Structure vs. Chaos: The Leadership Framework That Determines Success with Jerry Cook

What separates high-performing teams from complete chaos—and why do even experienced leaders get it wrong? 

In this powerful episode of Commander’s Intent, Derek Oaks sits down with retired Colonel Jerry “Chewy” Cook to break down one of the most overlooked drivers of success in any organization: structure. Drawing from real-world combat search and rescue missions, leadership at the Pentagon, and executive experience in the civilian world, they reveal how misalignment between authority, responsibility, accountability, and resources quietly destroys performance. 

You’ll discover why unclear roles create frustration, slow decision-making, and increase risk—and how elite military teams operate with clarity, trust, and precision even in life-or-death situations. This episode goes beyond theory, diving into real examples of high-stakes missions where leadership, structure, and flexibility determined success or failure. Whether you’re leading a business, scaling a team, or navigating complex decisions, you’ll learn how to create alignment, empower your people, and execute with confidence under pressure.

If you’ve ever felt stuck in confusion, overwhelmed by responsibility without authority, or frustrated by broken systems—this episode will completely change how you think about leadership, decision-making, and building teams that actually perform.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 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 Oak.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

Hello, and welcome again to another episode of Commander's Intent. I'm here with my special guest, uh Colonel Retired Jerry Chewie Cook. I flew with him about 15 years ago in Afghanistan, and I've I've known him since then and before then also, and have a great working relationship with him. And I think he has a very unique perspective on Commander's Intent and the challenges of having the right structure and having the right procedures in place for running your organization. I'm not a fan of structure, but I understand its value. I'm not a fan of being by the book, and that's often got me into trouble, but I do recognize that it's important. It's at least important at the strategic level of an organization that it's really critical. And so I'm gonna let Chewie introduce himself and then we'll go from there.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

Derek, thank you very much for that. So, yes, you and I share a history in the A-10. I've spent almost my entire career in the A-10 with just a few exceptions. I've commanded a few different organizations. Uh, I was in charge of cadet squadron at the Air Force Academy to command an A-10 squadron at Moody Air Force Base as a reservist, working with uh regular Air Force. Uh I went on to fighter group command, uh, where I was in charge of uh aircraft operations, maintenance operations, medical and logistics. And then eventually I finished off my career at the Pentagon. Now, after I retired and moved on from the Pentagon, I actually moved to Canada based off of marrying a Canadian. And once I uh came up to Canada, I was actually a CEO of a not-for-profit operating off our government grant. So here I am now in Canada, and I have my own business looking at executive coaching, and I have my own leadership framework that I've developed based off my experience in the Air Force and as a CEO. So uh thank you for having me on your show.

SPEAKER_02 2:16

I appreciate that. You touched on a couple of things. I'm glad you gave us a good history because I think it highlights exactly what we want to talk about today. And that is does structure matter? And does the organization matter and the bylaws and all those things? Does it matter? Can we get ourselves into trouble when we don't have a structure or when we even worse when we don't follow that structure?

SPEAKER_01 2:37

Well, a hundred percent. Because you can get yourselves into trouble. And I think we need to define like what do we mean by structure? I think we mean by structure is the alignment between responsibility, authority, and accountability. As commanders in the military, we look at unity of command. That means that there is one person in charge of the organization's mission. That's the commander's responsibility. The commander has authority over all the resources available, personnel, craft, equipment, you name it, in order to accomplish those responsibilities. And then that person is accountable. And that, you know, in the military, a commander is responsible or extremely accountable to another higher level commander. And when we look at this in the civilian world, we would say that person is the CEO. Now, underneath that level, all the various authorities and the resources are gonna be split to the individuals needed to do the job and support the overall mission. And so that's what we need when we want a fully functioning operation, because if you have misalignment, you're gonna have problems. So I'm gonna throw a few questions at you. Have you ever been accountable for something you're not responsible for?

SPEAKER_02 3:48

Yes, yes, and that's painful.

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Yeah, it is absolutely painful and it happens all the time. And then have you ever been responsible for something, but you don't have the authorities?

