Unlocking Creative Confidence in Corporate Culture | Stories With Traction Podcast

Show Notes:

In this episode, Matt Zaun sits down with Mary Messner, a former healthcare executive turned keynote speaker, to explore how creativity, not just innovation, fuels business momentum.

Mary shares how creative thinking helped her rise through the corporate ranks, lead global teams, and eventually launch a thriving speaking business. She unpacks how leaders can unlock creative potential across their organizations and why failing fast might be the most strategic move a company can make.

In addition, they talk about:

 ✅ Why creativity is not arts and crafts and how to reframe it as a business growth tool
 ✅ The power of “hackathons” in non-tech environments and how they foster surprising breakthroughs
 ✅ Why creativity should permeate every level of the organization, not just the innovation team

…and much more!

BIOS:

Mary Messner is a former healthcare exec turned keynote speaker who helps teams swap stale routines for sparks of creativity. Her talks feel like a field trip for your brain…fun, unexpected, and full of “why didn’t we think of that?” moments.

Matt Zaun is an award-winning speaker and strategic storytelling expert who helps business leaders inspire action and drive results. With a track record of catalyzing growth across 300+ organizations, Matt shows clients how to leverage story to transform sales, marketing, and company culture.

 

*Below is an AI-generated transcript, which may contain errors

 

Matt Zaun 

I am so excited for this conversation because today I'm joined by Mary Messner, who is a former healthcare executive turned keynote speaker who helps teams swap stale routines for sparks of creativity.

Welcome to the show, Mary.

 

Mary Messner 

Hey, Matt. Good to be here. Thanks for your time.

 

Matt Zaun 

I appreciate it. And one of the things I want to jump right to is the idea that a lot of businesses talk about innovation, innovating for their clients, innovating for their teams, but it's very rare or not, maybe not necessarily rare, but we don't talk enough about creativity in the workplace in a business setting.

Why do you think there's a disconnect between innovation and the creative piece?

 

Mary Messner 

Well, answer that in a couple ways. I'll say first, innovation is having a moment. It is definitely a buzzword that I think a lot of companies see.

If they can continue to innovate, they can continue to adapt to the challenges that they're experiencing, whether it's internal or external.

So I think that that in and of itself creates a lot of energy and attention simply to the idea of innovation.

The reason why I think creativity is sometimes left out of that equation is because, you know, I ask a lot of people, what do you think of when you hear the word creativity?

And most people's minds go to arts and crafts or something their kids do or bring home from school or some artwork you throw on the wall.

And that is, I mean, that's a component of how people express themselves creatively. But I really think in business, the successful piece there is to embrace creativity as a tool to help you think about things differently.

It's not arts and crafts. It's not the tangible element of creativity that's so important. It's the mindset of creativity.

And I do believe that that is where innovation comes from. If you can create an entire culture, an entire workforce that has not just the ability to think creatively, but permission to think creatively, then the innovation will follow.

So you mentioned about embracing creativity as a tool.

 

Matt Zaun 

What would it look like to fully embrace and implement that in a workplace?

 

Mary Messner 

Yeah, I'll give you an example. I know, Matt, you're a big fan of storytelling, so I'll do my best to weave some stories in here.

In my previous life as a healthcare executive, I worked with a couple other people. This is Cerner Corporation was where I worked.

Now it's owned by Oracle. But one of the things that we really wanted to focus on was the talent.

that existed within our consulting organization and some of the requests or demands that our clients were putting on us to do these big healthcare implementations faster, more efficiently.

And you assume the model of doing a typical project, you know, a project management type of project is cut and dry.

And yet I knew there was a different way to go about doing that. But I also knew I didn't have that answer.

So we put together hackathons. I don't know if you've heard of the term hackathons. Probably a lot of your listeners have.

It's very common in the tech space where you do coding and you hack apart a problem. We put that through the consulting lens and would pull a bunch of individuals together from across consulting.

