​Maxwell Leadership Podcast: Crisis Leaders: What They Do Well (Part 2)

Mark Cole:           Hey! Thank you for tuning into The John Maxwell Leadership Podcast. My name is Mark Cole, I will be joined with my co-host, Jason Brooks right after John Maxwell teaches today. Today, John is teaching part two of Crisis Leaders – What They Do Well. Last week, we did part one. Jason and I gave some application, this week John is going to teach part two and then Jason and I will come back in and give you some application there. Now, Crisis Leaders – What They Do Well, the show notes where you can download and fill in the blank, if you will go to Maxwellpodcast.com/crisisleader and then click on the “Bonus Resource” button, you’ll be able to download the notes, you will be able to watch it in it’s entirety. Now, this is a lesson John did a week and a half ago on Facebook Live and if you would like to watch it, we want to extend that as a value add to you. You can go to Maxwellpodcast.com/facebooklive and you will see this lesson, Crisis Leaders – What They Do Well, and you’ll see a whole long list of other live John Maxwell videos. We hope you will enjoy that, but I know you will enjoy this. Here is John Maxwell part two. Jason and I will see you on the other side.

John Maxwell:      Number four, crisis leaders think creatively. Crisis leaders believe that there is always an answer and let me underline the word always. You see, we all have fear. I have fear, you have fear. There’s no such thing as a fearless person. But let me just describe the difference between good fear and bad fear. You see, if I have a good fear, in other words, I fear what’s happening around me and I see what’s happening, it’s not positive, but if I have a good fear, it causes me to prepare. If I have a bad fear it causes me to avoid. Those two fears are poles apart. And, crisis leaders, they have a good fear. That fear causes them to think, to prepare, to start to become creative in the midst of surrounding problems. Chuck Swindoll, wonderful friend, oh my gosh, what a great guy. He said, “We’re all faced with a series of opportunities that are brilliantly disguised as impossible solutions.” You see every opportunity is surrounded by a problem. It just is, you don’t go up to an opportunity and not have to go through adversity or difficulty. And, so a great leader, they think creative. They look at the crisis we’re in and they ask this question—in fact, I was in a conference one time and we’re doing a Q&A and I had a person in the audience say this to me, and I loved it so much I stopped to even put it on my iPhone so I would never lose the quote. He said, “My wife and I in our leadership team when a crisis comes or something really difficult comes our way, the first question we ask each other is what good thing is going to come out of this?” Now, that’s a person who is a crisis leader. Who thinks creatively, there’s always an answer. What good thing is going to come out of this? I want to encourage you as we look and we’re surrounded by the Coronavirus, and we’re surrounded by—it’s not getting better as I’m teaching it right now. What good thing is going to come out of this? Trust me! If we have a good fear, we’re going to find the good things that can come out of us. Good things about ourselves, good things about our team. If we have a bad fear, we’re going to avoid it and stay away. You know, Carly Fiorina said, “Fear hides possibilities.” That’s so true. “Fear hides possibilities.” Fear, worry—worry, if you’re a gardener let me just describe what worries—worry is like if you’re a gardener like going out and fertilizing the weeds…if you went out and saw someone taking fertilizer and fertilizing the weeds you’d run up to them and say, “Wait a minute! What are you doing? Those weeds need to be pulled out of the garden! They don’t need to grow, they don’t need to take over the garden!” We would say, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. That gardener is over there fertilizing weeds. Can I tell you something much worse than fertilizing weeds? It’s people that are fertilizing negative thought, worry, and fear in their life right now. It’s only going to grow. It’s going to consume the garden of your mind. So, what I want you to do is ask yourself two questions. I’ll give you the two questions and then I want to talk about them just very briefly.

Question number one is: What would I love to do right now since I have more time? That’s a great question! I mean, aren’t there things that you would love to do and just didn’t have time to do them? I think we’re all there.

