Mission First or People First? The Leadership Truth No One Tells You

Mission first… or people first? What if that’s the wrong question entirely?

In this episode, Derek Oaks dives into one of the most debated topics in leadership and challenges the idea that you have to choose between results and relationships. 

Through real-world stories from the military and business, you’ll hear how focusing too much on the mission can burn out your team and how focusing only on people can cause everything to fall apart. The truth? The best leaders understand that mission and people are not separate; they’re deeply connected.

This conversation unpacks what happens when leaders miss that balance, how short-term thinking can damage long-term success, and why trust, communication, and awareness are critical to building high-performing teams.

If you’ve ever struggled with leading people while still hitting goals, this episode will shift your perspective and give you a more powerful way to lead.

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 Oakes.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Welcome back to another episode of Commander's Intent. I'm your host, Derek, and I'm here with my co-host Rob Powell. And we're going to talk a little bit about the age-old question: is it mission first or is it people first? Do I focus on the task at hand or do I focus on the people that are helping me do the task? You get a lot of opinions about this. And I remember when I was in the Air Force, a four-star general changed it. It said mission first, people always. And he changed it to people first, mission always. And I thought, I don't know that I agree with that. I understood what he was trying to do, but I wasn't sure that I agreed with his approach to it. And my quick take on it is the people always matter. And I can't do the mission without the people. But we're here together doing a mission. The organization, whatever organization you're in, whether it's a business or a military unit or a church group, you're there to do a particular mission, to accomplish a particular task. And you're there as a team to do that. Now, that brings up some problems and some challenges in an organization, but they're easily overcomable if you have the right focus and you have the right approach to how you're managing your people and how you're applying your people. Now, Rob and I both come from military backgrounds, but we've also both worked in the commercial sector in a number of different companies of varying sizes and other organizations. One of the things that helps me in clarifying how I'm going to focus on people and how I'm going to focus on mission versus people is that I've got a mission in front of me. I've got a task in front of me. And yet that task is probably because of the people around me. Maybe not this specific team, but the people around me. I'll give you an example. You know, why do we defend our freedoms? Well, I'm defending freedoms for the people, for the citizens, for the individuals. I'm protecting their sovereignty, I'm protecting their right to vote, I'm protecting their freedom of religion and to live their lives as they see fit. So in that case, when you look at the big vision, the people do come first. And the people are why we're doing what we're doing. But when you look at the specific mission to get me there, the conflict that I'm in, for me, that has to be my focus right there. And that looking at it that way, that helps me to treat the people in my organization better. It helps me to put things in perspective with that.

SPEAKER_03 2:45

Well, Gareth, unlike you, that's on the military background. I heard that all the time. You know, mission first, people always. Everybody always puts it out there as some kind of choice that you make, that you're either going to do mission or you're going to do people. I do remember back to the academy in a leadership class, they used to give us this graph. And on the graph, one axis of the graph was mission, one axis was people. And they'd try to give us, you know, we're trying to link to us as young kids. And they they were saying, okay, Star Trek, which captain, where would they be? And they would put like Picard was like a five or six on the mission scale, but a 10 on the people scale, and you know, on and on. And to them at the time, obviously, they listed Captain Kirk as the 1010 or the 9-90, a guy that could do both. The thing that always bothered me though, in these discussions was nobody ever told me how to help figure out that balance or how to weave these things together. And it's taken me, you know, 30 years and experience to come to the place where I am now, where, like you, I think it comes down to you have a mission to do, you have people that have to take care of it. And so you can't do one without the other. They are inexorably intertwined. And if you think you can focus on the mission and forget the people, you'll fail. If you focus only on the people and don't forget the mission, you'll fail. And so the best leaders have to manage those on a day-to-day, week to week, month-to-month basis.