SPEAKER_02 3:57

Yeah, that's in some ways, that's almost more painful because you feel the weight of the responsibility, but nobody's given you the go-do to act. And so you yeah, that's worse.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

And then of course, we've probably seen where people have the responsibility, they have the authority, but they're not held accountable. And we know over a long term what can happen with that. We can have people going well outside their authorities, uh taking on things that they're definitely not responsible for, and you end up potentially with a toxic leadership, at least in my experience that I've seen when you don't hold people accountable to the things they're responsible for. So those are some of the basics when I look at structure, what do you want to have? Now, having said that, there is times where you cannot have that unity of command, and then you have what we call a unity of effort, and I'm sure, you know, giving our background, we both heard that, and that means that you have to split certain things up. And using another aviation example, but on the civilian side, let's talk about airlines and coaches. So, case in point, like you said, I now live in Canada, I have a trip plan to the US, I purchased a ticket through a US carrier, but the the airline that is going to you know fly me is Canadian. So that is a unity of effort. They're sharing the resources, aircraft, pilots, crews, etc. And they've shared the accountability, they've shared the responsibility, they've shared the various authorities based on the agreements they have. So that is a unity of effort. And they can also have certain things within the same organization where you have a unity of effort, usually driven by just smart allocation of resources. And you and I both saw that within the overall Air Force between the components, between the regular component and the Air Force Reserve, and we have these things called classic and active associations, as the Air Force has shrunk down, we've decided to pair up the regular Air Force and the reserves to share our assets and resources while still being focused on a singular mission. So that's another type of structure that exists. And then of course we see either with new organizations or organizations that have gone through lots of dramatic change, you're really just the structure doesn't exist. And I saw that as a CEO, it was as a new organization. We started off with five, six people, and within three months we had 40 people. And early on, it was all hands on deck. We need to get something done. Okay, you have the time available. Okay, you're now in charge of this. It wasn't based off their particular job that we hired them for, it just had to happen. And so there really wasn't that structure. It was, you have the bandwidth, I need this done, go ahead and do that. They ended up hurting later on as we mature as an organization, we had to develop a structure, but you end up having situations where new organizations or old organizations have gone through lots of changes where you don't know where decisions rights exist, i.e., authority, who is responsible for the various mission elements, who owns the resources, it can get pretty confusing and it's challenging to remain functioning as an organization when that exists.

SPEAKER_02 7:11

Yeah, I it's a lot of different challenges. And I've worked with a bunch of different small companies, and I've seen that growth or contraction in some cases. And where do you put something? You know, with a small business, you're trying to grow at exactly the right time. And so it's almost like you don't want to waste the time on the structure because you're trying to get to that next level. Well, how long is it going to take you to get to that next level with these undefined roles? And then once you get to that next level, how are you parsing out the duties and how you separating the responsibilities, accountability, everything you talk about, and the authorities? That's a very big challenge. And I'm sure that I know because I've been in large organizations, even in large organizations, you have similar challenges. It just doesn't seem as acute because when you're in an organization like you talked about of 40, you know, going from five to 40 people, you feel every single task, you feel every single decision, every single responsibility, especially as a CEO. It's like, how many times am I gonna are we gonna have this meeting to re-carve up the responsibilities and accountabilities and the authorities? It's a tough position to be in. And yet it it needs to happen at some level.

SPEAKER_01 8:18

Well, it's definitely a significant leadership challenge. And I can imagine being a small business, and granted, we were a not-for-profit for so we were slightly different, but it's a challenge when you start your organization and you are involved in every day's decisions. And so you as an owner or founder, particularly for small businesses, you're involved and you're making all those decisions, and you have all those authorities, accountability, and the responsibilities all wrapped up in you. And if you're successful, you grow. And before you know it, it's well beyond your bandwidth to be in charge of everything. And now you're gonna have to parse out some of those authorities. Like you're still overall responsible, but now you have to parse it out for people because you just simply can't do all the things that you need to once your organization gets to a certain size.

