Most leadership advice arrives wrapped in the language of strategy and performance: metrics, alignment, execution. 

Cynt Marshall, the retired CEO of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, offers something that sounds almost old-fashioned by comparison. Her formula for leading people comes down to three words: listen, learn, and love. 

When she brought that philosophy to High Point University in North Carolina this spring, she made the case that it is precisely this warmth that produces extraordinary results.

Marshall, who serves as HPU’s Sports Executive in Residence, addressed students in the Callicutt Life Skills Theater for a Life Skills and Leadership Series session titled “Motivation with a Mission: Leading with Faith, Joy, and Grit.” 

The talk drew on the same people-first approach she used to help turn around one of the NBA’s most prominent organizations.

The Three L’s

The framework HPU students took away was deceptively simple. Marshall lives by “three L’s,” and she describes her faith as intertwined with all of them. 

Listening means actually knowing the people you lead. Learning means staying humble enough to grow. Loving, in Marshall’s usage, means caring about employees as whole people rather than as instruments of output.

She is not, she told students, the kind of reclusive CEO who prefers the quiet of an office to the company of a team. To lead with love, she said, a leader has to understand who employees really are: their dreams, their experiences, the baggage they carry, and who they are when they get out of bed in the morning.

Why Caring Comes Before Results

Marshall’s central claim inverts the usual order of business priorities. Care about the person first, she argues, and the performance follows. 

“You want them to feel cared for because you’re in charge,” she told the High Point University audience. “People need to know you care about them and you love them. And if you can ever get yourself to genuinely care about a person, not the results, not the ultimate outcome, the people will deliver. I know for a fact people will deliver for you. They will deliver the results.”

She backed the assertion with her own record. “I’ve achieved extraordinary success and results in my life,” Marshall said, “and it’s because of other people who I can rally around and who felt like ‘OK, this is worthy of us taking the hill together. I can take the hill with this woman because she cares about me.’” 

Leadership You Have to Choose

Marshall was candid that this kind of leadership is not a personality trait everyone is born with. She admitted that early in her career she made the mistake of feeling she had to do everything herself, and that she was not yet the inclusive leader she would become. 

She put the challenge bluntly. “If you can’t develop that sense of caring, which I believe you can, but if you don’t feel that way, then you have to assess do you really want to be a leader,” Marshall said. “I believe everybody sitting here is a leader. Care about people.”

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The Roosevelt Line That Stuck

Among the ideas students carried out of the theater was a quote Marshall shared from President Theodore Roosevelt: “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” 

It is a tidy distillation of her entire philosophy. Expertise matters, but only after a leader has earned trust through demonstrated care.

HPU sophomore Jackson Clark Jones, a psychology major from Columbus, Ohio, said the message landed. “If you’re able to care about the person that’s in front of you, you will instantly be able to provide for them how they need,” Jones said. 

“That caring piece is so important in every single work that you do no matter the career field, no matter what path that you walk down, because that right there will set you apart from people.”

Leadership as a Life Skill

For business and leadership readers, Marshall’s “three L’s” are a reminder that empathy and results are not opposing forces. 

Her career suggests they reinforce one another, that the leaders who understand their people most deeply are often the ones who get the most from them. That conviction also fits squarely within HPU’s identity as the Premier Life Skills University, where leadership is taught as a practiced, human skill rather than an abstract theory.

By bringing a leader of Marshall’s stature into a room with undergraduates taking their questions, High Point University gave students a working model of the philosophy she preaches. 

Listen, learn, love: three words, Marshall insists, that can carry a leader from a college classroom all the way to the top of an NBA franchise.