SPEAKER_01 4:07

Great comment. You know, I think of companies that fail and they are focusing on people. They're focusing on the individuals in the organization. I think they fail. It may be that they have the wrong product or they have the wrong mission, they're going in the wrong direction, but they fail at the mission if they focus on the people at the expense of the mission. And the problem with that is that you bankrupt the company, you bankrupt the organization, so you failed at both of them. If you are so people focused, whether it's the benefits you give, the time you spend, the time off you give them to the point where the job is not getting done, then you're not helping anybody. You've treated people like children and you've given them children satisfactions. And as a result, the company fails and the individual fails. Nobody's happy when you focus on that. So you have to focus on the mission. What brings the people together and focuses them is the mission, what it is that you're trying to do. One of the challenges, I think, in this day and age is short-term mission focus. And one example, I think, are at the corporate level are quarterly reports and quarterly earnings, because a lot of executives are compensated by stock prices and stock earnings and earnings per share and those kind of things. So a lot of times they will tweak numbers and they will drive their organization in such a way to be successful at that part of the mission. And as a result, the people become just a statistic on the balance sheet. And so they're focusing on short-term. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't focus on short-term earnings. You've got to, you've got to pay your bills. But a lot of times when you do that, you're not focusing on the long-term mission, the long-term growth of the company and the long-term success of the company, which is going to be more beneficial to both the people and the mission.

SPEAKER_03 5:55

Well, and I'll give you an example of that. So I worked for a company that I guess I won't mention by name, but I worked for a company that was losing $130 million a quarter. And now you're obviously not going to stay in business very long losing $130 million a quarter. They are still in business, they keep getting bailed out. But one of the things that we mentioned a lot was, you know, as a pilot, we had a lot of pilots leaving the company on a turnover. And they were so worried about their money and that we're losing $130 million a quarter, they missed the forest for the trees or the trees before us, I guess. In this instance, you know, they're folks finding oh, we're losing all this money. One of the places that they were losing a tremendous amount of money that was kind of out of side out of mind was in replacement costs for pilots. Because I figured out for me when I left as a captain to replace me as a captain, it was going to take about five months and about sixty to eighty thousand dollars for them to do that. So if you think about that, if I've got even 10 captains a year that are leaving, that's six to seven hundred thousand dollars a year that they're essentially throwing down the toilet because they aren't taking care of the people. And so these are the things where I think it's important to, as a leader of an organization, that you have to take a holistic approach, that you have to understand where things are going. And what we pointed this out to the company and said, listen, you know, hey, if you took care of your people a little bit better and, you know, maybe get a little bit of bonus money, maybe do some a few of the things that we've talked about, guys won't leave quite as much. Like, well, yeah, that doesn't matter. We've got a budget for that. Well, yeah, you got a budget line item that's maybe you got a million dollars a year staffed away for turnover and recruitment.

SPEAKER_01 7:33

But if you don't have to spend that, well, just because you have that money there doesn't mean you should spend it. Just because you think that's the cost of doing business doesn't mean it has to be the cost to do that. And when you're losing $130 million a quarter, you probably need to change your cost of doing business. You need to make some shifts. I think all of us have varying degrees of empathy for those around us, but some people are not good at it. So, how do you take that person who is hyper task focused, who's very, very competent, very, very good? And how can they be a good leader when they don't have the empathy to be able to focus on the people? How do you keep them from only focusing on the mission? Or in focusing on the mission, how do you get them to take care of the people also?

SPEAKER_03 8:11

So, this is one of the things that I think the Air Force gets right in some ways. As a commander, so I never had the opportunity to be a second command in the Air Force. I was a commander twice, but never got to sit in a deputy seat. I had a phenomenal deputy for both my commands. And I will also say I had two phenomenal, phenomenal senior enlisted advisors for both my commands. And I have a tendency, I know myself, I have a tendency to be very mission-focused. I expect a lot out of myself, and I think that also translates a lot to I think I have a tendency to focus more on results and mission. And hey, if I have to stay 12 and 15 hours to get this done, I will. I had a phenomenal support team, though, that would remind me quite often, hey, boss, like, hey, do you realize that what you just asked the team is, you know, going to cost most of the people their weekend? Ooh, and maybe I should think about that. And so I think that's one way to do it. I think you have to set yourself up with a complementary command or management team. If you are so empathetic, you need somebody who's mission-focused on that command team. If you are so mission-focused, you need somebody who's a little more empathetic or a little more in touch. And that's what I loved about the senior E's in the military, is at least in the Air Force, they were very, very, very in tune with what was going on, you know, in the operations.

