From the Diary of Mark C. Crowley

The author of Lead From The Heart and The Power of Employee Well-Being has stopped talking about engagement. Here is what he wants leaders to measure instead, and why he says it pays.

Mark C. Crowley has a question for anyone who runs a team. Fifteen years ago, about 30% of American workers were engaged in their jobs. Since then, engagement has had more surveys, more consultants and more conference stages than almost any other idea in management. What percentage of workers would you guess are engaged today?

“If you guessed 30% you would either be cynical or humorous, and either way you’d also be right,” he says.

Gallup’s own trend bears him out. The share of U.S. employees it counts as engaged was 28% in 2010 and 31% in 2025, with a peak of 36% in 2020 in between.

Mark is a speaker, consultant and the author of two best-selling books on leadership: Lead From The Heart and The Power of Employee Well-Being, published in late 2025. He spent two decades as a senior leader in national-level positions at one of the largest financial institutions before he wrote either of them, and has reached a conclusion he’d like the rest of the field to reach with him. “I think enough time (more than enough) has passed for us to declare that our ‘focus’ on engagement has been a complete failure and it’s time we acknowledged it and stopped all the surveys et al that go with it.”

He isn’t arguing for any less ambition. He’s arguing for a different measure. “I’m saying we failed with engagement, but also there is a more informed way of achieving all the outcomes high engagement long ago promised us: more committed, energized and high performing people. And that’s to make employee well-being a leadership KPI.”

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Why the Scores Never Moved

Ask Mark why over fifteen years of engagement work produced so little improvement and he gives a list, not a theory. Wall Street never valued engagement, he says, and decided companies could achieve goals no matter how low the scores were. CEOs then never took it seriously, so HR departments took it upon themselves to launch the surveys, and without CEO backing, there was never a real commitment to improve it. The surveys took months to tabulate. No one, line managers included, was held accountable for the results, so the feedback was read and ignored. HR could check the box on conducting surveys, and employees came to resent that nothing was ever done in response to what they’d said. The questionnaires themselves were too unfocused, “with no fewer than 12 questions being asked,” so there was never any clarity on what specifically should be fixed.

Then the point he puts above all the others.

“Most important: Leaders were never required to improve their practices or do anything required to elevate engagement. The scores speak for themselves.”

Mark C. Crowley

In many organizations, he expects the surveys to carry on anyway. “I think it’s safe to say that leadership practices get passed on from generation to generation and that suggests companies will continue to do engagement surveys just because they always have. That’s honestly insane to me but it’s also human nature. We resist change even when we know doing things differently will be better.”

What he wants measured instead needs defining first, because the word gets confused with something else.

Well-Being Is Not Wellness

Mark draws a line that he says companies routinely miss.

“We conflate well-being with wellness and we must no longer confuse the two. Wellness is about an employee’s health, and companies have been known to offer meditation apps, yoga classes and weight-loss contests. Well-being is the psychological and emotional experience people have while at work or wherever they are working. And while supporting employee wellness is generous of companies, it’s only well-being that leaders have a responsibility to directly support because of its known impact on performance.”

Mark C. Crowley

That psychological and emotional experience, in his account, is made or broken mostly by the boss. When people operate out of fear, or work for a manager who shows little interest in them, gives little personal support, appreciation or growth opportunities, or fosters internal competition within a team instead of collaboration, cooperation and belonging, he says, well-being is undermined and performance goes with it. As he puts it on his profile, “Well-being isn’t an HR initiative. It’s a leadership strategy with measurable business & financial impact.”

The measuring, he argues, is the easy part, and it’s where the old surveys were weakest. Pulse surveys let a company ask employees one question at a time. The feedback can be summarized down to the individual manager and compared with peer managers, and it can be used to make immediate changes, or at least to make a manager more aware of how the team perceives them. “Pulse survey technology allows companies to ask a question one day and literally have a summary the next day.” Telling people what was learned closes the loop: “employees feel they have a voice and it is being heard.”

He is careful to add that managers can’t do it alone. In a LinkedIn post, he wrote that managers “operate inside systems that either enable them or thwart them,” and listed what organizations have to change: span of control designed around relationships rather than efficiency alone, a new model for choosing leaders, support for managers rather than responsibility alone, measurement of how results are achieved, not only whether they’re achieved, and having well-being treated as a performance KPI. “The time for bandaids is over,” he wrote.

The evidence he reaches for first is not a spreadsheet.

A Call Center in Britain

“Start with it being massively intuitive,” Mark says. High-performing athletes, and the CEOs who have caught on, do everything they can to support their wellness and well-being in order to perform. Then he turns to the study he calls “a simple and wonderful illustration of the evidence.”

