A leadership team spent more than a year trying to fix a broken process. Workshops, facilitators, more workshops, and nothing moved. When the leader came to Mark Engel she wanted one more process workshop. He said let's try something else first. He spent the morning working on connection instead, on people opening up and saying the things they'd been avoiding, and he never once mentioned the process. The next day he asked what happened. Within two hours that afternoon, they had resolved the thing they'd chased for a year. That story is the whole idea behind his work.
Mark is the founder of The Third Space, based in Bangkok, where he helps founders and creative leaders find the sweet spot between performance and relationships. He calls it team chemistry. Most of the people he works with are performance people, ambitious and driven and great at what they do, and that preference carries them a long way before it hits a ceiling. What he has learned to look for is the part nobody put on the whiteboard. As he says it, many things that show up as a strategy problem are a chemistry problem in disguise. Just look a level deeper.
We talk about this constantly at Sacred Business Flow, just aimed at one person instead of a whole company. The Substack that won't grow, the offer that won't launch. The surface problem is rarely the real one, and the real one is usually a level down, in the part you have been avoiding.
The work started with a breakup and a Bloomberg terminal. Mark had a good career in asset management. Good people, good money, the structured path a Swiss upbringing sets you on. Then a relationship ended and knocked him sideways, and he still remembers the day. Sitting in front of the financial charts, he looked at the numbers and realized he couldn't care less. He called the pain a mirror, a clear judge of what is worth paying attention to and what isn't. For me it was a health scare rather than a breakup, snowing outside, and I was asking the same question he was: why am I doing this. Different door, same house. That question, what do I truly want, is a little dangerous once you open it, because there is almost no going back.
What he had to let go of was the need for security. Growing up in Switzerland, he said, everything is set up for you. Follow the classic path, get educated, and things generally turn out fine, and that comes with a promised safety on every level. Walking away from it meant walking away from the thing he had been taught would keep him safe. In his third year a huge client dropped inside two weeks and the old fear came right back up. And still, what he found surprised him: how much of that security is an illusion, and how little of it he actually needed. Carolina and I both felt that one. The safety we think lives in the job, the apartment, the country, the next figure. Choosing your own path is an invitation to move that sense of safety from outside you to inside you.
If you only know the calm version of Mark, the story he tells about being seen will do you good. He laughs and says he has always loved the spotlight, no issue there, and then he tells the Tarzan story. In an early coach training a colleague handed him the quality of Tarzan to embody, loud and jumping around, and half of him was mortified and half of him knew it was exactly what he needed. It was terrible at first. Then, in the debrief, he was the first to speak, going all in, and one of the facilitators said, there you are. He is five and a half years into this and still calls being seen a path he is on. That is the honest version of visibility, and it is the one worth trusting.
What makes him rare is where he points. He builds the invisible thing, the web between people that a company runs on and nobody measures, and he says it is often the highest leverage point in the whole business and the last place anyone looks. He even built two short assessments to put language and numbers on it, one for teams and one for the individual leader, so the part you can only sense becomes something you can actually see.
A few other threads from the full episode:
The appreciation game he played with a 170-person team in China, and the participant who ended the workshop in tears
The three levels the work moves through: the individual leader, the team, and the whole organization
"Stop carrying the system and start to catalyze it," the one line he would put the whole practice on
Why he says that if he ran a big company, he would send his people to coach training just for the skill of engaging on the relational side
The safe-harbor quote he still lives by, and the bigger vision behind seeing Bangkok as a small version of the world as one community
The question worth sitting with after this one: the thing that is actually slowing you down right now, the one you keep trying to fix at the surface, what would you find if you looked one level underneath it?
If Mark's way of seeing teams lands for you, he writes it all out in his Substack newsletter, The Space Between, and both of his assessments live there too. Tell him we sent you.
One more thing before you go. Mark's whole method starts with making the invisible measurable before you try to change it, and we built a tool that does the same job for your business. The Harmony Map is a free assessment that takes about eight minutes and shows you where you're standing across the nine frequencies of Sacred Business. It won't tell you what to decide. It shows you where to decide from.