These were new hires, some people who had been there just a week fresh out of college, and some people who had been out in the consulting space for 20 plus years.

Put them. We in a room together. We did do a constraint of 24 hours and said, help us make our implementations better.

Kind of a broad problem statement. We did not put a lot of restrictions on it. And we simply said, you got 24 hours to solve this problem.

How would you do it? If you had all the resources at your disposal, what would it look like? And to support that, we gave these individuals access to some data analysts, some HR resources, some executives that had kind of the voice of the client in mind.

But we gave them full creative freedom to put together a process that they thought could work. At the end of all of this, they presented back to the executives and we ended up adopting some of those.

The reason I tell that story is because, one, we were putting our faith, we were putting creative freedom on some individuals.

That actually didn't know a lot about this business, but they'd lived life. They'd interacted with people. They may have some new ideas that we hadn't ever considered.

And the other half of it is that we said to them, come up with any idea, regardless of the limitations that it might present.

And that right there is something people crave. They crave having their voice heard, and they crave having the time, energy, space, and the respect to simply brainstorm new ideas.

And that's how you begin the process of creating a culture that actually celebrates and respects that. And then you got to go at least put some of those things into action.

If you say, thanks so much for your time, that was a fun 24 hours, see you next year, you probably wouldn't continue the culture.

But the willingness to hear from people in the company and then put some of the things into action, even if it's just a tiny little...

A little piece of it. That's what begins the culture of really embracing creativity in the workplace.

 

Matt Zaun 

I love that. The hackathon idea, especially from a consulting perspective, is absolute gold. You know, I think it's something we said about gamification in business.

And I think gamification leads to that creativity. I think we're speaking almost the exact same thing here as far as like a hackathon versus the gamification.

Because in my world, one of the things that I challenge clients to do is pull everyone in the company together that has any kind of influence over the sales process and focus on the prospect and or client in mind, because if they're trying to upsell and focus in on the emotion of fear.

And what we do is I will set a timer for five minutes and I'll say within these five minutes, I want you to come up with every single topic you can possibly fathom that is driving fear right now in your clients and or prospects.

It's interesting. Interesting because they'll rattle off five and then they're like, well, what do we do with the rest of the time?

And that's where that hackathon mentality, that gamification comes into play, where then we say, okay, well, you keep saying price, price, price, price is a fear, but there's like 30 subcategories under price.

Why is a prospect concerned and fearful of price? Why are they concerned about any kind of inflationary things? Why are they concerned about any kind of regulatory things?

And then keep going and going and going. And it's amazing. What I'll say is you stood in line longer than five minutes for a cup of coffee.

Focus in on this for five minutes. And it's amazing, this amazing surge of creativity that happens. And there's more problem solution conversations that come up.

They unpack all kinds of different things that they never even thought that their clients were afraid of and concerned about.

And then we're able to go back and say, okay, well, these are the stories that need to be shared.

 

Mary Messner 

So it's right in line, I believe, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, and that hackathon gamification mindset.

Yeah. I think there's a couple things that you did there, which I really like. The first one is you give them white space.

And that is so paramount. That time to simply think and ideate, pen in hand, I think is fantastic to write some of those things down.

But the permission to just have time that is unscripted time is so incredibly important. And then I think the second piece that I really like there, there's a phrase that I think is the magic behind all of this.

And that phrase, when you put creativity behind it, is to simply say, help me think through this. I have a dream I want to go after.

Help me think through this. We've got some challenges with a client. Help me think through this. And it's a subtle, subtle shift in words, but it's not, will you solve this?

Will you take action on this? Will you outline the five things we're going to do to, in your case?

Improve a sales relationship. It's just simply very open-ended. Hey, help me think through this. That, it's a freedom-giving statement.

And you combine that with the white space like you did. I think that's brilliant.

 

Matt Zaun 

Thanks for sharing that. appreciate that. Why do you think some leaders are afraid of looking silly as it pertains to creativity?

