Why Integrity Is the Foundation of Great Leadership

In this episode of Commander's Intent, retired Air Force Colonel and fighter pilot Derek Oaks explores the true meaning of integrity in leadership—and why it becomes most important when the pressure is highest.

Through powerful real-life stories—from wartime courage to high-stakes decisions in aviation—Derek reveals how integrity shapes trust, culture, and decision-making inside organizations.

If you want to become a leader people truly trust, this episode will challenge you to ask one critical question: Do you act with integrity when no one is watching?

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Have you ever frozen in the key moment of making a critical decision? Whether it's in business or in life, it can cost you everything. Commander's Intent will teach and inspire you how to lead with clarity, courage, and purpose. So here's your host, retired Air Force Colonel, fighter pilot, and your leadership mentor, Derek Oaks.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Hello, I'm Derek Oaks, and welcome back to another episode of Commander's Intent. Today I wanted to talk about integrity. If you go to almost every company's website, every organization's website, they all seem to throw that word around. They all seem to say integrity matters to us. Integrity with relationship to our customers internally, whatever it is, they talk about integrity. And yet there are a lot of organizations, and I'm not going to name any names, but there are a lot of organizations that don't operate with integrity. When push comes to shove, when they're stressed, when they're in a challenging situation, it's easier to cut corners. It's easier to not use integrity in how they operate. And it's really too bad. I'm going to talk about why that is so dangerous from an organizational perspective and why that is so dangerous from a personal perspective. As I've thought about integrity and I've thought about really what it means, I really didn't get a good grasp of it and a grasp of its importance, a tangible grasp of its importance, until I put pen to paper and started writing down what integrity means, what integrity means to me. As I was fleshing out my latest book, The Confident Leader, Creating a Culture of Confident Decision Makers, I had a couple of key points, vision, trust, and debrief, and on how you create that culture of confident decision makers. But as I went through those points, I realized that one of the common threads was that those don't matter and they don't work if you don't have some foundational principles within that organization. And one of those foundational principles was integrity. I wanted to share a story about my wife's grandmother. Her name was Beulah Reem Allen. She was born in the mountains of Idaho in the late 1800s, one of 10 kids in just north of Bear Lake, Idaho. She grew up with not a whole lot. She went to school as she graduated from high school and then went to school. She became a nurse and she loved the medical career field. And after she became a nurse, I think she got tired of doctors telling her what to do and doctors being in charge. And so she said, I'm going to go to medical school. So she went to medical school and she graduated from medical school, practiced medicine for a while, and then she had a brother who had moved to the Philippines. So she moved over to the Philippines. And she was a doctor in the Philippines with the American forces, the American, uh, you know, the expats that were living there. And she met a gentleman by the name of Sam Allen, and they got married. And this is in the 1930s. And my father-in-law was born in 1938. Well, you can imagine what happened a couple of years later. So they're there on December 8th, 1941, when the Japanese invaded the Philippines. And subsequently, they were held under siege. Her husband, Sam, ended up fighting the Japanese. He eventually surrendered and walked the Bataan death march and was killed in a prisoner of war camp. And she was captured in the spring of 1942. And here she has my father-in-law, her son, little three-year-old Lee. And then she's five months pregnant with her second child. And here they are in a prisoner of war camp. She's the camp doctor. A little side story is that there were a lot of injured civilians, a lot of injured people there in the camp. And she literally had the patients lined up on the floor of this warehouse, running surgery on them. When they ran out of thread to stitch them up, they went to bailing wire. They didn't have a lot of anesthetics, you know, just lie soap, and they definitely didn't have a lot of painkillers. And she here she is performing surgery on these individuals. Like I said, she was pregnant. She opted to have a c-section on the 4th of July 1942. That was her little protest against their imprisonment and a conflict. And as the camp doctor, she effectively supervised her own C-section. Now, I'm not great with pain, but I can't even imagine that kind of a pain and thinking with the kind of clarity that was required to be able to pay attention as you're delivering your son via C-section in that camp. So Henderson was born on the 4th of July, 1942. And then she continued to be the camp doctor for the rest of their time there until they were liberated in the spring of 1945. So about three years. And during that time, her care was all of her patients, all of the other inmates, prisoners in the camp. And as you can imagine, they were starving. They weren't getting sufficient vitamins, sufficient