SPEAKER_02 9:07

As I've looked at these organizations, I think this is what really drove me to this show and the title of this show is you always have to be focused on that desired end state. You always have to be focused on what your vision and what your goals are, because otherwise you get bogged down in a structure. You get bogged down and you create a structure that becomes a self-looking ice cream cone. Let me give you a simple example. This is in manufacturing and in production type companies, like in working with the military. A lot of times they want you to be AS 9100 certified. AS-9100 is a quality management system, and it's very effective, it's very good, and yet sometimes that becomes the end instead of the means. So we needed in the companies that I've worked with, we needed AS 9100. Otherwise, in some cases, the government wouldn't even look at you. You needed the certifications, you needed that structure in place to manage risk, to manage your quality assessments, but that couldn't be the end. It couldn't be the desired end state. The desired instate is a good product. The desired instate is a product that meets the requirements of the customer. The desired instate is not having books and a process and checklists that meet your quality management, your AS 9100 certification. Yes, that had to happen, but that wasn't the goal. That was the means to the end. And so that was part of the how, not the why and the what. So remembering that all the time. And as a CEO or in any leadership position, when you talk about your overall responsibility, am I focusing on the how or am I focusing on that desired end stadium?

SPEAKER_01 10:45

Well, Derek, I love that you brought that up because ultimately it comes down to strategy. You talk about the ends or the means, you know, ends, ways, means. Let's go back to kind of our military strategy background. But ultimately, you have to think as a leader, what is it that we want to achieve? And then it's like, how do we go about achieving it? And if you're creating that vision and that desired end state that you want the organization to achieve, the how things happen is going to be happening in your structure. It's going to be deciding who has the decision rights, who has the authority to accomplish all the things that need to happen along the way to achieve that desired end state. And so it is a combination of almost that leadership and that management aspect. The leadership establishes what is going to be that end state, why we want to achieve that, and how that's achieved is through structure and through your management. That's the way I kind of parse those two things out. I love that.

SPEAKER_02 11:45

I'm going to give us a little bit of a distraction, but I think it's a current events distraction, something that we're very passionate about. And I want to talk about the combat search and rescue that's gone on in the last little bit here in Iran. And I watched it with a great degree of interest. I was a Sandy One at Rescue Mission Company. I know you were also. It was like the pinnacle of my career. And you felt the weight, the responsibility of have to go get that guy. I have to go get that girl, whoever it was. I have to go get that crew. And then as Sandy One, it was completely on you. You didn't have to do all the work, but it was completely on you. And the question you ask yourself, like when you're planning a combat search and rescue, you know, task force, putting it all together, is do I have the resources to do it? Do I have the authority to act? Once they say go and push, do I have all the authorities to act? Can I point my gun at the ground and not worry about political consequences, organizational structural consequences, and do whatever it takes to protect Jack, as we would call it, until the rescue assets could get in place and get him out of there. And I'm thinking about all the things that went through the mind of Sandy One to protect and ultimately get those guys out of there. And, you know, there were, if you look at, I don't know all the details, but as I look at the little snippets in the news, they went through a bunch of different approaches to get everybody out. And they were given almost carte blanche, whatever it takes, resources-wise, we're going to get those guys out. That fills me with pride about how we approach the life of a human, but it's also a great discussion in organizational structure like we're talking about. Because ASRTAF, when you learn how to become a Sandy One, there's a very specific structure to it. And then you learn that very specific structure, and then you realize that's just one way of doing it. That's just one approach. The desired end state, that commander state, to get jacked out doesn't change. And our conventional approach is this. And the people who have the authorities to make that decision, you know, they don't really change so much. But how I get it and get him out, that may change. And so did they ignore that the standard structure to getting him out, to getting the crews out, or did they actually follow what was most important? So sometimes we get bogged down in the tactical details in your organization, and we get bogged down in the tactical execution instead of taking that step back and saying, okay, what is the overall goal here and what is the overall structure to make that happen? I wondered your thoughts on that.