And is there a different perspective shift that they can be mindful of to kind of stiff on that notion of, I need to be put in a silly state in order to have a surge of creativity?

 

Mary Messner

I do think that it's a, it's a misinterpretation of creativity. So it's back to this arts and crafts idea, is that if creativity is centered around that, I've got to get, you know, Play-Doh out on the table, Legos for everybody, gadgets for people to play with, colored pencils for people to doodle with.

And I love all of those things. I'm not. I'm putting down any of them. But I think that there are executive leaders that come forward and say, if I have a room full of Play-Doh, I'm not actually doing business.

I'm creating a space to play. And play is what brings in that creative mindset. But I think that you can do that without people feeling like they're stepping too far into the silliness space.

And I'll go back to your example. A pen and a white piece of paper and one single question. That right there is that freedom to start bringing in creativity.

The second piece that I think a lot of people shy away from is there's a risk there. People are going to come up with some ideas and some suggestions and thoughts that might press a few buttons, that might be a bold enough idea that someone says, that's the most ridiculous thing I've heard of.

But what if everybody else in the room actually loves it? You know, how do you come back from those moments?

So there's a little bit. of fear and loss of control that has to occur. And those things are all okay.

If you acknowledge them ahead of time and prepare yourself for them before it gets to that moment.

 

Matt Zaun 

Sure, sure. A musician, artist, if you will, that I absolutely, absolutely love is Bob Dylan. I'm a huge Bob Dylan fan.

And I think he's an amazing lyricist. My wife doesn't like him. She thinks that he has a scratchy voice.

I think he is a masterful writer. And I bring that up because it's interesting because for anyone listening that is a Bob Dylan fan or has any kind of respect for Dylan, if you read lyrics that he has, it is just incredibly deep.

And some people might scratch their head thinking how on earth can someone produce that kind of song? And this is way before AI and all that.

And it's amazing because if you really look at 10 songs being put on an album, it wasn't 10 songs that were written.

It was... And I think it's interesting in business where we often think, okay, we're going to have five ideas and we have to work within the realm of these five ideas when it might take 17 ideas.

might take 55 ideas to hit the ideas that we need. So how would you recommend organizations giving people, I mean, you mentioned the hackathon.

I think that's amazing. But are there some other concrete ideas that organizations can do that they can understand that it's going to take longer than just, hey, we need to throw a couple of things up on a wall and see what sticks?

How can we get more business leaders in a mindset of, no, if you listen to amazing musicians that have really awesome songs in the world, it wasn't just what we see that took to get there.

What are your thoughts on that? Oh, there's a lot there.

 

Mary Messner 

The first thing is to accept failure. Because that... That seems like a very obvious statement. So I'll just start with that one and get it out of the way.

Because to your point, the ability to try a whole bunch of ideas means way more than half of them.

In fact, the vast majority of them are probably going to end up being wrong. So accepting failure is incredibly important.

I also think that the part that goes hand in hand with that is it's not just failure of a business or a leader.

It's failure of you have to allow every single staff member the space to fail without repercussion. And I know that feels, again, we go back to fear.

You mentioned fear earlier. There's an emotion of fear behind there of like, what if it's such a big failure that it takes the company down?

The likelihood of that happening is very small. I also know that that's something that can stop people from allowing that, that full freedom of thought.

So acknowledge the fear, create the guardrails for people to operate within it, and then allow for the failure that can, that can happen as a result of.

The other thing that I think is interesting, this, the, you know, design thinking world brings in this concept of fail fast, which is that permission to try things, but do them in a rapid prototype world where you don't have to have the entire thing thought out, but you simply begin.

And beginning gives you good insight into what will work and what won't work so that you can fail fast, cross it off the list, and move on to the next one, especially if you're worried about it being such a massive failure that it could have big implications to a company as a whole.

So I love that fail fast mentality. And then I do think that the ability to bring that freedom of thought, it can't exist at a specific layer of the company.

It can't be the innovation department who's given their stress balls and beanbag chairs to work from and, you know, walls of whiteboards to work from.

