Welcome back to another interview on Unlocking Your World of Creativity. We had the pleasure and honor to sit down and speak with Major General Robert W. Mixon, Jr. 

In the US Army, General Mixon commanded the 7th Infantry Division and Fort Carson, Colorado. He has served in executive leadership positions in both for-profit and not-for-profit companies prior to starting his own leadership company, Level Five Associates, in 2014. 

He is also the co-author of a best-selling book on Amazon, “Cows in the Living Room: Developing an Effective Strategic Plan and Sustaining It” and the author of “We're All In: The Journey to a World-Class Culture”, which became a "Best New Release" on Amazon in 2017. 

In today’s episode: 

1. Major General Mixon breaks down his 6 key principles of success in leadership 
2. The value veterans bring to the workplace 
3. General Mixons company, Level Five Associates and how his time in military service developed the insights, discipline, and vision necessary to transform capable people into unsurpassed business leaders.

6 Principles of Success

1. Azimuth - A term learned in the military. It's your cardinal direction for the organization, for the team. You set the azimuth, which includes your mission intent. 
2. Listen - Becoming more effective listeners. 
3. Trust and Empower - Empowerment is the embodiment of trust. But if we don't nurture that aspect of our culture, then we'll end up with an environment of distrust, which is toxic. 
4. Do the Right Thing When No One is Looking - “As we say, at the Pentagon, that briefs well, but it's very difficult to do because we have to value the process over the outcome and do the right thing.”  
5. When in Charge Take Charge - It's not being loud and profane and directive. It's being calm in the chaos.
6. Balance the Personal and Professional - Taking your careers very seriously, your mission very seriously, but not taking ourselves that way. Promoting balance among each other. It's not all about time with work life. It's about having the values that you really believe in guide your actions, and that's where balance lives.

“The plan is a basis for change. And if we are not adaptive as leaders, as organizations, and we are rigid in our fixation on the plan, then I think our chances of success are very low.”

Value Veterans bring to the Workplace 

1. a sense of duty, a sense of doing what needs to be done.   
2. They're reliable.  They're gonna be used to getting the mission accomplished. Sometimes when it runs beyond five o'clock
3. They're going to be team players. They understand that there's no eye in team.

After General Mixon left military service, he continued to support and work for veterans with disabilities, mental health challenges, and has worked extensively in nonprofit work. 

Two organizations he is privileged to be a part of are:

CDS Life Transitions - An organization providing life and job transition for men and women with intellectual disabilities 

Warrior Salute  - Provides meaningful platforms and events to raise funds for other warrior and veteran organizations.

Level Five Associates

Level Five Associates’s goal is to provide individuals and organizations with leadership tools that work, that are values based and based on the right values.

• offering individuals and organizations one on one in strategic planning and executive coaching 
• conduct workshops for teams and individuals on each of the big six principles focusing on discovery, learning on practical application
• process of engagement where we seek to “learn about you”,giving practical application tools that they can employ every day. 

“Taking charge is promoting positivity, promoting a learning culture.”

Find out more about Major General Robert W. Mixon, Jr. by going to Level Five Associates, Linkedin, and Amazon to purchase his books. 

Speaker 2: Hey, thanks Mark. It's an honor to be here.

Speaker 2: Well, thanks, mark. If we look back on the military, my military journey of 33 years, and it's hard for me to believe it's been 15 years since I retired from [00:01:30] Division Command. But along that journey, what I learned in the military was that there was a tremendous amount of creativity inside our organization, an operation. For example, there's a concept called the, there's a concept called the commander's intent, which I'd like to cover or briefly describe. When we have a mission, we're given a mission. Then [00:02:00] the commander gives us his or her intent, which is a distillation of the mission into some key components. And the key components of the mission are the end state. What does success look like? The key tasks we have to perform for that end state to come to life. And then the purpose, the why that evolution of mission and intent is now the Army calls it mission command. It was very descriptive in terms of what [00:02:30] were we supposed to do and when was it supposed to be accomplished and why we were conducting this mission. What was not in there was the how we were charged with developing the how. And that's where the creativity opportunity really emerged. In my army experience, I found that the best commanders were the ones who were specifically not gonna give us the how

Speaker 1: Absolutely. Well, and in your book Cows in the Living Room, you were talking about developing and these effective strategic plans. And I think of a strategic plan or in maybe a creatives vernacular, the brief, the guidelines, here's the plan of action with the why and the purpose all behind it. But the tactical thinking does require some creativity.

