The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk
684: Marcus Buckingham - Design Love In, The 5 Feelings Leaders Must Create, The ABCs of Authentic Leadership, and How to Unleash The Most Powerful Force in Business
Why It Matters
Understanding love as a strategic, data‑backed asset reframes how leaders approach employee engagement, customer loyalty, and growth, offering a tangible lever for improving performance. As businesses grapple with post‑COVID workforce challenges and the push for efficiency, Buckingham’s call to design love into every interaction provides a timely roadmap for creating resilient, high‑performing organizations.
Key Takeaways
- •Sold company 2017, regrets losing love-driven culture.
- •Love is measurable, most powerful force in business.
- •Leaders design experiences to shape employee and customer behavior.
- •Founder’s flame preserves love, sustaining high‑performance companies.
- •Five sequential feelings guide great leadership, order non‑negotiable.
Pulse Analysis
Marcus Buckingham, the co‑creator of StrengthsFinder and author of *First, Break All the Rules*, spent three decades studying what truly drives human performance. In his latest book, *Design Love In*, he recounts selling his own consulting firm in 2017 and immediately recognizing the mistake: the sale fragmented the love‑filled culture that had powered the business. He argues that love is not a soft, feel‑good add‑on but a structural, measurable asset that fuels both employee engagement and customer loyalty. This perspective reframes the conventional focus on efficiency and scale.
The data Buckingham cites show that love‑driven experiences generate repeat purchases, advocacy, and discretionary effort from staff. Companies that protect the founder’s flame—such as Disney, Apple, Chick‑fil‑A, and Southwest—maintain a distinct, high‑performance identity because love remains embedded in every touchpoint. By contrast, large corporations that prioritize machine efficiency often lose that emotional core, leading to silos and disengagement. Recognizing love as a quantifiable driver challenges business schools, which rarely teach how to design strategies around it, yet the evidence links love directly to superior outcomes.
According to Buckingham, great leaders must become intentional experience makers. He outlines five sequential feelings—security, belonging, significance, contribution, and love—that must be cultivated in the exact order to sustain thriving teams. The simple equation he promotes—experience drives behavior, behavior drives outcomes—replaces directive, incentive‑only tactics with purposeful design of meetings, emails, and customer interactions. Leaders who master this framework can pull rather than push behavior, creating cultures where love fuels performance, loyalty, and sustainable growth. By measuring love through Net Promoter Scores and employee sentiment, CEOs can track progress.
Episode Description
Read my new book, "The Price of Becoming." www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming
The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk
My Guest: Marcus Buckingham is a Cambridge graduate. He spent nearly 20 years at the Gallup Organization, where he co-created the StrengthsFinder assessment. He is a New York Times bestselling author of influential books, including First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths. Currently, he leads the People + Performance research at the ADP Research Institute.
Key Learnings
When you start a business, it's all about love. Seven out of 10 businesses fail, so when you start a business as an entrepreneur, you love what you do, you love your clients, and you surround yourself with people who can love it as much as you do. You all have this passionate delusion that what you're doing is really important and it's gonna work.
Marcus sold his company in 2017 and calls it the biggest mistake of his career. His company was broken down into silos, and the conversation became about maximization, compliance, and efficiency.
"Love is born savoring, it lives in intelligence, but it dies from neglect. Love dies from forgetting." (Pablo Neruda) When you stop talking about love, you destroy it.
Before you sell or scale, ask: Will this lead to more customers falling in love with your company and more employees saying they love working there? If the answer isn't obvious yes, then don't do it.
Great companies protect the founder's flame. Walt Disney, Truett Cathy and Chick-fil-A, Apple's passion for design, Southwest Airlines, and Herb Kelleher. When companies lose their connection to the founding passion, they become the machine. The machine doesn't have a soul, and people can all feel it.
Love is the most powerful force in business. If you want to drive productive human behavior, repeat visits, advocacy, loyalty, collaboration, high performance, the precursor to that is love.
But we don't say the word. Marcus was with 30 C-suite executives, and they spent two hours talking about data. They couldn't even say the word, love. They came to say it about customers, but never about their own employees.
The job of a leader is to change human behavior. You're not paid to hit a goal. You're paid to change behavior so that you hit various goals. You've got two choices: directive (which works temporarily) or designing experiences.
If you want sustainable behavior change, experiences drive behaviors, which drive outcomes.
The best leaders are skilled experience makers. That email you just sent? It's an experience. That meeting? It's an experience. Onboarding? It's an experience. Every touchpoint is picking up what you're putting down.
Culture is just a series of experiences.
Either you are getting people to say "I love that," or you've failed to change their behavior.
"If you are faking your beliefs, I can smell it, and I don't want to follow it." Authenticity is manifested in your beliefs, and they better be coherent with who you authentically are. Your customs are the living manifestation. The things you customarily do have got to flow from your authenticity and your beliefs. The best leaders have their ABCs line up beautifully - they are authentically who they are, you know exactly what they believe, and their customs bring those authentic beliefs to life.
The biggest driver of engagement is your local team leader, not the culture of the company. The culture is like the river, but there's a lot of different eddies. You join a company, but the sun, the moon, and the stars of your work is that local leader. The most important decision you make is who you make the leader of that team.