SPEAKER_01 14:27

Well, let's face it, it is the most difficult mission that we did in the A-10, and it's also the most rewarding because we are there to bring back aviators that were shot down, bring back special forces personnel that are behind enemy lines that are stuck. It's bringing back our teammates back home. And so it does have a special place in our hearts. And so it's we're both very passionate about that. So let's I think we probably need to explain that to some of our civilian audience members that are probably watching this as well and kept trying to figure out what's going on. So you have a combat search and rescue task force, and then you have rescue mission commanders. And the rescue mission commander is a mission that we did as A-10 pilots, Sandy ones, and Sandy One being the call sign. And so when you break things down, the overall objective is to bring that to that person home, the isolated personnel. In order to go about doing that, of course, you've got to bring in some rescue vehicles. It could be lots of different assets. It could be a car, it could be boat, depending on where things happen. It could be a helicopter, as it was in this particular case. And so you have to figure out we gotta find this personnel, we gotta go ahead and protect that personnel, we've got to protect the helicopters. In order to protect the helicopters, we need lots of other airborne assets, so we gotta protect all of them. And it becomes this huge task force of all sorts of different aircraft, and we've heard a little bit about the aircraft involved, but you and I both know there was probably dozens of if not more than that, aircraft involved in this operation, each thing along the way playing that part and each playing their roles and responsibilities. And so how do you organize? If I understand your general direction is like, how do you organize and how do you set something up like for this, given a structure with roles and responsibilities and authorities? And so, right, is that what your intent is talking about?

SPEAKER_02 16:25

Yeah, well, it's exactly right. Exactly right. How do I create a structure and give ultimate operational flexibility to tailor that structure to the nuances of of this particular of this?

SPEAKER_01 16:40

Yeah, so it is goes back to your course of some fundamentals as far as your trainings on how to go ahead and do this, knowing the mission and knowing the capabilities of everyone involved. And once you have that knowledge and trust, and I think trust is a huge part of this, because you know you cannot micromanage the combat search and rescue task force. You cannot. You get your experts out there, you give them the mission that they need to accomplish, or their smaller role within a larger mission, you explain what the left and right limits are, and you let them execute. And then you let them communicate and you have specific rules about communication because there's so many aircraft involved, you can't have everyone speaking up all at once. You have to have rules as far as what are your critical pieces of information that need to be passed quickly and who needs to receive that. And that's what you do really in any organization is you establish those roles and responsibilities and those communication procedures. And again, this is all those things that are built into structure. I think at the end of the day, is you have those clear lines drawn up, but then you always contingency plan. Because no plan survives contact with the enemy intact. Or as I like to think Mike Python's Tyson used to say, everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face. That's right. Great words of wisdom. And so that always happened in the CSAR TAF. You know, a lot of times you're on alert and you had a basic plan built given what you knew about the operations at that day, and so you kind of had your various cutoffs built. Um and actually the alert planning was probably the most difficult because you didn't have the details. You had to make lots of assumptions along the way. Once you had a dedicated CSAR, which it sounds like this probably started off as an alert type mission that was a pickup game initially for that first down pilot, and then became a dedicated and pre-planned once the initial alert only found that first pilot, and then you built a very specific plan. And it sounds like it was pretty detailed. It was amazing what they did with the MC130s as far as essentially establishing a forward operating base. That was a great capability. But again, you build off what you know for that commander's intent.