That, that is a mentality that has to be allowed to occur throughout the company. And that means you do have to be willing to take risks.

And, and I also, you know, there's the obvious things like there's, there's opportunities to pilot things, to try things in safe spaces, to reach out to client partners and say, we want to try a risk.

Would you partner with us if we implement this with a different cost method behind it? But there's all sorts of ways to put things into practice.

But that first thing is acknowledging the ability to fail and then, and then fail fast. So you can move forward to the next idea.

 

Matt Zaun

That's a really good point. Thanks for sharing that. I want to talk about, let's, let's backtrack. want to talk a little bit about your story, how you got to the world that you're in with this creativity space.

So let's go back to when you were a teenager. I was like hearing from individuals when they were a teen, what they wanted to do, what they aspire to.

So if I were to ask 13 year old Mary, what's. What wanted to do, what she wanted to be, what would that response be?

 

Mary Messner 

Does it have to be 13?

 

Matt Zaun 

Or 15 or 17?

 

Mary Messner 

The middle school age is always a tricky one. I, you know, forever I wanted to be a nurse. That was kind of my dream.

I had a lot of healthcare people in my family. I was fascinated by the whole side of medicine. And so if you would have asked me, probably any point in middle school and beyond, I wanted to be a nurse.

That's what I went to college to go do. Um, and then I didn't get into nursing school. That's, I mean, simply put, I enjoyed college way too much and I didn't have the grades I needed.

I will talk about fail fast. That was a, that was a pretty massive failure from the beginning. I didn't have the grades that I needed to get into, into nursing school.

And that might have been a little bit of a moment that began to spark a lot of this creative thinking that we're talking about here today.

And then. It shows up in, in my keynotes and the work that I do. And that is because that was a moment where I didn't know what to do.

I was two years into college. My parents had said, you gotta, you gotta go to the local community college to figure this out.

And so I took a ton of different classes of business classes and read a whole lot of books, read an Ayn Rand book that kind of shifted some perspective about what I wanted to do and the growth that I wanted to have professionally.

And I realized I really wanted to be in a career that allowed me to, yes, appreciate this healthcare world that I had loved for so long, but also allowed me to constantly think about things in new and different ways.

I ended up getting a degree in health information management, which is simply put the business side of medicine. And I went on to be the health information.

Management Director at a large hospital here in Kansas City. It's my first job out of college, had about 80 people reporting to me.

And this is a really good example of creativity from the very beginning. And that was that I went to the CFO of the company.

I was hired in as the Assistant Director. The Director left a few months later. The CFO said, there is no way we'll promote you into being a director.

And I went to her office and I said, I know I don't know how to do this job, but I also know if you give me a little bit of time, I can figure it out.

I can rely on my team. I can ask the right questions. I can try a whole bunch of stuff.

I'm confident that I can do this job if you give me a little bit of time to figure it out.

And she didn't answer me right away. But eventually, maybe through desperation, because they had no other option, they let me have the job.

Side part. Side part. I became this director of health information management at 24 years old. And I made a lot of mistakes, but I learned a lot along the way.

But I think that really solidified my willingness to try the things that I didn't know how to do and experiment with the things that I didn't know how to do.

And it stuck with me. Wow.

 

Matt Zaun 

So at 24. So what positioned you in your 20s to be that bold?

 

Mary Messner 

Oh, well, I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm going to try and answer it. So this is a little bit of a tangent here.

I'm 5'11", so I'm almost six feet tall. And now you see these six feet tall middle school girls walking around all over the place.

That wasn't the case when I was 11. I was hovering near six feet tall. And I learned very young.

That people saw me and noticed me whether I wanted them to or not. I stood out to make me feel comfortable and I slapped my shoulders and sit a little bit lower as often as I could.

But I also realized that even that made me stand out even more because it was so apparent I was trying to hide.

So the other option that I had was to embrace the fact that I did stand out and to let that make me be a little bit more bold and a little bit more confident in my choices.

