Retired Dallas Mavericks CEO Challenges HPU Students to Lead with Love

HIGH POINT, N.C., May 4, 2026 – Retired Dallas Mavericks CEO Cynt Marshall encouraged High Point University students to genuinely care about people if they hope to someday be effective leaders who motivate their employees to do their best work and achieve their career goals.

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

Marshall said she is not the type of reclusive CEO who prefers to sit in her office instead of interacting with her team members. She stressed that she leads with “love,” and to do that, she must understand who her employees are on a personal level — their dreams, their experiences, the baggage they carry around and who they are when they get out of bed in the morning.

“You want them to feel cared for because you’re in charge. And so that is the one tip I would say: People need to know you care about them and you love them,” Marshall said. “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. I’ve achieved extraordinary success and results in my life, 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.’”

Marshall told students that she knew little about how an NBA franchise is run when she met with then Mavericks owner Mark Cuban in 2018 about becoming the team’s CEO. As she left his office, two employees stopped her and asked if they could speak with her in private. The next morning, more employees pulled Marshall into a conference room and talked to her for three hours.

“That’s when I really realized just the magnitude of what was going on, but I also realized that we had some wonderful, wonderful people who work there,” Marshall said. “And then I said I’m going to do this, and I prayed about it. My purpose here is to help these people have a great place to work. That’s what I’m being called to do right now is, to create a great place to work. That is my mission.”

Marshall admitted she made the mistake early on in her career of feeling like she needed to do everything herself. At the time, she wasn’t the type of inclusive leader that she eventually became.

“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.”

What Students Learned

HPU sophomore Jackson Clark Jones said he was struck by Marshall’s message that she lives by “three L’s” — listen, learn and love — and that her faith is intertwined with all of them. He also appreciated her sharing a quote from President Theodore Roosevelt: “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”

“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. So, the leadership part becomes that much easier because you’re so intact with the person you want to help out the person and to serve the person,” said Jones, who is a psychology major from Columbus, Ohio. “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.”

Senior Henry Cissel is graduating this week with a bachelor’s degree in sports management. He said he wanted to hear Marshall speak on campus after he was told great things about her. He also wanted to get her perspective on how he could break into the sports world as he goes through the hiring process.

Marshall’s message about the importance of having a strong support system resonated with Cissel, is from West Chester, Pennsylvania.

“I would say she really relied on her family, and as someone who has a loving family as well, I think it just shows that regardless of whether you go through the good and the bad times, they’re going to be there for you,” Cissel said. “So I think really that just stay with them.”