SPEAKER_02 19:02

No, I love that. And the variances, you know, you and I are not privy to a lot of the intel, we're hearing different reports, but I find it fascinating as I've listened to little snippets. I'm like, was it a pre-planned? Was it an alert? Was it a kind of an on-the-fly CSAR where they grab qualified people already airborne and roll them into that mission? And then as you go into you know, beyond the first couple of hours, now you can definitely say it was a pre-planned CSAR. What went into what contingencies did they account for? What contingencies did they not account for, but still were able to act because they had clear commander's intent. You know, I think about you know, we lost the C-130, and we lost, we think we lost a couple of other assets. If I was a betting man, I'd say that the commander's intent was I don't care about any piece of hardware. Every American is coming home. That warms my heart as an American former serviceman, and knowing that, you know, people's sons and daughters and husbands and wives are lives are on the line, but we didn't care about any. I'm sure we don't want to lose assets, but they were very, very, you know, way down the totem pole on importance to every single life that entered the country was going to come out of the country. Every single serviceman that entered the country was going to come out of the country. And they built a plan accordingly, and they clearly acted accordingly. $100 million aircraft, I don't care. I'm getting this individual. $10 million aircraft, whatever, I don't care. I don't want to lose it, but I'm not going to waste any time or put additional people at risk to save that asset. I'm focusing on getting those individuals out. And so it was a very clear approach to it. And all the nuts and both of that, we may find out about that. We're never going to, I don't think we're ever going to find out all of the details because we're not, you know, read into those things. But having gone through that that planning process and that training process, I can think, I can make estimations and I can make guesses of what they went through. But that's because we had you and I, as we went through the training program to become Sandy Ones, there was a structure, there was an overall structure of and an overall intent that if we're doing this, this is why we're doing this. And this is what we're trying to accomplish with this. And that's clearly those clearly would happen. And I love the little stimulants that I'm hearing of how they were able to throw off IRGC forces and they were able to be able to bring force to bear when they needed it to bear and minimize or reduce loss of life almost entirely, or dis entirely, in this case, entirely, from a friendly perspective, and get everybody out. And so that's I think it's a great case study on exactly what we're talking about. Is how does what exactly is structure and what structure helps you and what structure hurts you? Like if they had had this big long checklist of if I lose this asset, then we're rolling back and we're coming in, you know, where it was a very risk averse or very. Or manage detailed plan, then I think it would have been very detrimental to the team, and the chance of success would have gone down quite a bit. Even with a pre-planned event, I pre-plan doesn't mean that they don't account for contingencies. Pre-plan doesn't mean that they don't know that contingencies are going to happen and they don't say it's a failure if everything doesn't happen the way they want it to. Pre-plan is you think through all those things and you adjust fires and shift as you need to to still get that mission done. But I think it's a great example beyond the military to study and how do you structure your organization to be successful.

SPEAKER_01 22:37

There are so many things that we can go ahead and talk about there. And commander's intent is obviously the most critical one. Hence the I love the name of the podcast, by the way. It's uh very appropriate. Knowing the mission, knowing what the commander's intent is, allows you to make decisions in a relatively short period of time as things evolve that you didn't even anticipate. I think you read something this morning that one of the C-130s experienced a mechanical problem, hence they were able to launch out. So that was one of the C-130s that was destroyed and was destroyed by US forces, so it would not fall into Iranian hands. But in order to go ahead and flax, they're like, we need more aircraft assets coming in, more C-130s to come in, putting more things at risk. But it was an acceptable risk given the mission. It's much more acceptable than leaving people stranded. And they did that because they knew exactly what needed to be done. And then there's also a fact of read that the CIA was playing a role too, as far as providing some tactical deception. And who knows how much coordination happened beforehand. But even if there wasn't that much coordination, they just knew what needed to be done in order to facilitate this operation. And all this is based off of not only knowing what needed to be done, having the structure set up for that, but also training. And I think that is another thing that we could spend a lot of time talking about our experiences in the military versus my observations on the civilian side of things, which is honestly limited, but how much we spent in training for the limited time we actually operate. The challenge on the civilian side of things is they're continuously operating, accomplishing their mission. And now they have to squeeze in training. And so that's a cost-benefit analysis as well. We can see when you are trained and you operate with each other and you establish these relationships and structures, how successful you can be. How do you do that in the civilian world as well when you you need to set that up while you're operating? And I remember when I was CEO and we're starting operations, and we were describing it as like, yeah, you're building the aircraft as you're flying it. So it is interesting seeing the different challenges from the two different worlds, and how do you take the lessons from our military experience and transfer that over to the civilian sector?