And this is theory, Matt. am speculating that that experience is what those experiences that kind of combined around just my presence at a young age, that that contributed to me being able to carry that mentality forward to say, hey, I'm going to maybe screw this up.

I'm going to stand out. I'm going to do. People are going to look at me funny. And also, they've been doing it for a very long time.

So I'm just going to keep trying things and see what I can maybe get away with. And it certainly served me well since then.

I still have a problem slouching. But I try my best to remind myself to stand up straight.

 

Matt Zaun

Wow. I really appreciate your vulnerability and you sharing that. I feel like that could have gone one of two ways.

 

Mary Messner 

It could have developed an inferiority complex for sure.

 

Matt Zaun 

Or what you did, lean into the identity of being bold, leaning into a strength, leading into who you were.

And clearly, it worked out really well for you. So 24 years old, you're running a team. You're fighting to become a director, even though maybe at that moment, your boss didn't think you were qualified for it.

So after that, take us through 24 to your 30s. And then when you became. An executive at a healthcare company.

 

Mary Messner

What did that look like? Yeah, you know, I went on, I was at this hospital as a health information management director for about four years.

And then an opportunity came up with Cerner Corporation, the company I mentioned earlier, to go implement their health information management software as a consultant.

And now I'm 27, 28. And I knew this is an international company. It's an opportunity to travel worldwide to work with people that were my own age and just experience that part of life.

So the opportunity came up and I said, I said yes. Yes. And what I learned in that very quickly there was many people had started at this company right out of college.

And so they learned a lot of consulting skills. They learned the technology well, but they hadn't worked in a healthcare setting and didn't have that background.

So I started working with our clients and noticing things in their department operations, where I'd say, have you considered looking into how you're processing the paper that moves through this department, or how you're even positioning your staff throughout the department?

Some of the efficiencies just started to become really obvious, and that might have been my work. The hospital that I worked at was a for-profit healthcare system, so the idea of efficiency was constantly drilled into your mind.

But those conversations led to some one-off consulting operations, selling some additional services into these clients. And each of those interactions began, I'll say I started to get a little bit of a reputation around the company for trying things and interacting with our clients in some slightly different ways, pushing into things that maybe weren't

Particularly in the scope, you know, the paper of exactly what we were supposed to be doing. But they were adding a lot of value into our client interactions.

And so I got asked to take on some new things. Or people would say, hey, let's think through this.

We've got this client, new challenge. We're not quite sure how to approach them. And within a few years' time, I'd moved into an executive role there.

I was leading all of our project managers across the globe. And I loved that role. I was supporting the sales teams, thinking about how we could do implementations differently, how we could adjust our costs to meet the client where they were.

It was the freedom that I had to think in new and different ways. I will say it was not given to me.

I took it. And, but I did that with, I took a lot of risks, but I did that. business You

I took smart risks is the way that I will say that. I pushed boundaries quite a bit, but I did that by studying situations, by talking to other people, by saying, if we staffed this project in this way that was more efficient for our company and maybe took some of the burden off of the individuals on the client side, what would that look like?

What's the downside? What's the upside? Could we try it in a very small capacity? And sometimes it works, sometimes it didn't.

But for the most part, it allowed me the ability to keep pushing boundaries. And so when challenges would come up at the company where someone would say, we need someone that can come in here and think creatively about this, they'd pull me in to those conversations or those projects that people were working on.

It was so much fun. Tons of fun to go out there and just play. Sure. When did you make the jump from what you were doing in the healthcare world to keynote speaking?

That was in 2021. End of 2021, survived COVID with my team. We got through all of that. Another one where we learned a lot about how to work with team members in different ways.

And I'll give you a quick example on that and then come back to the question that you just asked.

Oftentimes in business, I think leaders say, COVID is a great example. In times of challenge, in times of unknown, I need to hold on tighter.

I need to get better plugged into the work that's being done. I need to have more visibility or clarity on what people are accomplishing or what they aren't accomplishing because things feel risky and unknown.