SPEAKER_01 9:31

The troops, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 9:32

Yeah. And the troops, I always made sure that I listened to them as much as I could because their advice was generally invaluable to help me to balance the mission of the people. That's at least, I mean, that's one way to do it. I'm sure you've got some other ideas and ways that you could balance yourself as a leader, but really I think it's learning to be knowing that that's one of your weaknesses, knowing that that's one of the things that you need somebody to help you with, and then accepting them.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

I love that because what you're doing is you're recognizing your weaknesses as a leader or your blind spots as a leader, and you're filling them in with other people. Unfortunately, sometimes people don't know they have blind spots, they know it all just to ask them. And so, and maybe I'm that way sometimes. I know I have blind spots and I don't recognize them, and I get reminded of them or instructed on them sometimes by other people. For me, having a long-term end, really a long-term focus is what is most important to take care of people. Because if I want to be successful long term, I also have to be successful short term. I may not hit a home run right away, uh, you know, in that first inning, but if I hit singles throughout all nine innings, I can still be long-term successful. And so I need to set myself up so I can hit those singles, you know, throughout the entire nine innings. And so what does that look like? And then I start looking at what does my team look like and what kind of skills do I need? And then here's one that's very hard, I think, for leaders to grasp or accept is there's gonna be somebody after me. I'm not the end of this company, or I'm not the end of this organization. And so you start focusing on either I don't have an expiration date, and so you don't worry about training your replacements, and you don't worry about training people to eventually sit in your seat, or you've identified your expiration date, and you know, and like in the Air Force, you're a commander for generally two years, and so you're completely focused on a two-year success window. Well, that's not long-term focus. That is that's two-year focus, and you have to be thinking about you know, the young kids that I have in my organization, when are they going to be senior leaders and what will they look like? And how do I get them there? That's when you start thinking about a long-term success.

SPEAKER_03 11:38

Yeah, well, and to that point, we've all been in those units, especially because the Air Force has such a quick turnover. Every two years you're getting a new commander in. I know everybody that I talked to in the military, we got really tired for a few years of a new commander would come in and go, Okay, guys, you know, we're we're real close to being, you know, right where we need to be. But if you'll give me, you know, a good 12 to 18 months of hard, solid work, we can get ourselves up to that plateau and then we can relax. And you have busy beaver and get all the stuff down and work, work, work, work. Well, 18 months into it, you know, that guy takes off, goes to his next command, new guy comes in. Hey guys, we're real close. If you just work really hard, then pretty soon you've got a unit that's now been running at 120 percent of capacity for four years, and the throats are burnt. And you know, it always interested me, and I saw this actually more in the civilian world, I think, than I did in the military. And there's some reasons for that, but we are more concerned, especially in the aviation business. There are specific rules and regulations that explain how much you can fly your airplane, when maintenance has to be done, what type of maintenance has to be done, in order to keep that airplane operating at its peak of performance. We don't have the same thing other than crew rest rules where you can only work X number of hours a day or whatever, but there is no maintenance schedule for your people. And people start to get worn, especially for when unusual events happen. I'll give you an example. And this is one of those that I think ultimately highlighted for me the company that I used to work for was not people focused on its workers. And that was a customer service organization. We, you know, we flew private people around the world, but they didn't think about, from what I could tell, they didn't look at their the people working for them in the same way. This is a perfect example. I live in Florida. I happened to be at the time my position, I was a fleet lead, which meant I was responsible for mid-management of a pilot force everyone that lived in Florida, which is about 40, 45 people at the time. One of the things we have in Florida that happens quite often are hurricanes. And hurricanes can be a very hit and miss item. You don't really know where it's going to go, you don't know how it's gonna bad it's gonna be, but they're pretty serious. And most folks need some time when a hurricane is announced that it's coming to prepare their property, whether it's moving all their lawn furniture, you know, into a covered space or you know, putting plywood over their windows or whatever it is they do to prepare their place, depending on where they are. And I'll never forget we had a hurricane. This is about two years before I left the company. We had a hurricane that was gonna hit and it was gonna affect about 20 of my 45 pilots. Some of them were home, some of them were on the road. And I, in the last three or four days before the hurricane hit, I kept bugging management in our op center. Hey guys, are we gonna get some of these pilots back to their house so they can take care of stuff before the hurricane hits? And I got no response back whatsoever. And I had five or six pilots that were not able to get back to their homes before the hurricane hit. They were not able to prep their homes. Some of them suffered some damage and some loss. And all of these pilots, because the hurricane happened to hit on exactly the wrong day, all these pilots ended up having to stay out longer because they couldn't get home because all the airports were closed by the time the hurricane hit on Go Home Day. And so about a month or so later, I happened to be in our op center meeting with the leadership in the op center. And I asked the leadership, the guy running our operations center, hey, how did we do on the hurricane response a month ago? And he was like, Oh, we did phenomenal. We did great. And he outlined for me for the next 10 to 15 minutes how they had everyday meetings about maintenance and airplanes and how to move things around and still get the customers and get the mission done. And yeah, we did phenomenal. And at the end of all this, they said, Hey man, that all sounds great. I said, But when did you ever talk about the pilots that live in Florida and how you needed to get them home or not? And he literally kind of drops his head to the floor, shakes his head, and goes, Yeah, we did. Yeah, no kidding, he didn't. And so that's one of those things where I think you see it firmly when a company drops the ball. To me, that was totally not even thinking long or short term, but that was a total drop the ball on the people. And I will tell you, a lot of guys left the company, uh, not as a director that specifically, but that was another name on the coffee.