And, question number two is: What should I do now that I have more time? Now, that’s a different question. I’ll come back to that but let me just talk to you about, what would you love to do that you—I mean just love to do it? But you just haven’t had time! I mean, for me, right on my desk, right over there I can—let’s see, I got six books, six books that I just wanted to read. I’ve had them kind of waiting for me and now I have the time and I’m going to read those books this month. How about friends to call? I mean, you know, everyday on my phone, everyday I put down people that I need to call to touch base with. Or, perhaps people that I can add value to. I thought about you all day today about adding value to you. And, for me, one of the things I just would love to have a little bit more rest. I keep it pretty fast pace and I get that time now. I’m getting to rest. Now, the second question, what should I do now that I have more time? Well, let me just say this, okay, I’ve written down three things for me: exercise and diet, that’s one, I put them together. Clean out my closet and clean—and hey! Clean my office here. I really don’t want to clean out the closet…need to. My office is in really good shape, but I just really need to, you know, there’s just some filing and things I need to do that I haven’t done in a long time that I need to do. Exercise and diet, that’s always a challenge. But for me, one of the reasons I’ve always said as “excuse” remember the worst excuse is a good excuse. One of the things I’ve always said is well it’s hard for me to do that when I travel so much. Well, no travel now, John. Your favorite excuse has just been shot. So, let me just say this, especially when I look at what should I do now, now that I have time? I think when we’re through this time of quarantine and the crisis kind of eases up, I think there are going to be some people that are going to be very fulfilled in the fact that they took the very best use of the time they had at home and maximized the return for it. And, then I think there are others who are going to say, “Wow, I didn’t really maximize my time.” What I’m saying to you is just very, very simple. Opportunities, they’re never lost. You know, people say, “Man, I lost that opportunity.” I say, “No, no, no you didn’t lose that opportunity.” I say, “Somebody found it. Somebody always finds it.” And, so when you’re looking at the opportunity, you’re always going to see the problem, but you’ve got to get through the problem so that you can get to the opportunities. And, great leaders believe there’s always an answer and so they do a lot of good creativity.

Number five, great leaders embrace technology. I won’t say much about this, but technology is right now king because we are able to touch our people through it. I’m touching you right now through it. When we cancelled our John Maxwell Team, our coaches conference in Orlando, thirty-five hundred people were going to come. We asked ourselves, “Well, what should we do?” So, what we decided was on March 22^nd, 23^rd, 24^th, 25^th that we would go online. In the beginning, we were just going to go online to our coaches and then we said, “Wait, let’s go online to a lot of people.” Over a million people joined us! And, it was all because of technology. Wasn’t it interesting? We went from thirty-five hundred people that we touched it, without that technology to a million people. Now, I’m going to get out of that because that’s not my strength at all. I have great people around me to do technology, not me. But, let me review quickly, crisis leaders do—we shared five things, understand context, embrace good values, communicate effectively, think creatively, embrace technology.

Number six, they show humility. Crisis leaders are very open. They’re very honest and pretty much their humility and their authenticity allows them to just look at you and you sense that they’re not trying to fake it ‘till they make it. What I mean by a leader of humility, I mean a person that looks at you and says, “I need you to help me. I’m asking you to help me.” I’ve often said that one of the things people need to hear from their leader is, “I need you.” There is something highly complimentary about asking a person’s opinion or saying, “Hey, look, I can’t make it without you.” A humble leader values people; puts the people first. And, again, regardless of what situation you’re in, as I talk to my leaders of all my organizations, I put the people first. Not money, not profits, not business, not strategy… people first. If I lose it all, if I lose everything in my life, but I’ve been good to the people and I’ve done my best to take care of the people and I’ve shown care to the people. I’ve done what’s best for them, not what’s best for me. Then, even if I lose it all I’ll be able to look them in the eye and give them a hug and smile and say, “I did my best.” And, you know, obviously, I didn’t maybe save us, but I did my best. That’s essential. If you’re a leader you’ve got to live with your heart out. A humble leader, they ask for help, they value people, they have a servant’s heart, they are constantly saying, “How can I help you?” And they constantly are pointing to others giving them credit. You see, in the business community, so many times we talk about four things:

Strategy – what we must do.

Mission – what we want to achieve.

Purpose – why we’re in the business.

Action – Let’s go do it!