I took, and I didn't do this alone. I say I, my entire team worked together to say, Okay. How can we survive this crazy COVID chaos without feeling like we're holding on so tight that we're just creating more stress for ourselves?

And we did a couple of things. The first one is we stopped holding meetings on Friday. We largely implemented a four-day work week.

And the beauty of that then was people actually got more of their work done. And they worked more efficiently in the first four days.

And then they had Friday to take care of their family, to focus on the kids that were at home, to focus on the parents that maybe they were caring for.

We set a rule that no meetings occurred before 9 and no meetings occurred after 4 p.m. Because people were getting kids ready for school, for homeschooling, getting breakfast going, and they needed to be ready to prepare dinner at the end of the day.

And we preserved a block of time in the middle of the day to do the same thing with lunches for kids and family that were all home.

day. And weאתham. We'll We'll keep Thank And the other thing that we all agreed to, which is a little bit softer, was a willingness to trust each other.

And what that meant is, you know, I think we all can think in business of the meetings where you invite 15 people to the meeting because they might need to know the information that's being covered.

And then you got a lot of people that are simply sitting in a meeting. It's a lot of dollars and cents worth of time sitting in that meeting.

What we all said was, if we are not critical to the conversation, we're not going to join the meeting.

And so we trusted the ones that showed up to make the decisions that needed to be made. And we trusted the ones that opted out to say, I'm going to trust your judgment that you don't need to be in this conversation.

We accelerated our timeline. We got more done and less and the entire team stuck it out throughout this whole window of COVID.

It was a, it was just a fascinating time to, again, you had. to take risks. You had to bring creativity in and think about things differently because business had completely changed.

So fast forward to end of 2021. I'd been at Cerner for 14 years and I was ready. I mean, there was no compelling reason, but I was ready to take a chance on myself and to try something different, to use my brain and in new and different ways.

And I put in my notice and said, I'm not really going anywhere. So I'll give you eight weeks. So I gave him a two month notice, which allowed the team to really get into a strong, you know, position to continue operating.

And I began experimenting. And saying yes to new opportunities and And. Deciding what it was that I wanted to speak about and what I was passionate about and what my signature message really was.

And through a lot of that, went back and studied my career, just like we're doing here. What are those standout things that really were game changers or big pivots for me in my career?

And it all kept coming back to a willingness to embrace creativity from the beginning. So that's what I speak about today is creativity in the workplace.

 

Matt Zaun 

I love that. Thank you so much for sharing. And thank you so much for your time today. I really, really appreciate this conversation.

I got a lot of great takeaways. There's three in particular that I'm going to walk away from this conversation remembering.

The first is I really appreciate you mentioning embrace creativity as a tool. Not thinking about it like arts and crafts.

You said we actually need to embrace it as the creative business tool that it is. The second point, I really appreciate you mentioning hackathons, but not just in the tech space, but it could be.

Utilized in pretty much any business environment. And that really brings up the idea of that gamification in business. You said give white space to team members.

That unscripted time is paramount to people thinking creatively. I thought that was incredible. And then the third and final point, I really appreciate you mentioning that this idea of creativity, it can't be for a specific level of the company.

We really do need to create this company culture of creativity across the board. So I thought there was tremendous wisdom in what you said.

So I really appreciate that. And Mary, if anyone wants to get more information on you, what you do, they want to reach out to you for a keynote to bring you in to speak to their company, where's the best place they can go to get that information?

 

Mary Messner 

Anybody can visit my website, marymessner.com. There's a contact form there. It's got a list of all of my keynotes.

Social media wise, I'm very active on LinkedIn, just Mary Messner on LinkedIn. So I'd love to. Connect with any of your audience and stay in touch for more.

 

Matt Zaun 

Perfect. I'll include that in the show notes. People would just click and go from there. Thanks again, Mary. Really appreciate your time today.

 

Mary Messner 

Thanks, Matt. It was fun.