SPEAKER_01 15:53

It was an indicator of how they were viewed to the company. You know, too many organizations they view their people uh in terms of a balance sheet exercise, and that is it. And you know, you're talking about, you know, that corporate leader was talking about moving assets and putting assets in the right place. And it didn't seem to me, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, it didn't seem to be like he was talking at all about taking care of people and making sure people were safe or anything like that. It was all, I don't want this aircraft damaged, I want it to be fueled and ready for our next mission, and I want those things to be put in place so that we don't see a hiccup in our schedule and don't see a hiccup in our mission, and no concern for the individuals in the organization because he was viewing it as an operational and a balance sheet exercise instead of an exercise that was taking care of his people and making sure that the people who were making that mission happen were ready and able to go. Yeah. I mean, yeah, in the Air Force, you know, and sometimes you don't have a choice. I lived in, I never lived in Florida, but I lived in South Georgia. And a lot of times when we would have a hurricane come through and there was a threat of a hurricane, we had plans where the families were kind of on their own. And you would get an 18, 24 pilots plus a fleet of maintainers would fly the aircraft out so the aircraft didn't get damaged. And the families had were kind of left to fend for themselves. That wasn't entirely true, but sometimes that was the feeling that the spouses got and that the families got a look. There go our husbands or there go the flight crews along with their maintainer friends, getting out of harm's way and going up to a place where they can hang out in a hotel and party for a couple of days while we're weathering the storm and that they're stuck to board up the houses and things like that. And uh, I said that's not entirely true, but that was sometimes the feeling of how people viewed it, how people felt themselves. And so, as a leader, you have to ask yourself, how is my decision, even if you think you're doing people first, or even if you think you're taking care of people in the best way you can, how is my messaging and how are people perceiving it? And there's always going to be complainers, there's always gonna be somebody who says, uh, boss doesn't care about me, boss doesn't, he hates me, he doesn't like my family, he just sees me as uh somebody to bump into in the hallway and somebody that that's late on doing a task instead of how's Derek's family doing, and I care about you know the health and well-being of his kids and his wife and all of that. And so there is always gonna be people that complain about it, but you have to ask yourself as a leader, yeah, I have to focus on the mission, but in focusing on the mission by focusing also on the long-term health and well-being of the team members.

SPEAKER_03 18:32

Yeah. Well, when I did the same thing as a commander, you know, we ask a lot of our people in the military. We know we're gonna ask them to be away from home. For me, I used to send my guys on the road for three months at a time. My guys would go up and gone for three months to Africa or you know, South America or wherever. And so I tried to be very stingy with their time while they were at home. I didn't want to ask them to do things, you know, weekends and stuff most of the time. I tried to keep pretty clear. But there were those times when things came up that, and I remember my response to this, because I remembered as a young pilot, I hated being volunteered to take a mission just because I happened to be around. And so what I would generally do is I'd go around if I had a weekend mission that had to be done. I'd go around the squadron and hey, ask guys, hey, what do you got planned this weekend? What do you got going on? And try to find the folks that didn't have anything planned. I had one guy and he was a gung ho captain. I asked him, Hey, what do you got planned this weekend? Well, I was gonna take the boys up throw a camp out. I said, Okay, hey, no, don't, no worries. He's like, Well, no, sir, what do you need me to do? I said, dude, I need you to go take your boys on the camp out because I knew I could find other pilots to do that mission. Now, would it have been easier for me to just say, hey, dude, you're going? Yeah. But I knew I could earn trust. I could earn trust. And when I ask you to do something, you know, I have expanded every or explored every opportunity or every other option. So if I'm asking you to cancel something, it's because I have to. It's not because I just am doing it because it's easy for me. My wife talks about this one with great angst. I almost got my wedding canceled to my wife. And my wedding was not at the base I was at. We were living in Florida at the time. We got married in Utah, and the commander laughed in my wife's face about when she said, Well, hey, you know, we're supposed to be leaving in two days. It's like, well, yeah, but I need to keep crew integrity. I was a lieutenant, I was easily replaceable. Put another co-pilot in the right seat. You don't change anything. I was not important. His response to me and my wife was, Well, this is what I want to do. It completely turned me off to those kinds of things. And so I tried, tried, I can't say I was really successful, but I tried to ensure that I did not have that same kind of response to my people when they had things going on in their lives that were fairly important. Now, you know, I consider a wedding fairly important because I kind of had to be there. But you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:51