But, there’s something wrong with that picture. Where are the people? The people should be right in the middle of every decision that we make. What’s best for my people?

The last thing I want to share with you on crisis leadership is those who do well in a crisis, they focus on constructive change. I shared with you earlier in the lesson that crisis moves us and the crisis, does it move us forward? Does it move us backward? Are we getting better? Are we getting worse? Which way are we going? You see, crisis causes huge distractions and what leaders do is leaders work hard. Distraction means I lost my way, I lost focus. You know, distraction has in it that word traction. Distraction means to pull away, traction means together and to pull forward and what leaders do is leaders during a crisis do their very best to get people back on track. One of the things I’ve done for forty plus year is I’ve had what I call “learning lunches” where every month I take someone to lunch that’s bigger, better, and faster, smarter, more successful than me. I don’t even have lunch I just buy their lunch and I ask them seven questions. These lessons and these lunches have been invaluable to my personal development and growth. One of the questions I ask them is I ask them, “What is the most important lesson that you’ve ever learned in your life?” I love that question and when they give me the answer I’ve asked it hundreds of times, and when they give me the answer of where they got the most important lesson in life, they don’t give me the same lesson, but they go to the same place in their life. Every time, one hundred percent, when I said, “What’s the most important lesson you ever learned?” A hundred percent of the time they will go, and they take me to a very dark period in their life…failures, mistakes, problems, adversity. They’ll take me to a deep valley in their life and they will share with me that was in that very difficult experience that they learned the most important lesson they ever learned. I never one time, never one time, had somebody say, “Well, the most important lesson I ever learned was when I was on top of the mountain and everything was going incredibly well, I was making a lot of money, and the business was growing…” I never one time had them tell me that’s where the most important lesson they learned. Listen to me, my friend, my name is John, I’m your friend…wisdom is always extracted from adversity. So, when you hear a person that has great maturity, great wisdom, deep thought, it comes out of a deep valley. So, when I ask that question at the lunch, “What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned?” I don’t know what lesson they’re going to teach me, I know that it’s going to help me, but I know where the lesson comes from. It comes from their biggest disappointments and their darkest days.

So, I just now will talk to you for the next couple of minutes from my heart. The question that I ask myself, the question that I hope that you’re asking yourself is, since I’m going through this deep valley and since this is a very difficult time for me, for you, for all of us…where are the opportunities? What lessons am I learning right now? This is huge! The other day I was going through, again, what lessons am I learning during this dark time? And, one of the things I wrote down was the fact that a leader never has the luxury of having all the answers. Just about the time I think as a leader that I really developed my leadership and I got the leadership game down, a crisis hits and the playbook’s gone. Now I’ve got to—hey! That pregame plan and leadership, that’s all tossed out the window. Now, I’ve got to have some halftime adjustments. In fact, in a crisis, you have to adjust every minute. You can’t even wait for halftime, halftime’s too far away! But I just sat there, and I thought to myself, no matter how good a leader we are, no matter how much we know leadership, people look at me as an “expert” in leadership, whatever that means. Here’s what I know, that it takes a crisis, one more time, to help me to understand that life is beyond me, there are questions that I do not have answers for and I consider it to be very grounding to me. It makes me depend on others. The team, and because I’m a person of faith, it makes me depend more on God. In fact, it’s during these times of crisis that I just wish everybody had faith. Faith grounded in God. And, again, I’m not at all trying to put this over on you, but I can tell you that when I see friends really struggle, sometimes I just reach out to them and I just say to them, “Oh, I wish you had my faith right now because I have peace that, perhaps, you don’t have. I’ve got strength that I’m not sure is yours. Joy, joy, ah!” So, I just want to say to you that there’s a whole bunch of bad stuff happening to me right now. And, the fact that if I put my list out, it’s probably about fifty to one. Bad things versus good things. But, here’s what I know, when I put down the good thing that’s happening to me right now during this very difficult time, it’s not the number of items on my sheet that determines whether I’m having a good day or a bad day. It’s the weight of those items and the fifty things on them. The bad column that just aren’t going well for me right now, just like hey! They’re not going well for you either, they’re not going well for any of us! We’re all in the same boat. There maybe a hole at the other end, but we are in the same boat. Okay, the bad things, the bad things, there maybe fifty items, and maybe it will go—under the good, there’s just one item, but let me tell you something, the one good thing that’s happening to me, weighs more than the fifty bad things. It’s not how many answers you have good or bad. It’s just the power of the answer. It’s the strength of the answer and that one good thing in my life is helping me cope with all the fifty bad things, fifty-one bad things, how many that you have. I just want to say to you that I care for you, that I’m doing this for you because I just hope that it helps. That whatever you think of me, think of me as your friend, because I am. I value you greatly. And, I’m just grateful for the John Maxwell Enterprise, all of our organizations because they agree with me, the best thing we can do right now is not do business but do relationships. Just love people unconditionally, add value to them and do everything you can in your power to lift their load. So, I hope this lesson has lifted your load. I hope you pass it on to others. Hopefully, in a short time I will be able to come back to you, maybe with another lesson. As long as I can help you, I’ll have another lesson. God bless, and remember, it’s not what happens to you, it’s not what happens to me, it’s what happens in us that’s going to make the difference in this crisis.

