Why Love and Work Are Not Opposites: Marcus Buckingham's Business Case for Designing Love In

Marcus Buckingham joins Craig Dowden to explain why love and work aren't opposites, why unloving practices quietly wreck performance, and how leaders can design love back into their teams.
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For 25+ years Marcus Buckingham has researched what makes people thrive at work. In this episode, he joins Craig Dowden to unpack his new book, Design Love In, and why love, not engagement or satisfaction, is the most powerful and measurable force in business.

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TL;DR

What is the connection between love and work? Marcus Buckingham argues love isn't a soft add-on to work, it's the most powerful, measurable driver of loyalty, performance, and growth. When organizations design experiences that let people feel more fully themselves, they get outcomes nothing else can produce.

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Why does love die in growing companies? Not from being killed, but from neglect. As organizations scale, conversations shift to KPIs, compliance, and performance ratings, and love simply stops being discussed.

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What are "unloving" workplace practices? Common ones include oversized spans of control (like one nurse supervisor for 40 nurses) and unnecessary handoffs that force people to repeat their story over and over.

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Can tough feedback still be loving? Yes. Buckingham argues that honest, difficult conversations, delivered with someone's flourishing in mind, are often the most loving thing a leader can do.

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The Question Every Leader Should Be Asking About Love and Work

Most leadership conversations avoid the word love entirely. Chief Human Resources Officers can't say it. General counsel teams are built partly to protect companies from getting too close to employees. And yet, according to Marcus Buckingham, love and work were never meant to be separate conversations, they're the same conversation, just one most organizations have stopped having.

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Buckingham has spent over 25 years researching human performance, beginning at Gallup, where he co-created StrengthsFinder with Donald O. Clifton. He's the New York Times bestselling author of First, Break All the Rules, Now, Discover Your Strengths, StandOut 2.0, and Nine Lies About Work. His newest book, Design Love In, makes the case that love is not a coating of niceness on top of business, it's an ingredient you can design directly into how you onboard people, review performance, serve customers, and lead teams.

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In this episode of Do Good to Lead Well, host Craig Dowden asks Buckingham to unpack that argument, starting with a very personal story.

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Why Buckingham Opened His Book With His Own Failure

Buckingham built The Marcus Buckingham Company (TMBC) from 2007 to 2017, creating a strengths-based technology called StandOut. Like any founder, he describes the early years as powered on love: love for the product, the mission, the team, the customers. In January 2017, he sold the company to ADP, then a Fortune 50 business with roughly 3,000 salespeople, believing the acquisition would expand his mission's reach.

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Six months later, something had shifted. Conversations that used to be about ideas and people had become conversations about KPIs, OKRs, compliance, and performance ratings. As Buckingham puts it, quoting the poet Pablo Neruda, love is born in savoring and lives in intelligence, but "love just dies from neglect." Nobody killed it on purpose. The company simply stopped talking about it, and it quietly disappeared.

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That experience became the reason Buckingham wrote Design Love In. He didn't want to build businesses, raise his kids, or bring customers into what he calls "loveless" environments. And the data he's spent decades collecting backs up his instinct: institutional trust in large organizations, from government to media to healthcare, has been sliding for years, and it's not a coincidence.

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How Marcus Buckingham Actually Defines Love at Work

Ask most executives to define a positive experience for an employee or customer, and Buckingham says the word people instinctively reach for is love: "I love that leader," "I love that team," "I love that brand." For years, he dismissed this as careless exaggeration for like, joy, or passion. Eventually he stopped rejecting the word and started taking it seriously as data.

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His conclusion was that love is a deep and unwavering commitment to the flourishing of another human. Every time someone says I love that, whether about a pair of socks or a mentor, they're describing the same underlying experience, feeling a little more fully themselves, a little more able to express what's unique inside them. Buckingham describes people moving through life wearing armor, protecting themselves from a world that often demands conformity instead of authenticity. A loving experience is one that lets a person remove a piece of that armor.

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This reframes love from a soft HR topic into a design problem. If love is the most powerful driver of behavior in business, and Buckingham's research says it is, then leaders should be deliberately designing it into onboarding, customer service, performance reviews, and even how people are let go.

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The Data Behind Why Only "Fives" Matter

One of the more counterintuitive parts of the conversation is what Buckingham calls the curvilinear relationship between experience and outcomes. Most leaders assume that moving a customer or employee's experience rating from a two to a three, or a three to a four, produces a proportional improvement in outcomes like retention or productivity. Buckingham's research says that assumption is wrong.

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Picture a J-curve, similar to water reaching its boiling point. Moving someone from a two to a three, or a three to a four, barely moves the needle on their future behavior. It's only when an experience becomes a five, a genuine "I love that," that you can predict what someone will do next: work harder, stay loyal, advocate for the brand. Everything below a five, in Buckingham's words, is simply not love, and not predictive of anything.

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That's why he pushes leaders to stop combining fours and fives into a top two box metric, or nines and tens into an extreme NPS category. Doing so hides the one number that actually matters.

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Everyday Practices That Quietly Design Love Out

Buckingham points to two ordinary, seemingly sensible business practices that are quietly unloving:

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  • Oversized spans of control. In many U.S. hospitals, one nurse supervisor oversees roughly 40 nurses, far too many to notice what any individual nurse is going through on a given day. Attention, Buckingham argues, is the cousin of love: you can't love what you can't see.
  • Unnecessary handoffs. Every time a patient, customer, or employee has to repeat their story to a new person, whether in a hospital, a bank, or an airline, that handoff may be efficient for the organization, but it drains value from the relationship.

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Neither practice is malicious. Both are simply the natural output of organizations optimizing for efficiency over connection, without realizing the cost.

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Tough Love May Be the Most Valuable Kind of Love

Perhaps the most provocative idea in the conversation is Buckingham's claim that tough love, including firing someone, can be a profoundly loving act. If a role doesn't let someone express the best of themselves, keeping them in it out of comfort or avoidance isn't kindness. Buckingham describes the hardest version of this: sitting someone down, telling them you still love them, and telling them the job isn't right for them, precisely because you care about their flourishing.

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This reframes accountability as compatible with, not opposed to, a loving culture. Leaders who avoid difficult conversations in the name of being "nice" may actually be withholding love, not protecting it.

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The ABCs of Leading With Love

Buckingham offers a simple framework for leaders who want to build love into how they show up day to day:

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  1. Authenticity: Who are you, really? Followers don't need a leader with every competency; they need someone who is genuinely themselves rather than performing a role that doesn't fit.
  2. Beliefs: What do you deeply believe, and have you said it out loud? Naming your non-negotiables reduces followers' anxiety about the future.
  3. Customs: What do you repeatedly, deliberately do? Customs are the visible, predictable rituals that bring your authenticity and beliefs to life.

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A Blueprint for Rebuilding Trust: Five Feelings, in Sequence

When Craig asks how a leader should approach rebuilding trust in a low-engagement organization, Buckingham offers a sequential blueprint of five feelings, each one a plate of armor coming off:

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  1. Control: What is this world, and how does it work? People want clear rules and expectations before anything else.
  2. Harmony: Do you know what I'm feeling, and do you care? Naming emotions, rather than ignoring them, builds connection.
  3. Significance: Do you know my story, and do you care? This is where individualization matters.
  4. Warmth of others: Who's with me, and how can they help me? Isolation is the enemy here.
  5. Growth: How can you help me be more capable tomorrow? Love is forward-facing.

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The sequence matters: Buckingham wouldn't tell a low-trust organization to start with individualization. Start with clarity and control, then build outward.

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Check out these articles to help hone your skills even further:

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Craig Dowden

CEO
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