Creating a Climate for Creative Thinking

Mark Cole:

Hey, welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Podcast. This is the podcast that adds value to leaders who multiply value to others. I’m Mark Cole, and today I’m excited to talk about creating a climate for creative thinking. Whenever we’re faced with new problems or challenges, we’ve never navigated them before and they seem audacious. They seem impossible. See, what we need, we need to leverage our most creative thinkers, but creativity can’t just be turned on with the flip of a switch. In other words, to harness creativity, you have to create a climate in which creativity can thrive.

So, today, John Maxwell is going to share with us seven tips on how you can promote a climate for creative thinking, for this creative thinking to not only be encouraged, but it to begin to shape your team and shape your organization. After John’s lesson, my co-host, Traci Morrow, and I will talk about some of the ways that we can promote creativity and how it has helped us navigate unique obstacles and foster new ideas here at Maxwell Leadership. If you would like to download our bonus resource for this lesson, it’s a free fill in the blank worksheet and it accompanies John’s lesson. You can find that at maxwellpodcast.com/creative. Also, if you prefer to watch the video on this episode, you can do that at maxwellpodcast.com/u2. Now, here we go. Let’s get creative. Here is John Maxwell.

John Maxwell:

If you are a growing organization, your challenges are going to get bigger and better. Let’s say you have a new challenge in your organization. It’s just something you’ve never faced before. This calls for a creative team. What you’ve got to do is when you face something you’ve never faced before, you’ve got to get the best creative people in the room and say, “We’ve never faced this before. How do we face it?” You don’t pull the whole team in. And so, you have to make a team. You look out and say, “Who are the creative people?” The creative people got to come in the room. Guess what? The non-creative people get to stay outside. Now, we’re not picking on the non-creative people, it’s just we don’t want the non-creative people. In fact, non-creative people will mess you up. They’ll be the anchor on your boat. You’re trying to get wind beneath your wings, and they’re going to constantly say, “But where’s the harbor? Where’s the harbor? Where’s the harbor?”

You have to understand if it’s a new challenge, it calls for creative team. The fundamental problem with creativity is that every really new idea requires the manager and the workforce to undergo significant change. So it is no wonder that most organizations, such as schools, businesses, churches and so on, seem to be designed for the express purpose of discouraging creativity. I mean, think about that. I’m not trying to be nasty. I’m just saying this is the way the life is. Because creativity calls for consulate change, what happens is organizations who don’t want to change, the first thing they want to do is get rid of all the creative people and they do that. Again, you don’t want to put a non-creative person into the initial meetings, especially of creativity. They will drag everybody down.

Create an environment that rewards creativity, you want to do that. Oh, this is a great statement, you can’t use up creativity. Just underline that phrase, you can’t use up creativity. Sometimes people are afraid if they use it a lot, they’ll use it up. Here’s why creativity works. You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. Sadly, too often creativity is smothered rather than nurtured. There has to be a climate in which new ways of thinking, perceiving, questioning are encouraged. This is the difference between the scarcity mindset and the abundance mindset. There are some people who are always afraid of using what they have because they’re afraid that when they do it, they won’t have anything left. It’s what I call a scarcity mindset.

The few valuable items of life that they have, they build fences around it and they begin to protect it, basically saying, “This is all I’m ever going to have, so therefore I’ve got to conserve it, protect it.” That’s what I call a scarcity mindset. There’s the abundance mindset that basically says that if I use what I have, I’ll get more. In other words, they look at themselves not as a reservoir, but they look at themselves as a river and they say, “No. My goal in life is not to store up or hold up. My goal is to let go and use,” and that’s really the way it works In creativity. Creativity constantly says we have to keep using our creativity, and the more that we use, the more that we receive back.

How do you promote a climate of creative thinking? Seven things. One, question old assumptions. The first thing you do is you just question every assumption that you have because much of our staleness is based on assumptions that we have that are totally wrong. Can I tell you something right now? Every one of us, including myself, are operating under some wrong assumptions in life. I guarantee you. Creative people question old assumptions. They just question them, not because they’re not loyal, they question because they know those old assumptions are like anchors and they’ll keep them from being creative.