Researchers from Oxford University went into a British Telecom call center where everyone had the same job and asked employees, at the end of every week, to grade their sense of well-being that week at work. “Jan-Emmanuel De Neve found that in weeks when scores were in the green (meaning high) all key performance metrics improved. Reps took more calls, made more sales, pleased more people… In weeks when feedback was in the orange or red, they went the opposite way.”

The published study, led by De Neve at Oxford’s Saïd Business School with colleagues at MIT and Erasmus University Rotterdam, tracked BT contact-center workers over six months and found them 13% more productive in the weeks they reported being happy, not by working longer hours but by making more calls per hour and converting more of them to sales.

He adds a second line of evidence from the markets. Irrational Capital, he says, has shown that the higher a company’s well-being, as assessed by its own employees, the better its stock performance.

The argument reads like a researcher’s. The career behind it was built on a sales floor.

Two Decades Before the Book

Mark’s first career was in financial services. From 2003 to 2010 he was Senior Vice President and National Sales Manager at WaMu Investment Services, directing sales management, communications and marketing for 2,200 retail branches nationwide. The investment brokerage business reached all-time-high revenue and profitability, and he was named the organization’s Leader of the Year. He led, in his own description of those years, “exactly as I now teach.” The same profile carries a line he seems happy to repeat: “I may be known as the heart leader, but people who’ve worked for me also call me ‘demanding.’”

Lead From The Heart first came out in 2011. The initial reception was not what he expected. “When I wrote that book many people assumed without any grounds that I had to be a spiritualist, a religious nut or someone who didn’t understand business,” he says. “People heard the word ‘heart,’ and immediately assumed I was arguing for soft leadership. So, once I heard this from people, I realized it would take time for people to accept my thesis and embrace it. Knowing I had science, data and my own direct experience to back me, I chose to play the long game.” The book has since been taught at 11 American universities, a second edition followed in 2022, and it carries endorsements from Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson and former Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly.

The same year the first book appeared, he began writing for Fast Company magazine, where he has been a leadership columnist for over a decade and has published more than sixty articles. In 2018 he launched the Lead From The Heart podcast, which now has an audience in 175 countries and ranks in the top 1.5% of podcasts globally. In October 2025, Berrett-Koehler published The Power of Employee Well-Being: Move Beyond Engagement To Build Flourishing Teams, with endorsements from Stanford’s Robert I. Sutton and London Business School’s Herminia Ibarra. This year, INC. Magazine named him one of its top 50 leadership and management experts.

Where the heart part came from is an older story.

The Neighbor Next Door

Asked for one person who shaped how he works, Mark doesn’t name a boss or a professor. “Mrs. Carol Whitman, my next door neighbor when I was a kid who nurtured me and ensured I believed in my talents, value and worth. I remained close to her until she died at 95 a few years ago.”

A second influence was an executive coach he was given 25 years ago. “After just one conversation, she said she had a piece of guidance for me,” he wrote in a recent post, “and it resonated so strongly, I not only never forgot it, I took her words to heart: ‘I want you to give and leave a part of yourself, your highest self, with every person you meet with.’” What he took from it is that people are always reading their leaders, “for reassurance, for direction, for proof that they matter,” and that there is rarely a neutral outcome from those interactions. “What I’ve learned: The simplest way to elevate employee well-being is to leave people better off than when you found them.”

Asked for the habit a colleague would call very him, he gave five words. “I live what I teach.”

Where Mark Is Now

The Power of Employee Well-Being has been out since October 2025, and the podcast has returned from its summer break with a run of episodes on what AI does to people at work, with guests including Financial Times reporter Sarah O’Connor, MIT’s Sherry Turkle and Salesforce’s Paula Goldman. Book sales and speaking engagements “would always be wonderful,” he says, but the goal he puts first for the next twelve months is a different one: to influence leaders at all levels that actively supporting employee well-being is in their own interest, because it’s a proven driver of performance. “Leaders often comingle caring about employees with diminished results when the science and research proves they go hand in hand. The higher the well-being, the more optimal the performance, including financial performance.”

His advice to anyone newer to the field is short. “Show some courage, match up how you lead to the needs of people today, and move on from anything and everything that has no proven benefit or reward, starting with engagement.”

Outside work, there is a routine. “Since COVID, I’ve walked on the beach every morning at 5AM before going to the gym. After years of running, I’m having knee replacement surgery and the beach walks will come to a halt for a while.”

“I believe I was put on the Earth to do this work and everything I do every day going forward will be to advance it. How we lead and manage people in our workplaces often undermines well-being and that’s a lose-lose for everyone.”

Mark C. Crowley

Asked for the one sentence he’d want to be remembered by, he sent back three words.

“Love your people.”

Five Lines from Mark’s Diary

“Love your people.”
“I live what I teach.”
“Well-being isn’t an HR initiative. It’s a leadership strategy with measurable business & financial impact.”
“The simplest way to elevate employee well-being is to leave people better off than when you found them.”
“The time for bandaids is over.”