SPEAKER_02 25:05

I think it is. And I think for you and I it's easy to see because we've seen both sides. For somebody who has just grown up in a company, it's harder to see. And I love your analogy of building the aircraft while you're flying it. And sometimes you're so focused on operations, so focused on because you're trying to make payroll, you're trying to get there. But if you don't take those steps back and kind of rewalk people through, what are we trying to do here? And what is our approach giving people chances to chair fly it, to go, okay, if when this contingency happens, how am I going to handle it? For day-to-day operations, how am I going to handle it? And if you don't do that, you're going to run into trouble. You know, a CSAR, combat search and rescue, is uh is very complicated and very involved. And at the execution level, there are few people in the United States military that really know how to do it. I would say that a lot of the Special Operations Forces, they think about those kind of things and they plan for those kind of things. And I'm sure they were heavily involved, especially since a lot of their personnel were involved in the actual mission, but they were heavily involved in. What I don't know, and this is an interesting question to ask that I don't I don't know when we'll know the answer to. I don't know if there was an A-10 flying. The only people in the military who are trained to be rescue mission commanders, fully rescue mission commanders in the conventional sense, are A-10 pilots. Were A-10s flying the day we got the second guy out? And were they involved in the actual strike and everything? I don't know. But I would almost guarantee that they were sitting in the planning cells as they're going through how we do it because they've been through it so many times that they're the people to ask. They're the experts to start asking the right questions of how do we put all the pieces together. They're not the experts on flying HC-130s, they're not the experts on flying little birds or MH-47s and all the other assets or potential depression of enemy in the air defense assets that were used to act as decoys, you know, to distract the uh the Iranians. They're not the experts on all that, but they are the experts on what needs to happen and how we approach this. And if you look at your organization, whatever organization you're in, you need to have those experts that are good at thinking through contingencies that are good at thinking through, even if, and it may be the CEO some ways, but I love the thought that A-10s weren't flying, but they still put the whole thing together, help put the whole thing together. The those rescue mission can banners. Sometimes as the CEO, you do step aside and you let the tactical experts on how you're approaching a certain mission do their thing. You get out of their way, you give them the direction, you help them think through the problem, and then you get out of the way. I don't know if that's exactly what happened or or if they were a tense flying, but as the experts, they needed to share that expertise and put the whole picture together. Sometimes when you're in a company, you need to have those experts, but then you also need to know what their role is going to be in whatever mission you're trying to accomplish, whatever task you're trying to accomplish, and give trust and authorities to the right people so that your team is put together properly.

SPEAKER_01 28:15

I think where we'd also get into some other concepts that we we thought about in the military, and that's decentralized execution. Centralized command, decentralized execution. And that also is a structure in and of itself, right? It is. So you still have someone that's responsible, but they decentralize the execution to the experts. And in this case, I'm sure part of it is the if things haven't changed since we've uh retired, you know, you have the DOE personnel recovery center that is probably leading this effort. All sorts of different people come on in to help plan this and execute this based off of a known organization, known structure with a known mission and the appropriate authorities. And I think this is important for any organization. Now when some sort of contingency happens, who are you going to? Again, this gets back to the whole purpose of having structure of when something is going on, who you can you point to and go, who's going to be in charge of this? Who's going to be responsible? Do they have the resources to get it done? And let if they don't have the resources, let's make sure they have the resources. And so it allows you to execute very quickly while we're gonna be retaining the flexibility that you need. And I don't know if a lot of organizations think that same way. I hope they do. We know that we did, but this was something that was built up over oh, let's call it decades, centuries of military operations, figuring these things out, building these structures. And of course, uh the staff structure is still based off Napoleon system, which is crazy. But that's another sidebar that we can talk about. But so when you have that all together, it's amazing what you can orchestrate and do in a very short period of time uh and accomplish some pretty incredible goals.

SPEAKER_02 30:05

It really is amazing what you can accomplish. So I'm gonna ask the question. We've talked all around this, and you can use this as an example, or you can use other examples. When people can't see the structure, and you kind of talked about touched on this with the JPRC Joint Personnel Recovery Center, but when people cannot see the structure, how does performance degrade? Why is some kind of structure important to in order to accomplish anything?

SPEAKER_01 30:31

Well, this isn't my opinion. This is what actually a lot of studies have proven. There's been a lot of meta-analysis and studies accomplished in this area, and it ends up degrading performance. When you sit there and you don't know who's responsible for any particular action, you have that situation where maybe you're held accountable for something you're not responsible for, or you're responsible for something but you don't have any authority. I mean, what does that do to you? Not only from a nickn mission standpoint, from a psychological standpoint as well. I mean, I've had those times where I've been held accountable for things I'm not responsible for. And that was extremely frustrating. And it certainly impacted my performance as a leader because I just became frustrated. And now you start working as far as working around the process, or you have old structure that is no longer so you have to work around that. We've certainly seen that as well. But it it certainly degrades the performance, and there's plenty of stories, or sorry, not plenty of stories, but plenty of studies that directly support that. And that's one of the things I'm actually working on putting a short article out, publishing that, just it talks to that effect.