Number two, second thing to promote what I call a climate of creative thinking, get people together to generate as many ideas as possible. Put them all in room. It’s what we call the old brainstorming sessions. Just say, “Okay. Throw on the wall and see if it sticks.” Okay.

Number three, make sure the best ideas win. One of the things you have to do in bringing people that are creative, you’re not making sure your friends’ ideas win or your ideas win. The best idea wins. You have to have this whole mindset in a creative room. I love the creative meetings. They’re one of my favorite things to be in. The first thing I want everybody realize is it isn’t what John wants or thinks or even desires. I’m not the founder. I’m not the owner. I’m not the leader. I’m just John.

I’m going to throw stuff on the wall, but my stuff has to stick not because of who I am. My stuff has to stick only because it’s the best idea in the room. If it’s not the best idea in the room, we’re going to take Suzy’s or we’re going to take Jack’s. It doesn’t matter to us. The only thing we’re going is for best ideas. So, what that says does is you’ve got to have all your creative people coming in, no political alliances, no IOUs returned, but they have the position. None of that stuff goes in a creative meaning. The best idea is the only idea that should win.

Number four, learn from your failures. You just have to look back because you’re going to have a lot of failures. You’re going to have a lot of failures. You’re going to major in failure. Okay? Just learn from it. The question is not what did you do? The question is always what did you learn? What did you do? I tell you what you did, you failed. Okay. Now that we got that taken care of, what did you learn? It’s not the F that you’re worried about. It’s what did you learn? Don’t show me the report card. What did you learn? What did you learn about this failure?

Number five, adapt old ideas to new challenges. You’ve got to take some of the older things that have hopefully worked in time and begin to marry the two of them.

Number six, find a way to capture good ideas. Now, let me just stop for real practical talking and thinking. You got to have a way to file your own ideas. In other words, time out just for a second. Forget the team for a second. If I went around the room right now and ask each one of you in this organization, and I’m not going to, so don’t panic, how do you file and conserve your ideas? What would you say? I mean, do you have a system? Again, let me tell you something, many, many people, they just say, “Man, an idea’s worth its weight in gold.

Can I tell you something? There are two things in life that I would absolutely protect with everything I’ve got because these two things will make you absolutely the person you want to be. If you can create ideas, I mean good ideas, and if you can expand your influence, ideas and influence are more important than position, title, money. I’m telling you, you can have all the money in the world, just give me the ideas and the influence and I’ll get all the money back. Just trust me on this. I don’t need the tangible stuff, just influence and ideas.

So, one of the questions I always ask myself is, how do I keep expanding my influence? Because as I expand my influence, of course, I expand my leadership. But the second thing is how do I develop ideas, and how do I gather ideas, and how do I make sure that I don’t lose ideas? Because every one of us have ideas. It goes back to the thing, everybody that’s ever had a shower, while you’re sitting in the shower, you get this idea, “Oh my, Oh my. Oh, I ought to do this. This would be wonderful.” It’s not the idea you get in the shower, it’s what you do after you dry off that counts with that idea. Well, most people, that idea’s already gone. By noon, they said, “Well, I had an idea this morning.” “What was it?” “Well, I don’t remember, but it was an idea and it was just a wonderful feeling I had in my life.” Okay. So find a way to capture good ideas. Don’t let a good idea escape you. It’s gold.

Number seven, share the credit with the people who have the good ideas. So the question is how do you win the big challenge? The answer is bring creative people around you.

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Mark Cole:

Hey, welcome back. I’m looking forward to Traci joining you and our podcast listeners to dissect what John said. I loved how he ended this by saying you have got to surround yourself with creative thinkers and you as the leader have got to encourage a creative environment. Kind of feels to me as a leader that I get to feel the responsibility of creativity. Even if I’m not creative and I don’t see myself as overly creative, I can still as a leader find creative people to add to my team and find ways, and John’s gave us those of creating that creative environment.

Traci Morrow:

I think that John is a very unique person in the fact that he is very practical and logical and sees more in before and all of that, but he is also a very creative leader.

Mark Cole:

He is.

Traci Morrow:

He is so outside the box thinking. He has such creative thoughts and ideas. You kind of already gave the answer, but I am curious if you would dive into it a little bit more. Do you consider yourself on any level a creative person, a creative leader?