food. And a lot of the inmates, they were starving to death. And as they would die, they'd write up a death certificate and she would put starvation on there. Well, her captors, the you know, commander of the camp and all the guards, they would get angry at her and they would say, You can't do that. You can't say that it was starvation, put something else. And she refused to do it. She refused to say that it was something that it wasn't. They threatened her, they threatened her children, they threatened the other prisoners. And despite all those threats, she would not bend. She would not write something else. She had sworn an oath as a doctor, first as a nurse, and then as a doctor, the Hippocratic oath. And it was do no harm and to care for those patients. And she took that oath, I don't want to say to an extreme, but she fully lived that oath. And she was not going to do something that hurt that individual, even if it was in death. She felt like she was responsible for them. Now you could say, well, that was not very expedient. That wasn't very smart. What if her children had been hurt? What if the other prisoners had been hurt or she had been hurt because of her unwillingness to bend on something that didn't matter because those individuals didn't matter? But she felt it really important to be true to them. And from my perspective, we could argue all day long that it really didn't matter, but to her it did. That was her integrity. And she had sworn to the Hippocratic Oath, and she was not going to bend on that oath. I don't even know my wife's grandmother. She passed away a couple of months before we first dated, but I've heard many, many stories about her. And that's just a tip of the iceberg of the kind of person she was and the type of life that she lived as a mother, as a doctor, as a woman in society, you know, during the time that she was there. I mean, if you think about where she was, she was probably as a doctor in the 30s. She probably was not accepted in a lot of circles. She probably was not accepted as a woman doing what was considered a man's job back then. And that may have been part of what drove her to be absolutely rigid with her honesty and integrity. I don't know. But from everything I've read, that was just the kind of person she was. She was not going to bend and she was not going to acquiesce to the opinions of those around her or what other people wanted her to do. She was going to live her life with integrity and honesty. So that's one, I think, really great example of integrity, kind of an extreme one. Hopefully, none of us are camp doctors, none of us have to supervise our own C-section and have to sign death certificates and worry about what we're putting on them. But each of us is going to face whether it's daily, at least weekly, we all face decisions that make us ask ourselves, what is the right thing to do? What is the honest thing to do? I had going in basic training. I had a commander, you know, cadet commander Mike Davis. And he said, What is integrity? Integrity is what you do and how you act when nobody is looking. It's do I live according to my standards, my verbalized standards when nobody is looking? And that always stuck with me. I can remember his name. I can't remember all my leaders' names, but I can remember his name and I can remember him saying that. I can remember what he looked like and he said because it made a big impact on me. When I started basic training on the 5th of July 1985, they shaved my head, they took away my savannac clothes, gave me a uniform, tried to teach me how to march. And that very night, they took us up into a squadron assembly room and they had a swear oath to the cadet honor code of the United States Air Force Academy. And I'd always believed in honesty. I had always thought that it was important. I'm not saying as a teenager, I was always honest, but I saw its value and I saw the importance of living it as much as I could, but that was my attitude, as much as I could instead of all the time. But I remember standing in that room and raising my arm to the square and swearing an oath that I will not lie to or seat nor tolerate among me anyone who does. And I'm sitting there with all my classmates, my fellow cadets, basic cadets, and I instantly felt a kinship and a bond with them because we were all committing to be honest with each other, in some cases, brutally honest with each other and to hold ourselves accountable and hold each other accountable to that. So fast forward to my senior year, and one of my classmates had a challenge with his girlfriend back home. And rather than talking to his chain of command, to his leadership, he forged his sign out and he snuck out and he left for the weekend. And in leaving for the weekend, he came back and it became apparent that he had lied about where he was. He had lied about it. And I think rather than talking to his chain of command, to his leadership about the challenge he was facing and the stress he was putting him on, the stress caused him to not tell the truth, to leave the academy under false pretense. And so we held an honor board, and it was pretty black and white. When I say we will not lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does, it's pretty black and white, especially as a senior where you've lived under the code and you've learned how to live by it, that if you have a violation of the honor code, that you're going to get kicked out. And unfortunately, that's what happened with him. I mean, not unfortunate that the code was