You can't phone a friend in. You know, you made me think of something. A lot of times people think they're taking care of their people with blanket policy. So we're gonna make it the same for everybody. Everybody is gonna equally embrace the suck or equally get the benefits of it. And I I took a lot of heat in many instances where I made specific policy exceptions for an individual. Why? Because I wasn't looking at the policy. The policy was moot to me. The policy wasn't the mission in this case, it was how am I taking care of the people while managing the mission? And so I needed to make a change, an individual change, whether it was sending somebody home from a deployment because his wife was having a baby or letting somebody come late because they needed to get settled in their house. Those are decisions. The easy answer is nope, we're all in on this date. Nope, we're all gonna do this, we're all gonna be here 60 hours. You made a mention about working on the weekend. I tried really hard to never work on the weekend because I knew if as the boss, if I worked on the weekend, everybody else worked on the weekend. And there were times when I didn't have a choice. There were times when that was just the way it was. If, but if people were gonna go on the road, and I went on the road a lot of times when And I could have got a captain to do it, but there wasn't a captain who was going to volunteer for it. So I said, okay, I guess I'm doing it. I'm going to take that mission because I needed to demonstrate that I was as all in as they were and that their personal time mattered. There's some bosses in the Air Force and out of the Air Force who think, you work for me, you don't have any personal time. Your personal time is my time. And that's just bull. That's not it.

SPEAKER_03 22:27

The opposite, though, is also true. I had a boss at my civilian company. I had a boss that actually, one of the guys that helped me get hired at this company who was friends with our boss, my buddy Pence Away. And I passed that information on to my boss. But I happened to be working. I was working, I was on the road. This was a good friend of mine, but I'm not going to ask for time off to go to my buddy's funeral because you know what? I can go pay my respects to him somewhere else. And about a day before the funeral, my boss says, Hey, I'm not going to be able to make the funeral. Can you pass along our condolences to the family? I said, Well, hey, boss, I'm working, I'm on the road. So, you know, I'm not planning on going. And he moved heaven and earth, ended up getting my airplane landing that night in Tampa, puts an airplane down off the schedule for a whole day and said, Hey, go spend the day with your family, go to the funeral, pass on our condolences. After that, I felt like I owed that guy. I mean, he didn't do it for that reason. He didn't do it to make me owe him. But I would have sucked up a lot more overtime and junk because I knew that this guy cared. I knew that he cared about me. And so everyone moved from heaven and earth said, You're right, he needs done when he's in a book.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

That's awesome. You don't get leaders like that all the time. So let me ask a kind of a closing question here mission first or people first?

SPEAKER_03 23:38

It's a false dichotomy. It's take care of the mission, take care of the people. Those two things are the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 23:44

Yeah, I agree with you. I agree with you. It's a question of long-term focus versus short-term focus. And you need both. And leaders take the easy way out sometimes by completely ignoring the people or by ignoring the mission and focusing on the people. You can't do it. You have to take care of both. And if you do so, you'll win short term and you'll win long term. Well, thanks for the discussion, Rob. And for everybody listening, thanks for listening. And if you've got any questions, drop us a line at askdericnow.com and we'll have a conversation about it. If you have any specific questions about things we talked about, examples that we used, and you want us to expand on, we're happy to do that. Just go ahead and again drop us a line. We'll expand the conversation a little bit. Subscribe to Commander's Intent and continue to follow us, and we will together all become better decision makers for better results. Thanks.

SPEAKER_00 24:34

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 a grand prize drawing to win a $25,000 private exclusive leadership coaching package with Derek Oakes himself. So head on over to CommandersIntent Podcast.com and pick up a free copy of Derek's Leadership Guide and join us on the next episode.