A, B, C: Authenticity, Beliefs, Customs. We reach for authenticity in our leaders. We don't want perfection; we want authenticity because that leads to prediction. If you are authentically you, then I can predict you. I'm not expecting you to be perfect. I want you to be predictable.
The definition of love to Marcus: Love is an experience that helps me feel more fully myself over time. Which is flourishing. Most of us go through life balled up like an armadillo, surrounded by armor plating. But inside of us, we want to take what's inside and express it. Love is a forward-facing emotion. We're anticipating goodness, and we have to take the armor off one plate at a time.
A question for all leaders: What are the things I could practically do to get people on my team to feel like they are safe enough to express their best self on this team?
The five sequential feelings of love:
Control: "What's this world you've invited me into, and how does it work? "
Harmony: "You have to tell people that you know what they're feeling."
Significance: "Do you know my story?"
Warmth of Others: "Who's with me? How can they help?"
Growth: "How will this experience make me more capable?"
If a leader understands the five feelings, they have a blueprint to get your team where you want them to go.
Marcus's Audi story: he loved his Audi, then at the end of the lease, he got a robocall. "You are at the end of your lease. You have not turned in the car. You have one week remaining, or you will be charged $500." He wasn't planning to turn it in. He was planning to get another one. Next week, same robocall. He leaned out. It was jarring because he was excited, and Audi was pissed off. They lost him for five years.
Audi didn't take harmony seriously. They don't design for experiences; they design for processes. The person at the dealership is in a different silo than the person writing the script for the robocall. No one creates a holistic experience map.
We don't design for experiences; we design for processes. Go to a hospital. It's one handoff after another. The person who's supposed to hold the narrative together is you, the patient. The whole thing has been designed for efficiency, not for a holistic experience. Undesigned experiences lead to unpredictable outcomes.
Disney builds a berm around the whole park so you can't see out. You can't see the Red Roof Inn next door. Universal Studios doesn't do that. Six Flags doesn't do that. Why? Because Disney is trying to create a holistic experience. These companies think holistically about a human having an experience.
The best leaders, when you ask "How do you motivate people?" always say "It depends." It depends on the person. At some point, the experience has got to be individualized. Don't start there. That's why this is sequential. Start with control, then harmony, then significance. Tell them you understand their story and what will change because of that story.
The hospitalist movement in hospitals produced the best patient outcomes. They give each patient a guide all the way through the handoff process. Their entire job is to explain you to all the other healthcare professionals and to explain all the other healthcare professionals to you. As a result, you feel held.
If you love anyone, you don't imagine they're ever finished. Love is a forward-facing emotion. Growth is the fifth feeling, not the first. We get this wrong when we think about designing love. We build it backwards. We start with growth and warmth. No. What's happening is feeling by feeling, we're taking off one plate of armor. If you haven't taken off the first four, you can't hit them with growth.
The simplest thing leaders could do: check in with each of your people for 15 minutes, one by one, every week. Ask them:
How'd you feel about last week?
What are you working on this week?
How can I help?
Do that 52 times a year with each person individually, and you'll hit control, harmony, and over time significance.
Marcus is creating an app with an AI design partner. He doesn't want his kids to grow into a world accepting loveless schools, loveless hospitals, loveless workplaces. The app will have a slider: loving/unloving. Let's call it what it is. It's love or not love. It's not okay to live in a loveless world, and we should call out unloving when we see it.
Reflection Questions
What would happen if you asked yourself before every major decision: "How does this help our customers love us more? How does this help our employees love working here more?"
Are you designing experiences or just optimizing processes? What's one touchpoint in your customer or employee journey that feels mechanical and could be redesigned to feel more human?
Which of the five feelings (control, harmony, significance, warmth of others, growth) are you strongest at creating for your team? Which one are you weakest at, and what's one thing you could do this week to improve it?
Time stamps
00:00 Marcus Buckingham Intro
02:21 The Biggest Mistake: Selling My Company
05:55 Can You Scale Without Losing Love?
07:59 Protecting the Founder's Flame
12:03 Why CEOs Can't Say the Word "Love"
15:42 Your Job: Change Human Behavior
17:55 Experiences Drive Behaviors Drive Outcomes
21:42 Love Is Five Sequential Feelings
25:40 Jesse Cole and Josh D'Amaro: Real Love in Action
29:50 How Do You Prove ROI?
31:32 The Local Leader Drives Everything
32:09 The Scatterplot: Same Company, Different Experiences
33:43 ABCs: Authenticity, Beliefs, Customs
35:41 What Love Actually Means: Flourishing
38:28 The Five Feelings Blueprint
39:00 Feeling #1: Control (What World Am I In?)
40:28 Feeling #2: Harmony (Do You Know What I'm Feeling?)
43:43 We Design for Processes, Not Experiences
47:34 Feelings #3, #4, #5: Significance, Warmth, Growth
53:04 The Simplest Practice for All Leaders: Weekly 15-Minute Check-Ins
57:37 EOPC
More Learning
#467: Marcus Buckingham - How Love and Work Must Be Forever Linked
#305: Marcus Buckingham & Ashley Goodall - A Leader's Guide to the Real World
#676: Jesse Cole - Built for the Fans (Obsession & Excellence)
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