enforced, but enforced it for him. And I remember thinking after that, I so hope he has a good life. I so hope he's able to work this out with his girlfriend. I so hope he's able to work it out with his own career because he was less than a semester away from graduating. He didn't get his diploma. He wasn't able to graduate. He wasn't able to go to pilot training and become an Air Force officer because in a moment of stress, he kind of buckled. His integrity became less important for him. And I've thought a lot about that is what does stress do to us that makes us not want to face the truth, that not makes us not want to deal with the reality that's in front of us. So I wanted to talk about, you know, before we talk anymore about different examples, I wanted to talk about what integrity means. And I could give you a long list and you guys can look it up in a Webster dictionary. But there's some key elements for me about what it means. The first one is it's telling the truth, but it's much more than just honesty. It's dealing with what really is, is facing the facts. It's not trying to doctor the facts or make the facts put us in a good light. It's about not cutting corners, about not looking for a shortcut for things. And there's nothing wrong with being more efficient than before. There's nothing wrong with looking for better ways to do things. But if we're cutting corners, if we're avoiding the truth, or if we're avoiding what has to happen in favor of what is the easier way for things to happen, that's not demonstrating integrity. Now you think about an organization and what you can't do without integrity. Well, the first thing is if I have a, let's say I'm the leader and I'm sharing a vision and I'm sharing my intentions for the organization, and I'm talking to people about what kind of a culture we have and how I treat people. You know, right as I'm first onboarding somebody, you know, our people matter to us. But if our people really don't matter to us, what does that do for their level of comfort? As they see examples of how they really don't matter like they thought they mattered. They're really not as much of a team of an active participant and a player, a valuable player on the team as we said they were, we're not going to get as much out of them. They're not going to feel comfortable. They're not going to feel like this is their team. What if you talk about trusting your team and relying on them and providing a level of trust to where they feel like they can operate with some level of autonomy, like they can operate and make decisions that are going to be for the benefit of both themselves and for the team, and yet you don't trust them. The minute they make a decision, you shut them down. The minute you they do something, you micromanage them. They don't feel trusted. They don't feel like they're worth as much as you said they were when they first came onto the team. If you're always second-guessing your team, if you're always saying that you trust them, if you're always saying that they got it, that's their project, but then you're treating them like children, you're treating them as if you don't trust them, that's an element of integrity. And you're not going to get the most out of that team. You're not going to get them to perform at the same level, you're not going to get them to think at the same level, you're not going to get them to innovate at the same level because they don't see their value nearly as much. And I mean, let's face it, if you think you're going to get shut down, if you think that the minute you open your mouth or the minute you stick your neck out, that's your head's going to get chopped off. They're going to go, wow, that's not worth it. That's not worth my time. That's not worth my effort. And so you don't do anything about it. And then going to the debrief in an organization, you've got to have a system of debrief. You've got to have a system that is relentlessly looking for the truth and relentlessly looking for the best way to do things. And if you don't have honesty, if you're looking at the wrong things, or if you're doctoring the facts to make yourself look better in the debrief than you really were, you're missing opportunities to learn. Both you personally and the organization is missing opportunities to learn. So you're not going to have trust. Your vision isn't going to be believed. And you're not going to be able to perpetually improve because you're not being honest with yourself. There's a saying that I love an accountant or at a statistics friend of mine, said an ops researcher. She said, lies, lies, and more damn statistics. And I thought, that is so spot on. We take statistics and we manipulate the statistics often to get the answer that we want. It could be quarterly earnings. It could be, well, what I really meant to say was, I mean, it can be anything. You guys, I promise you that each of you has an example in your own life where you've seen statistics manipulated, where we're using the truth data, we're using the actual results, but we're twisting it in such a way to get the answer that we want. Everything down from specific statistics to how the news is recorded and how that news is edited to where it's not a really honest evaluation. You don't get an honest evaluation of the news because what's being shown to the public isn't the full truth. It's just an element of the truth. It's the part that we want to, you know, to drive our certain narrative. With enough drive, there are a lot of organizations where you can see