.
Ellen Griley: Let’s keep digging into that. If we were to start a study today, looking at the organizations that say, “Okay, we’re going to do the team of one, this is going to how we’re going to run our business” and those that adopted some of what you advocate for in your book around well-being, what would we find? What are some of the true returns that can come from investing in well-being?
Mark C. Crowley: You mean literally investing in well-being, right?
Ellen Griley: Yes. Let’s get into the ROI and why CEOs may be a little dunderheaded to not be listening to you.
Mark C. Crowley: One thing that I’ll point out is that, not only are human beings hardwired to thrive on connection and belonging, but the most painful thing we can do to people and which we do to people when we want to punish them is isolate them.
So, you know, even in prisons, the worst of the worst are sent into cells by themselves where they don’t see anybody.
That’s like the worst thing we can do to somebody because we absolutely need connection. So these companies that think that somebody is going to do well at work working with AI as opposed to other people — it’s delusional.
It’s so anti-human that people will just explode. Their mental health will explode and they’ll just end up leaving or they’ll go insane.
I mean, I know that sounds exaggerated, but it’s not a setup that’s going to work well for humans. It just simply isn’t.
The best example of this is an organization called Irrational Capital. Irrational Capital was founded by two people. One of them was Dan Ariely, who’s written three New York Times bestselling books. He’s a behavioral economist. They started off as a research firm.
And what they did was they started to go into companies and corporations and they said, we’re interested in evaluating the well-being of organizations and we’re willing to come into your organization and basically survey your people without your involvement. We’ll extract the information and we’ll share the data with you in terms of where you stack and how well you’re doing.
People were like, sure, go do it. Well, then what they did was they looked at the top 20 percent and they compared the stock performance of those organizations. And over an 11-year period, it was massively higher.
So they literally created an exchange-traded fund (ETF), which is like a mutual fund. It’s cleverly called “happy” — H-A-P-I. And in the first three years, it’s been up 25% per year. It’s beat the market significantly.
I had the other co-founder on my podcast and he said, “You know, the minute we started to announce this and started sharing our results, we had CEOs of companies saying, hey, could you put our company stock into your ETF? And we said, ‘Yeah, well, we’re totally willing to do that. As long as you get into the top 20 percent.’”
So all of a sudden now, I think you got Wall Street paying attention to this, because if it continues to outperform, instead of having Wall Street analysts or, you know, activist shareholders — which make CEOs lives miserable, saying to them, hey, we need you to drive up earnings here for the next quarter here or you’re going to get fired — they’re going to say, you need to elevate the well-being of your people because we think that drives better performance.
So I think, you know, the financial aspect of this is pretty irrefutable at this point.
If you think about the most highly successful athletes — are they eating hot dogs and hamburgers all night long? Are they getting drunk at night, not getting enough sleep?
Do we really think that you’re gonna get optimal performance out of people when their well-being isn’t being supported?
These professional athletes, they have their own hypnotist, their own nutritionist, their own trainer, their own chef, and they’re traveling with them wherever they go. Why?
Because that’s what’s going to support their success.
So this idea shouldn’t be so, well, I’m not so sure that well-being is going to drive optimal performance.
It’s like, it stands up on its own. You know, we shouldn’t have it be having this conversation like, you know, here’s another reason.
It should just be obvious.
Ellen Griley: I get the sense that you are an optimist about a lot of this. You’re nodding. Are you hearing from people who have taken this and been able to introduce some of these approaches?
Mark C. Crowley: Being invited to the senior partner meeting for one of the largest law firms in the country this past weekend was euphoric for me.
I mean, the CEO, the managing partner got up there and he goes, we could not have picked a better person for what we’re trying to do in this firm.
This is where my optimism comes from.
Because in the past we just dismissed well-being instinctively without really taking a look at it because it seems so foreign to us. It seemed like, no, we have to extract what we can out of people and deal with them transactionally and let them go when we need to. And just treat people like commodities — fungible commodities.
I think the world is beginning to realize that what’s happened is that people — employees themselves — simply don’t want this anymore. They don’t want that relationship.
If you’re going to treat me transactionally, I’ll treat you transactionally. And that doesn’t feel good either. Nobody really wants that.
That’s not to say you’re going to have a lifetime job. That’s not to say that.
It’s just for when I’m with you, treat me fairly. Treat me respectfully. Treat me with kindness and regard and advocacy and agency and help me fulfill my needs so that I can do my best work. And if that lasts for 10, 15, 20 years, great.