Mark Cole:           Hey, welcome back! Wasn’t John Maxwell incredible the last two sessions? I’m back with Jason Brooks and we’re going to be talking again today about Crisis Leaders – What They Do Well. Now, this is part two because as I told you earlier, John recently did a Facebook Live that you can go listen and actually view John Maxwell doing the entire teaching at Maxwellpodcast.com/facebooklive. Now, Jason, the reason that I did that is because we’re going to pick up today, and we’re going to pick right up with points number four through seven. We did one through three of part one last week, it was a fabulous lesson. In fact, you and I talked last week, and we went, “Man, we could have just kept talking about that!” But here we are back today, we’re still in crisis, the world is still needing great leaders and you and I get to share the privilege of leading a team, an organization like the John Maxwell Enterprise. So, I look forward to jumping in today! Thank you, and thanks for being on the team, Jason!

Jason Brooks:       Absolutely! It’s my privilege and my pleasure! So, let’s just jump right in. The fourth thing John says that crisis leaders do well is they think creatively. We’re a group and enterprise that values creativity. But I don’t know that we’ve ever had to be as creative as we have over the last, probably, five or six weeks. We’ve pivoted and done somethings that I think when we can catch our breathe and feel better about ourselves, we’ll look back and go, “Holy cow! That was amazing!” So, what is it about crisis that brings out the best in a leader’s creativity? And, what are you experiencing on this idea of having to lean in and think creatively during times of great challenge?

Mark Cole:           You know, I was on the phone with our leadership team over the entire weekend multiple times as we got ready for this Facebook Live event that John did. In fact, one of his points, Jason, the next point is crisis leaders embrace technology and when we talk about creativity, I want to kind of join those two points together if you don’t mind because John really felt compelled and boy, are we not glad that he did. He felt compelled that he needed to give a more consistent message during these times of crisis. That he needed to go to the well and he needed to dig deep within himself, and communicate a precise, consistent message of what leadership looks like during these difficult times. And, so, he’s got the lesson and calls me, and he says, “Mark, I really feel like I need to get it out, I just don’t know how.” Well, when we did the Leadership Through Crisis Summit a couple of weeks ago now, three weeks ago now, we sent John to a studio that we own in Florida. We had about four people in the studio with him. A makeup artist, the video guy, myself and John, and we were still in the requirements of social distancing. But, now we’re in a stay at home order and we can’t send John to a studio and so John says, “I got a message.” We say, “We don’t have the options that we use to have, even in this current economy.” Because now we can’t even get John in front of anybody. Now, we’re going to have to teach John how to record this on his iPad on his desk, walk him through it. And I got to tell you, I’ve had a lot of crisis in my life, but that was a crisis! How do I get John who has never, ever done a Zoom call or anything without one of us close by that walks him through that. That’s just not what he wants to spend his time learning and doing. And, thank god he doesn’t. Let’s keep him on the messages like he gave today! But we had to think creatively, we walk him through it, we’re in the middle of putting some long-term technology pieces in his home so that we can continue delivering things like this. But, here’s what creative means, we’ve got a message, we’ve got a group of people that wants to hear it. We’ve got to get creative in the middle to make sure that we can get that out, and we did, and John did, and I was proud of him. In fact, you need to go to Maxwellpodcast.com/Facebooklive, and watch John with his first ever, where he recorded himself giving this talk!