Speaker 1: So interesting. And I guess the conventional wisdom out in the lay public like myself is that these are inside the lines. Inside the box, don't distract or detract from the plan. But it sounds [00:04:30] like there's more thinking to that.

Speaker 2: And I think one of the great boxers in history said, no plan ever survives the first punch at the face. . I think the same is true in the military and in all aspects of our lives. The plan is a basis for change. And if we are not adaptive as leaders, as organizations, and we are rigid in our fixation on the plan, then I think our chances of success are very low

Speaker 2: Well, I have the big six principles that I've learned over time from what smarter people than me. And those six principles are essentially the, I think, foundation of where creativity can arise. And so I'll extrapolate them if you're okay with that.

Speaker 1: Absolutely.

Speaker 2: The fifth one is what in charge take charge. And I'd like a lot of people relate with the military. [00:07:00] It's not being loud and profane and directive. It's being the calm and the chaos. It's being the one who promotes feedback and discussion, honest discussion, and even promotes vulnerability in many cases because leaders need to be willing to be vulnerable if they're gonna be genuine. And the sixth principle is balance the personal and professional, which means we've got to take our careers very seriously, our mission very seriously, [00:07:30] but we don't take ourselves that way, and we have to promote balance among each other. And it's not all about time with work life. It's about having the values that you really believe in guide your actions, and that's where balance lives. So those six principles now become the foundation, as I mentioned earlier, of promoting and nurturing a culture of innovation, a culture of creativity. Because when you have those ingredients present in [00:08:00] your culture, in your ecosystem, now people want to contribute. They want to do things perhaps a little differently. The better, faster, cheaper pathway now becomes more obvious than the way we always did it. And so that's where I think a great organization can establish the plant, the seeds, and grow the seeds of creativity,

Speaker 2: I think the efforts to improve it, mark, I don't know that we've moved the needle far enough. And I say that because veterans could provide tremendous resource to any company, an organization, but you've gotta look for them and you've got to promote their development as part of the hiring process [00:09:30] and the onboarding process, we tend to not know enough about veterans because we don't have enough members of our population who have served . And if you think about it right now, the demographics are that 95% of adult Americans have never served in the military in any capacity

Speaker 1: That's far. That's a big number.

Speaker 1: . And I loved reading in your background [00:11:30] that after you left military service, you continued to support and work for veterans with disabilities, with mental health challenges, and so forth. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that nonprofit work.

Speaker 2: We're looking to expand it to other parts of the country right now. We're looking to establish the program here in Florida, and we find that the 90% success rate that we have is remarkable among veteran programs. Now we do that in partnership with the da, for example. So it's a community based program that has links to other programs, but I've been proud to be part of that effort. I'm a father of two soldiers, [00:13:30] one still in active duty and my daughter-in-law. And so I've got skid in the game, and I believe that we owe our veterans all we can provide them to help them transition successfully, having done so much and made so many sacrifices for us.

Speaker 2: Well, thanks, mark. We have a long way to go. And the requirements, the [00:14:30] needs of veterans for our help as a society are not going away anytime soon. We just ended 20 years of war. We didn't end it well, but we ended it. And we now have a generation of veterans that are gonna be among us for the rest of our lives. And these men and women are going to, they're gonna need our help. They're gonna need our help from service organizations, but they're gonna need our help in the workplace. They're gonna need [00:15:00] our help in the school system. They're gonna need our help in the neighborhoods. And I think where we can help is by going back to that second principle I talked about by listening actively listening actively seeking to see where we can support them as a community in every aspect of life and not, they don't look looking for handouts. Well, I'm talking about providing them with opportunities. And we've talked a lot about opportunities in our society recently and how we need to create more opportunities [00:15:30] for all Americans in every walk of life. So I think we need to open the aperture for veterans in this framework as well.

Speaker 1: , well, in general, Nixon, there may be creative listeners who wanna get involved in that. So before I turn the page to your current work, I'd like to maybe pause and have you tell us where could we connect with this organization and see if we could contribute to the efforts?

Speaker 1: We'll definitely connect with that and we'll put all those links in our show notes so people can refer to them.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Thanks Martin.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I appreciate that, mark. We Level Five Associates [00:17:30] is a company that is really almost an army of one, if you will. But our goal is to provide individuals and organizations with leadership tools that work, that are values based and based on the right values. So the big six principles for the core of our offerings to individuals and organizations, both in executive coaching, one on one, which I do a fair amount [00:18:00] of strategic planning, that's what the Cals and Living Room book was based on. It was a handbook in that regard. And in leadership development of high performing teens, I wrote the book, we're All in about the journey to a world class culture a few years ago, which really provides people with at least a snapshot of what does a world class culture look like. But in order to have a world class culture, you gotta have world class leaders, leaders who get it.

