How leaders can foster creativity

What role do creativity and innovation play in leadership? After an inspiring session during our 2025 Annual Meeting, we sit down with Josh Linkner during this week’s episode of Pave It Black to dig deeper into his leadership principles and how these can be applied to the asphalt pavement industry. Josh shares personal stories of overcoming failure and why tapping into your creativity muscles is the most important skill for leaders today. He also draws on his origins as a jazz musician and how this adaptability helped him respond to changes in the business world.

Here are the highlights from our conversation with Josh Linkner. Tune in to the full episode to explore more insights on creating a fear-free culture, using failures as learning experiences, and harnessing your creativity. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

What does the process look like for people wanting to develop that skill of being creative?

The good news is we already have it inside of us. Unlike learning a completely raw new skill. If I had to learn a new language that I don’t know anything about, I have to start from zero. But when you and I were six years old, every one of us was an artist. We’re built to be creative, we were all creative. You’ve never met an uncreative kid and creativity in this regard isn’t some discipline like painting on canvas or playing jazz guitar. It’s solving problems in unique ways. It’s imagining what’s possible instead of just what is. It’s questioning conventional wisdom. So the word creativity is often, pretty narrowly defined, like you’re doing something artistic, but you can be creative in asphalt. You can be creative in finance, you can be creative as in customer service. There’s roles for creativity in every role in a business, and all of us already have that skill inside of us.

So the truth is what we need to do is more like reconnect. Or tap into a dormant resource rather than learn something that’s new. Now we can further develop those skills, through practice. Like anything else, you go to the gym, you build muscle mass. If you practice five minutes a day, you build creativity muscle mass. But, it’s not a pursuit that requires hours of study because we already can do this. It’s our natural state.

The biggest thing you gotta do is remove the blockers. And the blockers are generally fear, which obviously inhibits us and an acceptance of the way the world is. Pretty easy. If you can get in a situation and any leader’s listening, your primary job as a leader is to create an environment that is safe. Fear and creativity cannot coexist. If you remove the fear, creativity will blossom naturally. Just if you add sunlight to a garden, it blossoms naturally.

Could you share some of the key takeaways of your book Big Little Breakthroughs: How Small Everyday Innovations Drive Oversize Results?

I’ve written four books, and this is by far my favorite. I spent a lot of time on it, man. I spent over a thousand hours researching. I interviewed CEOs and billionaires and celebrity entrepreneurs, Grammy Award-winning musicians, and Academy Award-winning directors. I really wanted to understand how the most innovative leaders think and act. What do they do every day?

And what I found was actually really surprising. We think of history makers as those who take these giant risks all the time, like big moonshots, the best of the best. Turns out, they don’t do that at all. Instead, they cultivate small daily acts of creativity, little micro innovations, but at a high frequency basis. It’s not like once a decade they do something creative. It’s five times a day they’re trying something new, and by the way, it’s way less risky. It’s way more accessible. Everybody in a company can be an innovator to a degree. And it’s also a great way to build those skills.