Jason Brooks:       I love that! I was texting with Charlie Wetzel earlier today, and Charlie is John’s writing partner of a couple of decades, and told him that John had been on Zoom, and Charlie was like, “That is amazing!” But, you know, it speaks to John’s, one of the statements that he makes in this talking about leaders thinking with creativity is there’s always an answer…always. But then he pivots, and he talks about one of the things that keeps people from find an answer is they have the wrong type of fear. So, John talks about a good type of fear that can actually help with creativity, and then he talks about a bad type of fear that actually stunts creativity. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? How do we as leaders find the appropriate type of fear in a situation like this that actually unleashes the potential of our creativity instead of harvest it?

Mark Cole:           You know, John talks about the bad kind of fear and what it does and what it does is it causes us to avoid. In fact, I have discovered that when fear causes me paralysis, I call that bad fear. I’m a leader, I’m driven, I have a propensity to action and any time that I am in a fear that causes procrastination, isolation, denial, it’s bad fear. Then there’s a fear that says, “Man, if I don’t get this thing figured out, John’s got a message, we’ve got about thousands, hundreds of thousands of people that want to hear the message. If I don’t figure this thing out on how to tell John to make it easy to deliver this through technology, I am stopping. I’m a lid on a conduit of great material that needs to be heard.” And, so, it goes on my mind, I’m constantly thinking, thinking. That kind of fear, if you’ll allow me to call it that… energizes me to creativity. It’s what John talked about Carly Fiorina, that bad fear actually hides possibilities whereas a good fear actually causes you to find possibilities. In fact, saying with Carly Fiorina, Carly Fiorina finds leadership as problem solving. If you can solve problems well, you know problems is not our problem. I’m not even going to pull a John Maxwell on us, “Problems is not a problem, problem, problem, problem…” But I am going to say that most of the time a problem is not what stops us, what hinders us. It’s the fear in our perspective of the problem that hinders us for leading in times like we are in right now. And, I don’t know what the future holds. I know that they’re telling us this week, that you’re listening to this podcast, that this is the apex. We don’t know that, it could be different. It depends on which model you look at. But this is the apex of lost life and the apex in most of the country, and people that contract the virus, I don’t know that. But I do know this, as a leader, I’ve got to not let the news media drive a bad fear in me that paralyzes me while I’m staying at home. I still got to keep the best of our people and the sustainability of our team at the forefront of my mind.

Jason Brooks:       I love that! One of the things that we’ve done in our household is we have limited media intake and we have definitely limited social media intake. We’re making a really concerted effort to find the people who aren’t just being blindly optimistic but are embracing the fear for productive ends and it’s amazing how helpful that actually is. So, you touched on technology a little bit there, and the creativity so we’re going to move on to John’s sixth point, and this one is interesting! Because from my perspective, I see how it fits, but it might not have been the first seven that I would have thought of about what crisis leaders do well. And, that is show humility. So, why is humility such a big deal for a leader in times of crisis? And, how do we show humility in a way that is appropriate and inspiring?