Mark Cole:

I do. I think in the area of leadership, so you got a problem that really requires leadership involvement. I feel a real creativity that when I get in an environment to where there is a leadership problem… We teach everything rises and falls on leadership. In an organization that is truly falling quantifiably, qualitatively because of leadership, I love getting in there and assessing and then beginning to create ways out of that.

We’re in the middle of that right now here at Maxwell Leadership. I see a problem that could impact the great culture that I envision for our organization. I see some momentum stoppers as some things that really could cause us a barrier to the amount of momentum that we need in the future. I’m really energized in a creative way of identifying things that will begin to shape that curve and get us back headed in the direction that I think we need to go. So I think I have it there. There’s more areas that I can identify that I don’t have it that I need others around me than I can identify areas where I feel like creativity is a genius for me or something that I can be proud of.

Traci Morrow:

Yeah. So a few weeks ago on the podcast, we talked about a meeting that you were going to be having with your team. You had spoken to a couple leaders on your team and they felt disconnected. In fact, you had called off… You stopped our filming from the podcast. Many of you may remember this, where Mark talked about he just had this passion buildup in him and he called it off. He and Jake and Jared and I had this great conversation and then we tried to pull that passion back into the podcast. You said, “I may need to talk about this a little bit later.”

You had that meeting, and that might have been in the way of you pulling your culture that the things that were happening may have been a detriment or a block, a roadblock, not a detriment, a roadblock to your leadership and the culture you were trying to create for your leadership team. Now, on the other side of that meeting, how are you feeling as far as getting creative for the path forward on the other side of that meeting? Just to circle back so our listeners can hear how you’re navigating forward.

Mark Cole:

Yeah. So there was this feeling, this intuition maybe that I was having that what it was like to be on the other side of me organizationally might not be as pleasant as it was in my mind. So I went, “Okay.”

Traci Morrow:

Wow.

Mark Cole:

Yeah. Maybe there’s some culture things that we can uncover, some things that would be either immediately limiting to our organization or certainly be problematic if not dealt with. And then also, at the same time, I had this real passion that there are a few areas in the organization that for Q1 of 2023, we need to build momentum. We need to manufacture momentum. So it was with that prevailing thought, intuition that we called these meetings together. We ended up calling them, I wouldn’t have known that in the podcast that we talked about, but we ended up calling them our family rooms. We consider ourselves family around here. In fact, you’re on the podcast family. We have the state statement above, or the doors in our office, welcome home. People are coming in from home to the office and we want them to bring home with them, welcome home.

And so, we didn’t call it town hall. We didn’t call it fireside chats. We call it our family rooms, where the family comes together. Like in my home, everything happened in the family room, the good and the bad, the deep conversations and the games. Everything was the family room. Everybody belonged and everything belonged. So we created these family rooms. I’ll tell you, Traci, so some of these meetings were not the funnest, most exciting, most exhilarating meetings I’ve been in this year. Some of them were very hard to hear what it was like to be on the other side of my leadership. Some of it was very hard to see the absence of values in certain segments of our organization. We value all people. Not all of our people were feeling valuable. And so, it was hard to see some of that.

But to this concept of creativity, and you’ve already seen this morning, I was giving you and Jared and Jake an update, and I mean, just 24 hours after the last one, this plan is already starting to develop me on how I can show people that they are valuable and how I can mobilize our leadership team to do a better job of communicating the value of our team, which is going to enhance our culture, which is going to solve some of our problems, which is going to allow us to get momentum. I can already see the progressive way that some creative things that we’re currently not doing that nobody else thought of, they just generated in my mind and I’m watching this thing happen to where creativity is starting to flow, that I can promise you this, I haven’t even shared it with our leadership team yet. I shared it to everybody in the studio here today, but I will tell you this-

Traci Morrow:

And all of our podcast listeners.

Mark Cole:

Well, I didn’t tell them the ideas yet. I’m going to let my leadership team hear those first. But here’s what I’ll tell you, I know this, they’re creative enough to encourage creativity that my creative team will give me more creativity. It’s what John says. He says, “Creativity creates more creativity.”

Traci Morrow:

That’s right. That’s right.