If it lasts for two years, you’re still getting the best out of me.
I think that’s a really good argument, and I think that it’s happening not because we’re noble, sadly, or because it’s the right thing to do, but because companies are losing good people.
And when they ask them why, they’re like, it’s because this is a shitty place to work. That’s the answer.
Ellen Griley: I think about this a lot. So many of the people who are in my audience on Substack or are my colleagues work in either internal communications or in human resources. Oftentimes we get left being responsible for engagement.
I personally believe at this moment that the kindest thing I can say to some of my colleagues is y’all, this is just a matter of investment. Give yourselves a break.
Employees are reading the room. They’re seeing the investment that their employers are making in terms of pulling back on parental leave or pulling back other benefits.
Employees are just calibrating their investment. It’s rational investor behavior. They’re calibrating their investment right back. They’re just saying, “Okay, you’re going to get the bare minimum for me.”
Mark C. Crowley: This is human nature, right? Newton said that for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. So you take something away from me, you should be expecting me to take something away from you. That’s human nature.
You know, if the company is starving, if all of a sudden we’ve lost clients, if we’re not making as much money and they come out and they go, “We really regret this, but in order to keep things going well, we need to cut this. We’re not letting you go.” I’m going to work hard because I understand the rationale and I’m grateful. I’m willing to give up that benefit in order to stay here.
But when you see Oracle lay off 30,000 people in an email, people who have been there for 20 years, which is exactly what they did, and then report record earnings, the best earnings in a decade — the duplicity of that is, I mean, I don’t know how Oracle will ever recover from that in terms of getting people to say, “Oh, it’s dinner time, but my boss wants me to look at this report.”
I’m going to have dinner, you know? I’ll look at it later.
Oracle is going to bleed for a really long time. And this is what people don’t understand — that people shut down when they feel that they don’t matter, and I use that word intentionally.
There are, there are probably six or seven books that have come out in the last year about mattering. You don’t write a book about people needing to matter if people feel that they do.
So this idea that we can just treat people transactionally and say to somebody, hey, leave your key and your badge on the and your computer on the desk, today’s your last day after 20 years.
The 20-year employee helped build the company into what it is. I mean, how do you think that that’s going to work out well? I just don’t seriously think that could possibly work out well.
It looks great on paper, and I’m sure Oracle’s stock went up, but the ability to attract talented people — why would you ever go to work for a company like that? Where you know on the first day that it comes down to us versus them, it’s going to be them. They’re going to be making the choice to get rid of us, because that’s how they’ve shown themselves.
You know what? If they wanted to lay off all those people, they could have done job freezes. They could have said, “Hey, we want to shrink our organization by this much. And we’re willing to pay people two years’ salary in order to let you go.”
Do it in a way where people are like, God bless you. Good luck to you, Oracle. I’m leaving here. I was ready to go, anyway. Or I’m willing to go try something new because of this. I want to stay home with my baby. Now you’ve given me the freedom.
Instead they just did this, you know, just dynamite the whole thing, like in cartoons. I just — I don’t see this working out for them. But I think other companies are going to try the same thing because they think they got away with it.
Ellen Griley: I’m going to ask a hard question.
Mark C. Crowley: [Smiles] These have all been easy so far.
Ellen Griley: A while ago, you wrote something in Fast Company and I picked it up and I ran with it and it. It was around the CEO who had called your approach and what you advocate for “woo-woo.”
You wrote, “deep down, many leaders continue to fear that any support they give to their people will come at direct expense of productivity.” And I wrote, “You could take this line, swap ‘productivity’ with ‘patriarchy,’ and get a far more accurate answer to the question, ‘Why haven’t companies paid attention to well-being for 80 years despite a mountain of evidence?’
Because I believe at some point we have to look at this conflation of well-being with emotion, with a softer or a more feminine approach, as upholding the patriarchy.
Do you think that this is something that we can reasonably see a shift in when there simply isn’t more balance in the C-suite in terms of gender?
Mark C. Crowley: So I don’t know that I’ve ever used the word patriarchy, but I understand exactly where you’re coming from. What I have been saying for 15 years now is that human beings have needs.
The needs that they have are ones that not only need to be supported for people to thrive, but when people thrive, they perform optimally. I’ve been saying this for 15 years — long before I wrote the well-being book.