Mark Cole:           I’m being mentored on this right now, Jason, so I’m not sure that I’m going to give you anything other than some music. But, because that’s your title, Jason uses, you’re going to be able to take my music and give something solid for the people. But I’m having to get John to mentor me on this right now because I’m a new leader, in other words, I’m leading at a new level, a different level right now than I have been in the last ten weeks. So, it’s a new leader, it’s a new time, a lot more eyeballs are on me and my leadership than there was ten, twelve, eighteen weeks ago, and I feel like I need to show confidence and I need to show certainty, and I need to tell people where we’re going, not where we are. So, I’m having John work with me on this very point of, “John, I really am trying to balance.” I talked about this last week, I’m trying to balance optimism, and realism, I’m trying to balance hope, and realization, that there are some hopeless situations in the world today. Our businesses, our financial future, the health of loved ones, people that we’ve lost, just since, Jason, you and I were sharing in our podcast last week, we’ve had many people that have lost somebody that they loved. How do I show certainty and in fact, I feel like I need to show a calm certainty. And, what John told me, he said, “You do need to do that, but you also need to do that with humility and what that means, Mark, is there are sometimes you need to stand before your team and say, ‘I don’t know.’ Because you don’t know, Mark. They can ask a question and you deflect it, you defer it, you give an answer that you hope what it is. But, in times like this we don’t know and in times like this your team needs to know that you know, you don’t know.” And, I think that’s what John is teaching here is that we’ve got to be vulnerable, we’ve got to be candid, we’ve got to be transparent. And then somehow, in that humility we’ve got to also communicate confidence, not in ourselves but in our team’s ability to get where we’re wanting to go. One of the things that I’m really working on with humility right now is every time I get in front of our staff, every time I get in front of our ambassadors, I highlight that a team represents them. Not Mark Cole, not John Maxwell, but they have a team of women and men that are representing them. And, I think that’s a great intentional act of humility to say, “I will own the responsibility, but the solution is not right here, the solution is in a community of people that are representing you at the leadership level.”

Jason Brooks:       That ties so well with what John talks about. He gave an illustration in the lesson about what was wrong with this picture that during times of crisis, so many businesses are focused on strategy, what they have to do, mission, purpose, action. And, John just asked a simple question, “Where are the people? In all of the stuff that you’re doing, where are the people?” And, I love the fact that one of the things that you’re learning is that you not only have to lead the people, but you’re not responsible for carrying them by yourself and you do lean into the team and you do allow the people to participate, which only makes the people feel more of a sense of community and connectedness to you which in turn, only makes them want to help you even more. And, leaders, if you’re out there thinking you’ve got to solve this crisis alone, or you’ve got to slog through this by yourself, don’t believe it. There are other people that will add value to you and would want to add value to you if you would give them the opportunity.

Mark Cole:           Jason, let me illustrate that point, we have, in John Maxwell Enterprise, we have looked at our current business based on the impact of our immediate business, based on the return of business quote as usual, all though, I don’t think it’s going to be “as usual”. And the potential timeline of when we can start seeing revenue come in and we’ve looked at all of those sides of the formula and we’ve balanced that to our cash position. Now, that’s what all of us are doing so everybody out there has done that or are doing that and are probably doing that every single day like we are. And, we came up with a conclusion that all of us as a staff needed to get into the boat and help us have a longer runway during this time until business could come back in our world. So, we did that, and several weeks ago we asked members of our team, I asked our leadership team to voluntarily adjust their income at a pace that they felt like was doable for their family. I then asked all of our team mates to take five unpaid vacation days in April if they could, and if they could, how many could they? And, if they can’t do any, at least consider it. We had some brilliant leaders, Jason, several of them come up to me and say, “Mark, I just want to give up enough that will take care of all of our team so they don’t have to give up any vacation days.” And I thought, “Man, that is brilliant! How awesome is that? That’s a humble statement!” But I challenged them to say if we’re not careful, we will do that for this month and then next month it will come as a shock to our team that we really have to make additional decisions. And, I want us, at the very beginning to realize we’re all in this together and we all have to consider how we can step in and help. It’s very, very important to us. As a team, that we’re in this together. Now, the humble response of that team, that leadership team that did that, our staff that did that, it was astounding because that is what crisis does to leaders. They unify us they humble us, and like we talked about last week, they have given a great opportunity up for us to reaffirm our values.

Jason Brooks:       Man, that is so powerful. It leads into, you know, we’re all going through a season of change, we’re all having to do things differently, we’re all having to make sacrifices, but the last thing that John says crisis leaders do well is they focus on constructive change. So, what makes a change constructive and how do we as leaders seek those opportunities out in the middle of challenging times?