Mark Cole:

Here’s what I know, my ideas are not the best ideas. Very rarely is my idea the best idea. I know my idea is good enough to bring it to a group of creators and they will come up with the idea that is best. I love that feeling. I can challenge you that most of the people that’s listening to this podcast, they know the areas where they’re creative. Not all of us are as creative as John Maxwell, but we know the areas where we’re creative. If we’re willing to allow our creativity to spark creativity, in other words not feel like we finalize creativity, then the best idea will win and creativity will reign supreme in your organization and on your team.

Traci Morrow:

Yeah, that’s why I think so many people fall into the trap of thinking as a leader, we have to come up with all of the ideas ourselves and we have to be the most creative one, that we have to fill all the roles because we were that title. I think that hopefully title being the lowest level of leadership and yet we sometimes burden ourselves with feeling like we have to do all of that. John will say, “Bring a good idea to a table, to a group of people, and a good idea becomes a great idea when it sparks the creativity in so many different people.”

And so, I love that he quoted Maya Angelou and the whole quote was great, but I’m going to pull out a piece of it and when she said you can’t use up creativity, but she talked about too often creativity is smothered rather than nurtured. And so, I’m curious, how do you nurture and not smother a creative environment in your team since you are trying, as somebody who says, “I have a little creativity, but I wouldn’t count myself a real creative type” and you have that on your team, how do you nurture that and not smother that for the environment for your team?

Mark Cole:

Yeah. I think that John takes these seven points and really gives us some things on how to create a creative environment. But let me say this, I think the biggest thing before we even get into the beautiful teaching of John today, I think most leaders don’t even realize that they smother creativity, because when the leader speaks, typically the air comes out of the room. That’s the one thing I hate about leadership. The higher my position, the stronger my role in the organization, the more I have to be careful what I say. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Traci, you were actually co-hosting on this episode, I’m a verbal processor. I’m watching that sometimes my verbal processing is doing two things. One, it’s shutting down creativity, subject of today. Two, it’s confusing people with verbal processing and leadership expectation. See, I can verbal process and people go, “Oh, okay, Mark just said that, we better go do that.” I’m going, “Why did y’all just do that?” I was just talking about something.

Traci Morrow:

And they’re taking as a direction.

Mark Cole:

Recently, I was in a leadership meeting, they went, “Is that vision?” I went, “No, it’s not vision. It’s processing.” Vision is unchanged. But as a leader, the power of my words has more power than I want to at times. I think realizing that as leaders as a first thought in encouraging creativity, because when a leader, a senior leader speaks, a lot of times people feel like that is the edict, that is the final. You can’t have finality in your thinking and expect more creativity. Creators need to just be throwing it and not finding the bottom line. They just need to be putting it out in the universe and see what comes back. Well, as the leader, even if you are a creator, and I’m talking to creator leaders too, be careful even in how you speak in creative mode because sometimes that can feel like decision mode and you kill creativity before it really gets off the ground.

Traci Morrow:

Oh, boy, is that really good? And so, maybe the way that you can do away with or help your team to not leave the verbal processing table is to maybe what preface by saying, “I’m just processing here. Just so you know, this isn’t the final word here.” And that might be hard for leaders who process verbally to learn to do that, but I’m guessing that you would see when you do that, you see a difference, an exhale, a settling into the chair of like, “Oh, I’m starting to understand my leader a little bit more because he or she is letting me into their process that this is what they do.”

Mark Cole:

Yeah, I love this. I love the role I get to play on this podcast. John’s the guru. John is the person that gives the content. I’m just the guy that’s trying to play. And so, even listen to this podcast and even having this conversation with you, I just occurred to something. It just occurred. Something occurred to me. One is when I’m verbally processing, I need to, one, be very careful where I verbally process. There’s certain environments that I shouldn’t be verbally processing because we’re a leadership, we’re trying to move. But when I am going to verbally process in public, let’s say in front of the whole leadership team, I need to set it up with, “Hey guys, I’m just going to verbal process here for a minute and spew it out.” That way, it doesn’t feel like direction.