Lead from the Heart is all about that. The idea is that making people feel safe, making them feel supported, giving them opportunities to grow, make opportunities to feel appreciated, to feel connected with people they’re working for — these are themes that I’ve been talking about for a really long time. And what I’ve expressed is these are human needs.
These aren’t male or female. However, If you stack up female leaders to male leaders, there’s evidence that not only do women tend to be more patient, more empathetic, more caring, more concerned about how people are feeling — people will describe those as more feminine traits — but they’re human traits in the sense that this is what people need, right?
There’s evidence that shows that women are better leaders, more effective — the results are better. The evidence is pretty clear.
So I look at that and go, well, what’s the difference? They’re still driving for performance. It’s all those things that I just mentioned.
There’s a mind that’s telling us we need to be exploitative of people and that we need to be thinking about how we’re going to get our numbers and work people hard. And then there’s the heart that says, you know we need to be caring about people. We need to be supportive of people because that will that’s the way to make sure you don’t kill the goose with the golden egg. You want to make sure that you can sustain people.
That’s not such a hard argument to make, right? So I don’t find this a difficult question. What I’m really saying is balance out your two forms of intelligence. Drive for performance and be caring.
If you were to go up to people and say, “Hey you used to work for Mark Crowley, what’s one word that you would use to describe him?”
You would think they’re going to say I’m a heart-led leader, whatever, caring. But I’ve done this. I’ve asked. They say, you’re the most demanding leader I’ve ever had.
It kind of surprised me, but it was like, yes, it’s both. If I asked them, and I never have, but if I said, give me one more word, they go, well, you know, you love us.
Like you care about us, you support us, right?
And that’s what I’m saying. You need to do both. This is just two dimensions of humanity, but we have said, we don’t want the heart in leadership.
We don’t think we need to care about people. If we do, they’re going to get soft in the middle. They’re going to take advantage of you. You’re not going to hit the numbers. That’s our belief system. And I’m saying, not only is that wrong, but it’s just the opposite.
The more you care about people, the more likely they are to reciprocate and to give you more than you can ever imagine.
That was my direct experience in my 25 year career. And now science backs it up. I didn’t create this based on science. I look for science to validate what I already knew to be true.
So CEOs, the thing is, the ones who are long in the tooth, you know, like if you see CEOs on a conveyor belt and this is their career, they’re going to start to come off.
And the ones that are coming up, I mean, I don’t know how you could possibly refute this. I don’t know why any but organization would hire a CEO today who continues to think that we need to, you know, basically squeeze people as much as possible and make this a win-lose proposition, I don’t see it happening.
And interestingly there’s an organization, Ernst & Young, which is one of the top consulting firms in America, and they have a chief employee well-being officer.
And when I talked to him, I was deliberately asking questions that I think are sophisticated, like if you know even half of what I’m talking about here, I’m going to be impressed. And he kept one-upping me: Yeah, we’re doing that and we’re doing this.
And I’m like, okay. These are math people. These are finance people. These are accountants, you know, largely. And so if those people are on board with this and they see it as a journey, they don’t think that they’re going to do this overnight, but they’re basically saying that in order for us to succeed here and to attract the level of people that we want, we want to go out and say, we got the MBA from Harvard and we got the the MBA from Wharton, we want to be able to go out to our clients and say, you’re working with the most sophisticated, talented, and experienced people, those are the people that quit first if they don’t get their well-being met.
So when I see that, it goes back to your question, am I optimistic and encouraged?
Yeah, because there was no such thing as a Chief Employee Well-being Officer anywhere a couple of years ago. And so this is, you know, if you’re competing against an Ernst & Young and you see the talent that they’re able to attract and retain and the productivity that they’re going to get, you’re either going to have to get on board and do the same thing in order to compete, or you’re going to get slaughtered.
And so, you know, I’m going to have my popcorn ready.
Ellen Griley: Well, thank you. Thank you for your time. You’ve left me more optimistic, I think, than I was entering this conversation.
Mark C. Crowley: Oh, good. Well, your questions were wonderful and your work is wonderful, by the way. Your report is really, really well done. So I learned from you. Thank you.
Want to learn more about Mark and his work? Visit his website or follow him on LinkedIn. He’s genuinely accessible and I appreciate his willingness to engage with folks in his comments. The Power of Employee Well-Being is available at bookstores everywhere.
In the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing some exciting news about my new Steady Work series, a 12-week cohort focused on communicating through polycrisis and uncertainty. Download my latest report and get on my mailing list so you won’t miss out.