SPEAKER_02 31:38

No, I appreciate that. I think, and you've kind of used uh three words there that I think are really key authority, responsibility, and misalignment. You know, if they're not aligned, if they're not properly aligned, you know, I'll go back to that uh comment search and rescue. If I give the responsibility to that rescue mission commander, but he doesn't have the authority to direct strike assets or recovery assets into the threat area, he can't make all the, he has to get a mother may I from the from U.S. Central Command, who's getting a mother may I from the Secretary of War, then that bogs the whole thing down. It slows it down, and you create this hesitant, ineffective environment. But if you put the authority and the responsibility at the right level, along with those the resources and accountability at the right level, then their ability to act when they need to act goes up exponentially. Yeah. I've shared this example, I think, on the show before where I was in Afghanistan, we're tracking this high-value target. They had positively identified him, they knew who he was, and yet they're waiting for the authority to strike. I'm like, I can see him right there. We're out in the middle of nowhere. And it would have been an easy takedown, and yet they're waiting and waiting and waiting until they got through. I don't know how high they had to go to get that authority. If it was to the Secretary of Defense, I hope not. Or if it was to a two or three-star general back in Tampa, Florida, or some other location. I don't really know. But we waited and waited and waited until that guy wandered into a village, and now we've got collateral damage all around us, and we've just complicated the situation. And we ended up missing the guy because the authority and the responsibility was not aligned properly for sending assets, multi-million dollar assets overhead to do a certain job, and then not giving them the authority to do that job. That was improper. And we you see that all the time in companies. And one thing that we haven't talked about is resources. If the resources aren't aligned, if you say you have the authority and you have the responsibility, but you've got zero money in your bank account, well, then you kind of go, Well, that's a great idea, but I can't execute that. I can't pull that off with the resources that you've given me. And so making sure that all those things are aligned so that she can meet the desired end state of the boss is so critical.

SPEAKER_01 34:01

Well, I think one thing you touch upon without explicitly saying that is your risk. Like, what are you comfortable with taking risk? When you pass down that authority to a lower level, you're taking on some additional risk because someone can go ahead and make a decision that in hindsight may not be the best decision. Taking risk by giving that authority to someone else. Conversely, you're also creating more risk when you keep that authority to yourself at a higher level because you slow down that whole process and you're not able to accomplish the mission, just like you said, given that one a potential strike. But by time you had the authority to potentially take on a strike, there was nobody to actually execute it, or you don't have the resources. And of course, that does bring up some history with me, because I remember back in 2018, I was commander at Moody, and we've been told to get ready for a potential conflict with North Korea. And that meant we had to accomplish a lot of training that we hadn't done for a long time, particularly when you're dealing with chemical weapons, and then also the appropriate training as far as the individual weapons, whether it's 9mm or N16 or M4 that you may carry. And the interesting thing is that I was responsible for that training for my organization. I didn't own the training resources to accomplish that. And that was actually part of the classic association structure that we had between the regular Air Force and the reserves at Moody, where here it was, we all had to share these assets and these resources, but I had no authority to actually have access to them. And so that becomes a leadership challenge. And that was something I had to dealt with. And I don't know if you saw that as well when you're a commander at Moody working with the reserves, probably from that the opposite perspective, because the reserves owned, you know, like I own my reserve personnel, but those personnel fell under a regular Air Force operations, which you were in charge of.

SPEAKER_02 36:02

Well, that's true to an extent because I as a fighter group commander, I owned the personnel, I owned the airspace, I owned the ability to manage that airspace, but somebody else owned the aircraft. Even though I was directly responsible in so many ways for those aircraft, I didn't own those resources. And yet I was still held accountable for them. If my guys were not combat mission ready, it was on me. It wasn't directly on the maintenance group, it was on me. So I had to cultivate a relationship with them so that those shared resources could be used to my benefit. And one of the things that uh you made me think about is accountability. If you delegate down authority, responsibility, and resources, but they're not accountable, they don't feel it. I I know that, you know, before I ever, you know, I knew that if I took a life and I didn't think about it properly, I felt that accountability, both from a person as, you know, that even though they're the enemy, their life has value. And militarily, if I was doing something that was uh illegal, incorrect, I felt that accountability. If you pass down a responsibility to somebody and say, hey, go take care of this, but there's zero accountability for whether or not they're wrong in how they execute that. There's a chance they can be flippant about it. They don't fully feel the responsibility because it's never going to come back to them. It's never going to be an issue for them. That's not the right approach. And that's why I talk about you know, we've talked about authority responsibility, and we've also talked about accountability and resources. All four of those things need to be aligned at the appropriate level in order to get the best out of your people, in order to field the most effective team and get the most effective results and gain.