Well, isn’t that true and applicable to a creative environment too? “Hey guys.” John said it. “Hey, I’m not Mr. Maxwell. I’m not the owner. I’m not the leadership expert of the world. I’m just John. Let me be a creator with you.” You heard John say that today. Well, I think we as leaders need to say, “Hey, I’m not the CEO. I’m not the president. I’m just Mark the contributor right now. Let’s have a creative environment.” If you get it out of their mind, “Don’t see me as the leader when I speak. Don’t see me as the senior owner or executive in the room in this moment,” and go ahead and set those as ground roots on the beginning, maybe leaders can exercise their creativity a little bit more without shutting the creativity down before it begins.

Traci Morrow:

Absolutely. And then fight the temptation to quick put back on your CEO hat, your president hat to jump in and pull rank at some point in the meeting if you feel like you’re losing something. It does require a maturity in that meeting to be able to sit as a contributor alongside of other people who may take the lead above you in that position. That’s a maturity space, I would assume.

Mark Cole:

Yeah, it is. It is.

Traci Morrow:

Okay. So here we go. To him, the meat of this is really how to promote a climate for creative thinking. As he started to go down this list of seven, what I immediately wrote in my notes was it reminded me of, and we had him on the show just a couple weeks ago, was Patrick Lencioni’s book, the Six Types of Working Genius. This just popped out at me as John started going through the lesson of those six working geniuses because John had described this in this lesson a little bit and went into deeper.

And so, I’m curious, when you talk about questioning all the assumptions that in line with Patrick’s book, it’s a little bit thinking of wonder. And then his second point was getting people to generate as many ideas as possible, which is with Patrick’s book, invention. So for those wonder invention, that’s the sparking of ideas. It’s the creative beginnings of things. What is your team process for getting together? We just were mentioning sitting around the table, but do you have a team process for when you want to do something or getting them around the table to start just like, “Throw it at me. Throw it at me”?

Mark Cole:

Well, first, I’m so glad you mentioned Pat Lencioni’s book Working Genius. He came and spoke to us at L2L, which you host that event. It’s brilliant. It’s brilliant content.

Traci Morrow:

I know. It’s an incredible book.

Mark Cole:

You said before we went on podcasts, I wish you would’ve quoted this for the podcast, you said,” I love that book because it proves I’m a genius,” or something like that. I can’t remember exactly how you said it, Traci, but I mean, it’s really impacting you, isn’t it? I mean, it really is. So, I love the fact that you brought that back up because that is a show that if you have not heard yet, you want to go back and listen. You want to grab that book, Working Genius. The way we’re doing that, let’s take that example, we have one of the geniuses, I’m trying to remember which one it is, but we have one of the geniuses that out of a team of 11 people on my leadership team, only one of the 11 has one of the geniuses.

Traci Morrow:

Oh, wow.

Mark Cole:

We’re under-resourced in that area.

Traci Morrow:

Wow.

Mark Cole:

So what we have begun to do since we realized that and since we had Pat’s team come in and help us assess our team and how we lead, we now are identifying, “Hey guys, this is a space that we’re very under-resourced in as it relates to genius. So X, what do you think?” We actually call it out and carve out a space for this teammate to speak into this genius part because that’s what we need at that particular point. It’s really given us a handle to make sure that we’re not leaving a genius behind as a leadership team and giving intentional space for that contribution. Highly recommend the book. Highly recommend the assessment. And so, I’m glad you brought that. We’ll put that in the show notes, the link, as well as how to get the book, the link to the podcast, as well as how to get the book.

So going back to your question I just gave you a little bit, we are being very intentional in making sure that the entire team is feeling like their genius, their skillset that John talks about is wanted. The other thing that I caution my more tactical people, the people that just are ready for an answer, John said it pretty hard in the podcast today, I said, “You can be a part of the team, but think before you speak.” Sorry, you can be a part of the meeting, but think before you speak because you are a wet blanket.

Now, I love you. I need wet blankets sometimes. I mean, we need you. But in a creative environment, learn when to shut up. If you are stopping the creativity part of an organization, then you either need to recuse yourself, get out or learn that that’s not where you can contribute and stay in so you can be aware when creativity comes down to finally it’s an application point. So many non-creative people want to be in the loop as soon as possible and so many creative people want to keep them out of the loop until it’s absolutely necessary, right?