this. With enough drive, you can be at least short-term successful if you don't have integrity. And there are organizations that have integrity in some areas and don't have it in other areas. And because they have a great product or because they're very ruthless, they're able to seemingly move forward. But I can promise you that every one of those organizations is not long for this world. Every one of those organizations is going to struggle at some point. They're not going to have the loyalty of their employees. They're not going to have the loyalty of their customers. They're going to become stagnant in their innovation and their product development. And they're going to become stagnant in their personal and organizational development because they're not being honest. They're not operating with integrity. And so it can be good for a short-term gain, but it's not going to be good overall. Before I close, I wanted to share one story. And it's a story that has bothered me for 30 plus years. And that's from when I was in pilot training. I went out on a solo ride. I'm flying a T-38, a supersonic jet. I go out to the area and I'm doing aerobatics. And there were G limits. You know how much force I could pull on the stick based on your certain weights. And I remember at one point I pulled G's and I went right to the limit. And I'm like, well, that was close. And then I flew the rest of the sortie and then I landed. And there's an empty back cockpit when you're flying solo. So I go to the back cockpit and I look, and the G meter is over the limit. And my initial reaction was, I know what it was because I saw the G's in the front. So I'm just going to zero eyes that out. And it wasn't a huge difference, but it was enough to put it over limits. And I thought, wait, I over-G'd it. Or did I over G it? I don't know. And so I sat on that for a minute. And I'm like, well, I got to go tell somebody. And so I went in and told my flight commander, I said, Hey, I think the G meter in the backseat says that I over G'd the aircraft. And so we need to tell maintenance. And I thought, of all the things that initially the reason I didn't want to talk about it was because I'd get in trouble. They could have failed me on the ride, even though I was sold. The easiest ride to pass, I could have failed that ride for something stupid, for pulling a little too hard on the stick. But I went back and like I said, I went and talked to my boss and I told him what the issue was. And they went out and they had to do an inspection on the aircraft, and there was nothing wrong with the aircraft. So you could say, Well, Derek, you worried about nothing, but a combination of lack of integrity built on another lack of integrity, built on another lack of integrity. And you think, yeah, that aircraft can withstand over Gs once or twice and it's not going to matter. But metal eventually fails. And you have me over Ging and the next person over Ging and the next person over G, and the next thing you know, you have a wing fall-off. And next thing you have a structural failure because people weren't honest about it. And what really bothered me about that was that I thought for a moment about not telling anybody, I don't want to get in trouble, and I think I'll be okay. And how was I to know? You know, the G meter in the front cockpit didn't say that I'd over G'd it. And so I stressed about that. And I still kind of stress about that today. It's kind of a reminder to me that I'm not, even though I believe in the honor code, I believe in integrity under a stressful environment. I thought I thought about not acting with integrity and that bothers me. So that's a good reminder of Derek, you're not immune to that. You always have to ask yourself, am I operating with integrity? So that's what I want to leave you with. I want to leave with that question. Are you operating with integrity? Or are you operating with integrity when it's easy? Are you operating with integrity when you're not under stress, when you're not under the microscope? Are you cutting corners? Are you acting with integrity when nobody is looking? Ask yourself that because I go back to what I said at the beginning of this episode. It's foundational. If you want growth, if you want trust, if you want to move forward individually and as an organization, you've got to operate with integrity. The chances are you're probably not going to be perfect at it, but always asking yourself, am I operating with integrity? Well, thanks for joining us today. We will keep talking about what it takes to make confident decision makers. And by becoming confident decision makers, how we can make better decisions. If you want to send me a quick note on AskDereknow.com, we can have a direct conversation about this. And if you have any specific topics or specific good stories about integrity, I'd love to hear them. And we'll take those and put those on a future show if it works out. And either way, I would love to talk to you. Subscribe to Commander's Intent. Let's keep learning how to make better decisions for better results. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

So that's it for today's episode of Commander's Intent Podcast. Head on over to Apple Podcasts iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will be entered in the grand prize drawing to win a$25,000 private exclusive leadership coaching package with Derek Oakes himself. So head on over to Commanders Intent Podcast.com and pick up a free copy of Derek's Leadership Guide and join us on the next episode.