Mark Cole:           I had our leadership team come together come together, one of our last leadership teams and I just said, “Hey, okay, nobody can bring a management decision to this leadership team meeting. Nobody can bring a stat or a report on what’s happening in our world from Coronavirus.” Now, Jason, you were in that leadership meeting and you know that they didn’t actually honor that request, but it was close! We got close! But here was my point, I needed our team to get a little forward in their thinking just so that when we do establish new norms, it’s not the first time we thought about it. You know, so many people, Jason, they wait until they have to change or until they have to construct something new before they think about construction. Well, awhile back, several years ago now, my wife, Stephanie, decided we were going to build our next home. That’s not highly recommended, and I know right now we’re not even in an economy that has us thinking like that, but we didn’t think about construction when we started the home. We thought about it weeks, months, even years for us, because of how we had to financially get there. We thought about it for a long time before we go there. And, I want to tell you, we’re in a time that new norms is a reality. In fact, there’s things new this week that wasn’t true last week. But, if we wait until construction day to think about constructing change, we waited too late. And, that’s what I was challenging my team to do is in crisis, be constructing the future, not after crisis. If you’re waiting until after the crisis to construct the new way of doing things, I’m telling you, you are already behind, and we haven’t even got there. And, that’s what I did with that simple discipline, I said, “Okay, today’s leadership meeting is not going to be about what we’re missing, what we need to change, what we need to manage and how bad is the sky falling right now?” I wasn’t trying to be unrealistic, I was trying to challenge leaders to do what they got to do and that’s john’s point right here: crisis leaders focus on constructive change and they focus on that constructive change before the change actually ends when possible. And, that’s where we are right now, you and I, you listening to this podcast, please begin thinking about the future, about being on the other side of this, about constructing the other side because that will put you ahead of the game if you’re already thinking like that.

Jason Brooks:       And, that’s a great spot to end, and just to give you something to think about, listeners, John gave two questions at the end of his talk, and we’re going to re-purpose them just a little bit in light of what Mark just said about, you know, looking ahead and what you need to be building, how you need to think about what you’re going to build before you actually build it. John asked the question, “What would I love to do now that I have more time?” What would you love to do on the other side of this? What would you love for your team to do on the other side of this? You need to be thinking about that right now so that when you are on the other side you can begin moving towards that reality. And then second question that John asked was, “What should I do now that I have time?” So, spin it just a little bit more for your team, what should your team be doing on the other side of this crisis? What should your team be focusing on when you move out of our current situation? I think if you think about, you know, what you would love to do and what you should be doing, those are two pretty good orientation points for you to set your compass by. Mark, man, as always, I just absolutely love being able to ask you questions and pick your brain. So, thank you for the time today. Thank you for what you brought to the table, just fantastic stuff! Again, we could have gone probably another twenty, twenty-five minutes! Man, I just appreciate the heck out of you, brother.

Mark Cole:           Yeah, you too, Jason. I love hosting the podcast with you! I love talking leadership, I love seeing your pen work its magic, and I love leading, truly, during crisis. If you’ve enjoyed today, I’m going to challenge you to a couple of things. I’m going to challenge you, one, to send this to somebody you think would be helped by what John taught today in Crisis Leaders – What They Do Well. I’m going to ask you, if you have not subscribed, you need to subscribe. We are going to continue bringing you relevant content for such a time as this. Right now, John’s doing Leadership When it Matters the Most, and we want to get that to you. And then, finally, I’m going to challenge you, if you’ve enjoyed today and maybe this was the first time you listened, you haven’t even listened to part one, John did an entire video of this lesson, fifty-two minutes, and we have that available to you at Maxwellpodcast.com/facebooklive. You’ll see that as well as some other videos and that’s because we’re just here to add value to you. John Maxwell, Jason Brooks, myself, Jake, our producer, we all have made a commitment that during times like this we want to be in your mind as an organization that adds value. That’s been our intent today. That was our intent last week, by the way, secret, that’s going to be our intent next week. That’s what we do. So, we hope we have done that for you today. I know that John did, I believe that Jason definitely did, I believe that all three of us together have given you some things to think about so that you will lead well in times of crisis. Let’s lead, let’s make a difference!