Traci Morrow:

Yes.

Mark Cole:

And so, there’s a way to have both, but in a creative environment, understand if you are a momentum maker or a momentum breaker. If you’re a momentum breaker, you need to either get out, as John said in his lesson, or you need to be silent and just be listening to the process work itself out.

Traci Morrow:

Oh, wow. Wow. I’ve heard John say, “Don’t say no too soon.” For me, I have to tell you that. So, one of my working geniuses is discernment. As somebody who has that working genius, and I’m certain that someone in our audience is going to hear me and go like, “Yes, I hear you. Amen, sister,” but part of discernment is you can weed through things quickly and see how it can work or how it can’t work and how it might derail the system and moving forward. So you’re more apt to say no too soon. And so, when I heard John say, “Don’t say no too soon, Traci,” he said to me once years ago, and ever since then, that just blew my mind because as a person who has discernment, who leaned into my discernment, my working genius, you also can’t get too comfortable in your skillset, even if you are applying it in a creative space with the team because you can say no too soon and shut something down way too soon.

Mark Cole:

Well, it’s why Patrick Lencioni says that the graphic he used, he said this at L2L, the graphic he used to show working genius was the wheel with the notches.

Traci Morrow:

The cogs.

Mark Cole:

The cogs, because it requires everybody to work together. If you’re too loaded as a team with two or three or even four of the working geniuses, you are incomplete and the cogs of the machine is not going to run as well lock up unless every person is playing their role. That’s what I think John is saying here, make sure that you promote a climate for creative thinking. It requires intentionality for a team to work with creativity.

Traci Morrow:

That’s right. That’s right. But you do need to move forward. Learning from your failure is the next one. Do you have a process for extracting as a team the lessons from your failures?

Mark Cole:

The answer is I don’t have a process to share at this point because one of my notes when I listened to the podcast today was… I think John’s got it right with these seven steps. I think there is a step embedded here that probably deserves prominence and that is implement good ideas. The problem with most organizations… I’m having this problem in my organization right now. We have so many good ideas, Traci. I’m telling you, the future is bright. Our challenge is we’re not implementing the good ideas and not implementing on good ideas as just as much of a wet blanket to a creator as somebody saying no before the idea gets off the ground, because even creative people want to see a return on their creativity. Right now, I have a tendency in our organization of over-promising on good ideas and under-delivering. If I’m not careful, I’m going to kill the creative environment that I want because everybody wants a return on the time they spent on something.

Traci Morrow:

Yeah, that’s true. So right now, you’re in that process.

Mark Cole:

I’m in the process of making sure that I have a good way to activate and implement on creative ideas. Right now, I’m in the middle of restructuring my entire schedule to get creative moments in every day for some key initiatives that I’m doing. What I haven’t answered yet, but I’m going to answer soon is what’s the process that my creativity sparks implementation at a pace that doesn’t make an already overworked team feel like that I’m weighing them down even more.

Traci Morrow:

Oh, wow. I love that because it’s cutting edge and I’m sure in the weeks to come-

Mark Cole:

We’ll be getting all into it.

Traci Morrow:

… we’ll hear how that’s playing out for the good and the bad and the ugly.

Mark Cole:

That’s right.

Traci Morrow:

Hopefully more good than bad and ugly. But what about adapting old ideas to new challenges? What does that look like for you?

Mark Cole:

I think every organization, I’m certainly in one, we’re rethinking a big part of our business. One of our big events, we’re rethinking. I’m watching resistance sometimes come not because of a bad idea or creativity, it’s coming because people are resistant to change. Sometimes resistant to change is bigger in people’s lives than resistant to creativity because change require… Everybody wants the creative, “Oh, let’s rethink.” And then the sacred cow, the thing that has changed their life, the thing that they have already locked in that they would die for because it was so good, the formula is being tweaked. The change is being tweaked. Remember those of you that love Coca-Cola from Atlanta like me? I’ve had three this morning, Traci grimaces every time I open one.

Traci Morrow:

Oh my gosh. I didn’t know you’ve had three.

Mark Cole:

Maybe something like that. I want three, let me just say it that way.

Traci Morrow:

That’s okay.