Speaker 1: Well, and under this practical, I [00:19:30] guess heading, you're very prolific in writing about some of these principles and these tactics and these plans and programs. In fact, you've got a biweekly blog. It's got a couple of thousand subscribers, but you also put out an ebook a couple of years ago called, who Saw This coming, and What do we do now? I couldn't help but think over the last even two years, and you who saw this coming , Robert?

Speaker 2: Let's reset our asthma. Let's review our mission, our intent, our values, our culture, and let's capture it saddle up here. Let's promote and practice active listing with the intent to understand, let's respect each other, which listing represents, let's nurture, trust and empower people to make the decisions at the right level. Let's do the [00:21:30] right thing. Yeah, let's demonstrate the right thing. Let's reward the right thing. Let's promote being calm in the chaos. Promote the capability in our organizations to learn. One of my best leaders I've ever known, Colonel and General Don Holder, taught me that there are two ways you can ask a question when something goes wrong. One of the ways you could say is, what were you thinking, Robert? The other way is, so Robert, [00:22:00] what did we learn? The difference in those questions in the tenor and way those questions are framed is night and day.

Speaker 2: We're not listening as leaders for those warning signs, and we don't seek to help people until it's too late to help them. So I believe that what we've learned in the last couple years is that it's time. It's time to go back to the basics and restore and reinforce those [00:23:30] big six and to bring them to life in ourselves and our leaders and our teams and our organization. And that way people know that we care. Yes, I know Seal saying that. Someone told me once, I don't care how much until I know how much you care,

Speaker 2: Well, I very much believe in strategic planning. As I mentioned earlier, mark, the healthiest and most successful companies are the ones who think strategically and act tactically. Well, how do you do that? Well, first of all, I think you build a plan of what do you want the organization to look like in three to four years? And that end state, [00:25:00] if you will, I mentioned earlier in the commanders in tent, how the end state is captured, but you start with the end in mind. And then I like to use the reverse planning sequence to come back to now. So if three years we look like this, and I would say we look like this in terms of our productivity, profitability, success or service performance, some type of metrics, because that which is measured gets done. If we use hope as a method, I tell you, [00:25:30] I've tried it, it doesn't work.

Speaker 1: So, well, and you're probably seen, I have somebody in the room who is talking about those what ifs or what if the bridge is out, what if there's potholes? What if that path isn't available to us? Are seen as you're so negative, you're so pessimistic, you wanna be the devil's advocate, but you're derailing our strategic planning process . But they have a place.

Speaker 1: Whatever we conduct. I'm gonna build that term.

Speaker 2: [00:28:30] Now that sounds very complex. It's really not. Once you practice it a few times and maybe you get some help to do it, I mean, sometimes we look inside and that's all we only look inside and we could probably get some help from other people who have made the mistakes before we made 'em or made more than we have and could come in and say, wait a minute, maybe you need to think about this. Or maybe you do consider that. So I think there's a lot of ingredients to this formula, but [00:29:00] that this is how learning organizations thrive.

Speaker 1: Love that. Well, Robert, what a great conversation. And before I ask you a concluding question, as I did before, how can we get in touch with you and follow your work and learn more about what Level Five is doing?

Speaker 1: Well, and it sounds like anybody who calls is gonna get some good insight. And I guess that's where I wanted to conclude with us, Robert, is that is, yeah, we've looked back on experience and learnings and all the ways that we can apply these experiences, but let's look ahead over the horizon for you. Instead [00:30:30] of saying who saw that coming , what are you looking for both in business and maybe your own personal creativity?

Speaker 2: We need to be more unified than divided, and we need to have conversations that may not be comfortable with each other in [00:32:00] different venues. And I intend to promote that type of work both professionally and personally. I intend to support the veteran community in any way that I can. We're working now on a project to bring affordable housing to veterans here in Florida, central Florida. They're even using the term now attainable because it's almost not affordable. But we're gonna figure this out and we're gonna figure out how to provide safe quality housing and all the other services with it [00:32:30] for our veterans here in Florida. And I think we need to do it around the country. So those are my sort of cause related efforts going forward here, mark and I intend to keep level five operational as long as people want to work with me and what we do and grow.

Speaker 2: It. Thanks, mark. I enjoyed the conversation and I wish all of you well.