SPEAKER_01 37:49

Couldn't agree more. I don't know what I can add to the conversations other than say, absolutely yes, 100%. That needs to happen. Now the question is, you know, I'm always a contrarian, so I always got to think like, well, what about the other argument? Is there another argument? And and I'm wondering if the other argument is when like when resources are truly scarce and cannot simply just go, hey, you have exclusive access to these resources. We need to potentially split up access to these resources to be the most efficient. I'm trying to think of like, is there another point of view that we're not potentially considering? And I don't know, but I certainly know there's times that it makes sense to maybe consider other alignment structures where you do have some sort of partnership where you do sort of have to share in some sort of responsibilities. Because I do think with the maintenance aspect of things, you're 100% right as far as you, as a commander on the operation side, you're ultimately responsible for your training. You need the aircraft for that, but you are not responsible for the aircraft maintenance. So is it something as far as we get around that because at Moody and other locations, both that operations group commander and both that maintenance group commander reported to the same person above them, but it was really you both shared the same boss. So that person knows where that accountability truly lies.

SPEAKER_02 39:20

That's a great point. And I think that's a that's a discussion for probably another three hours of what is the right level where you put responsibility and where you you put the responsibility, authority, accountability, and resources. Who should be the one who's ultimately responsible for that? And where will you be most effective when you put those, when you align those specific things? I think the real answer is they need to be aligned. They need to be at the proper level, and it's going to be a little bit different in every organization. My feeling has always been you push it to the lowest level possible so that people can, so it becomes tacky and people can feel the responsibility, they can see the responsibility, they can see the fruits of their labors, and and it's not just a job, it's something that they fully embrace and they fully take ownership for because they feel across the board that it is their mission, it is their responsibility, and they are accountable for that. And there's proof in that accountability and responsibility because they've been given the resources, they've been given the authorities. And when all those things aligned, you get more out of people. Julie, I appreciate the conversation. Is there any parting shot that you want to have that you want to throw out there before we close up here?

SPEAKER_01 40:32

You know what, Derek? I think we covered this one ad nauseum. I'm sure as soon as we get done with this, we'd be like, well, here's another great point. But no, I think we cover this very well. I'd be curious of what your listeners think. You know, what are some other ideas that we haven't thought about? What are some of the civilian structures that maybe we haven't been exposed to in our post-military retirement lives? But I think overall we covered this topic pretty well. And I will say, if anything, I want to say thank you to Dale Holland because when I was an AOC at the Academy, so Air Officer Commander and the Academy, he used to talk about the subject authority, accountability, responsibility all the time. Like all the time to the point where I was like, I can't stand listening to this anymore. And yet I go back to it all the time. So, in some sense, I want to say thanks to him because what I've said today is based off of his mentorship. But otherwise, Derek, thank you so much for having me on today. And I can't wait until this podcast comes out.

SPEAKER_02 41:30

Thanks for being here. And if anybody who's joined us today has further questions for either myself or for Jerry, then just reach out to me at askdericnow.com and we'll have a direct conversation to expand and we can potentially take it in a direction that you, as part of the show, think we need to take it, tailor it more to your specific kind of organization, to the kind of environment that you find yourselves in. Obviously, because of our background, we talk about the military and we try and relate it. Sometimes we miss the mark. I get that. And so help us find the mark and help us align your needs with what we're talking about. I know this stuff works, I know it's important, and I don't care what organization you're in, it matters. Thanks for being a part of the show. Thanks for joining us on Commander's Intent. And subscribe and follow so that together we can become better decision makers for better results. Thanks.

SPEAKER_00 42:20

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 Oaks himself. So head on over to Commanders Inten Podcast.com and pick up a free copy of Derek's Leadership Guide and join us on the next episode.