Mark Cole:

Coca-Cola tried something. As an Atlanta person, as a lover of Coca-Cola… Coca-Cola tried something sometime ago. They wanted New Coke, new and improved. Anybody in the studio, anybody remember that, New Coke?

Traci Morrow:

Yes.

Mark Cole:

Okay. Good. Good. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t past all of y’all’s age because I’m the oldest one in the studio right now. And then all of a sudden, they realized it was a bad idea. It was a terrible idea, and it was. If you tasted it, it was terrible. Well, then, they came back out with Coca-Cola Classic, and for a Coke lover, it is so good. They don’t even call it Coca-Cola Classic anymore. Do you remember when it was Coca-Cola Classic?

Traci Morrow:

Yeah.

Mark Cole:

This morning I went to Chick-fil-A restaurant. This podcast must be brought to you by Chick-fil-A and Coca-Cola. I went to Chick-fil-A and you know what I ordered, Traci? I ordered a Coca-Cola Classic, and the little 17-year-old said, “Do we have that?” I thought, “Oh yeah, you do. Just ring it up as Coca-Cola.” But I was so thankful that Coca-Cola brought back my classic that to this day, 30 years later, 20 years later, I still order Coca-Cola Classic. Listen to you diet. Well, in an organization so many times people can be so impacted by a product, by something that they came to work because of this product and now you have the audacity to put creativity in the mix and going to change it?

And so, what we have to really do is leaders, we have to listen to the concerns, ensure that the special ingredients that made it special in the beginning is not only going to be there, but it’s going to be enhanced. We got to take people along the journey with us. Creators, let me caution you, you can be so cool and so creative that you lose the essence and the support that you need to get a creative idea across the line just because you didn’t take the time and include the good things of the essence into the creativity of something new. It’s not that it’s a bad idea, it’s not that creative wasn’t good, it’s just how you implemented it is leaving some people behind.

Traci Morrow:

Yeah, that’s right. So not that you have New Coke and old Coke, not that your ideas are… You’re going to something that’s not really at better. I think what you’re going to is, as somebody who’s involved in it, you’re definitely recreating and reimagining something better and pulling us into the future of something that’s better and bigger and with the future in mind. But I think it’s more about a change issue, not that you are taking something that’s perfect and you’re trying to make it better and it’s not such a great idea. Just as somebody is a member of that crowd, I think it’s more a fear of change than anything.

Mark Cole:

A lot of times. A lot of times it is.

Traci Morrow:

Yeah, for sure.

Mark Cole:

Hey, speaking of change in creativity, let me leave you this one last standout statement. I do believe that creativity takes courage. I believe for leaders to take the time to allow creativity to manifest itself, to be born into an environment takes courage because most of us leaders have a propensity to do something and creativity sometimes feels like it takes a while. It takes courage to let that begin to develop. I think it takes courage to look at people that do want to fight for the sacred cow and say, “No, we’re going somewhere greater. We’re going somewhere bigger.”

I think finally I would say that creativity takes courage because all of us as leaders are bought into whatever made us successful in the position in the first place, and there’s a tendency to feel defensive when somebody comes with an idea on how we can do something that we fought to implement how we can do it better. We go back and remember the battle scars. We go back and remember the pain. I would just tell you that courage for a leader is required to allow creativity to be developed as a team because there are better ideas on your team than you have. There really is. If that’s not true, you need to go back and change your team because you need teammates that are making you better.

Hey, I want to close today with a comment as we always like to do, a comment or a question. Keep them coming. We are in the podcast world because of you. We want to know how we’re doing. Lou gave us a great comment about the podcast we did with Andy Stanley recently about his book, Not In It to Win It. We’ll put that in the show notes if you’ve not seen it. But here’s what Lou said, number one, Lou started with one of my favorite words because you can spell it the same forward and backward, it’s wow. And so, Lou said, “Wow, I love the concept that the solutions are in the middle. We seem to have lost a sense of reasonableness in this world. Being a light in a crazy world is challenging when bad news makes the press. Thank you for this inspiring, clarifying conversation.” Lou, thank you for your feedback. We exist to bring powerful, positive change to you so that you can lead well because everyone deserves to be led well.