In most offices, the conversation starts with KPIs, OKRs, and the next earnings call. Mark C. Crowley wants it to start with a heartbeat.
“Well-being is not wellness,” he insists. “Yoga mats and kombucha on tap won’t move the needle. What moves it is the week-to-week emotional score employees give to their own experience. When that inner report card is green, every hard metric—sales, safety, customer love—rises with it. When it’s red, the numbers bleed.”
Crowley, a former top-tier financial-services executive, came to this conclusion after watching spreadsheets triumph over souls for two decades. His 2011 bestseller *Lead from the Heart* argued that management is first a cardiac exercise, not a cognitive one. His forthcoming book, *The Power of Employee Well-Being*, backs the claim with 15 years of neuroscience, Gallup data, and field experiments: the strongest predictor of sustained high performance is how people feel—about the work, the team, and most of all, the boss.
“The relationship with one’s manager is the culture,” he says. “Everything else is commentary.”
Perks, he argues, are corporate junk food: fast, photogenic, nutritionally empty. Real nourishment comes from four manager behaviors:
1. **See me**: frequent, two-way check-ins shorter than a coffee run.
2. **Free me**: clear the path so the employee’s talent can solve problems that matter.
3. **Grow me**: micro-learning and stretch assignments delivered in the same week, not at annual review time.
4. **Cheer me**: specific, timely recognition tied to purpose, not poster slogans.
Crowley calls these “pulse practices.” Done weekly, they outperform annual engagement surveys the way compound interest beats a lottery ticket. “Ask three questions: Did you feel valued? Did you learn something new? Do you believe your work mattered to someone today? Act on the answers within 72 hours, and the next week’s scores jump 8–12 percent. We’ve tracked it across 22 companies.”
The stakes are higher than HR headlines. Disengagement is now the largest global tax on healthcare costs, absenteeism, and churn—$8.8 trillion a year, according to Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace report. Crowley notes the curve hasn’t budged in 12 years. “We keep surveying prisoners and wondering why the jail won’t redecorate itself.”
His prescription: stop measuring engagement and start engineering belonging. “Belonging is the primal nutrient,” he says. “Without it, the brain stays in threat mode, cortisol floods the system, and executive function—creativity, empathy, foresight—shuts down.” Conversely, a felt sense of tribe triggers oxytocin and dopamine, the neurochemical tandem that powers curiosity and grit.
Crowley’s own turnaround story started in 2008 when, as a regional president at a large insurer, he inherited a unit ranked 42nd out of 44 in engagement. Instead of rolling out a wellness fair, he asked every employee two questions: “What do you love doing?” and “What’s one barrier I can remove this week?” Within 18 months, the unit vaulted to number 2 in engagement and number 1 in profit growth. “We didn’t add a single perk,” he laughs. “We subtracted fear.”
He now teaches the same method to CEOs who once treated culture as a slide in the investor deck. The cohort meets monthly, trades weekly experiments, and measures outcomes in days, not quarters. Early adopters—ranging from a 200-person SaaS shop in Austin to a 40,000-employee healthcare system in Ohio—have cut voluntary turnover 25–40 percent and lifted customer NPS 15–30 points within a year.
Crowley is adamant that none of this is “soft.” The heart, he reminds skeptics, sends more signals to the brain than vice versa via the vagus nerve; ignore those signals and you’re managing a partial employee. “Leadership is a cardiovascular event,” he smiles. “When the heart’s not in it, the head follows it out the door.”
The payoff, he says, is a virtuous circle: employees who feel safe bring their full neural bandwidth to work; customers feel the difference in every interaction; investors get the only metric that ultimately matters—sustained, human-driven growth.
In short, Crowley wants to replace the quarterly earnings call with a weekly heartbeat check. Because in the race between burnout and balance sheets, the heart is still the fastest runner.