The Leadership Secret Fighter Pilots Call "Motherhood"

What if the key to extraordinary leadership isn't found in the big decisions, but in the small things you do every day?

In this episode of Commander's Intent, retired Air Force Colonel Derek Oaks shares a heartfelt tribute to his mother and the powerful leadership lesson she taught him without ever stepping into a boardroom or cockpit. Drawing on the fighter pilot concept of "motherhood," Derek explains why great leaders focus on the essential routines, systems, and habits that make success possible.

From aviation and business to sports and everyday life, Derek reveals how mastering the fundamentals creates the foundation for excellence, improves decision-making, reduces distractions, and allows individuals and teams to perform at their highest level. He also explores how effective leaders eliminate unnecessary friction, establish clear standards, and create environments where people can focus on what matters most.

If you want to become a stronger leader, improve team performance, and achieve better results, this episode offers a simple but powerful reminder: greatness is built on the fundamentals.

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 Oakes.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Welcome back to another episode of Commander's Intent. I'm Derek Oakes, your host, and I wanted to take a little bit of time today to talk about my mother. My mother was and is an amazing person. She passed away last summer, beginning of July, and I always knew how much she meant to me, but I feel it a whole lot more now that she's not here with us. She was almost 89. She died of an advanced dementia. And yet to the day she died, she was never cross. She was never, I did see her get angry at me because I deserved it, but she was always looking for the pleasant side of things. She was always looking for the opportunity to improve somebody else's life. I think back to my childhood, and I didn't realize how easy my life was in so many ways because of my mother. We woke up every morning. We always had breakfast. We always had almost always a warm breakfast. We always had a lunch packed. We always had dinner. Every single dinner had some kind of a dessert, even if it was jello with whipped cream on top. We always had some kind of a dessert. She never complained about driving us back and forth to the different events and different activities that we were involved in in our life. And she was always very much involved in our lives and the lives of my friends. I never once remember feeling like one of my friends was not welcome in my house. A lot of my friends can attest to that, that they always felt like they had a seat at our table. And it was because of my mother, kind of inviting person that she was. I'm going to share one simple story about my mom. I was a senior in high school, and she had just made us, my brother and I, a chocolate cream pie. And we're sitting in the kitchen in our avocado green kitchen in Northern Virginia. And she sets the pie on the table and she's just giving it to us because she wanted to make us something nice after school. So I've got a fork. My brother's got a fork. I dip in with my fork. I take a bite. My brother takes a bite. And so we're eating. We've barely made a dent in the pie. When I don't know if it was him or me first that took a forkful of it and flung it at the other one, put it on the other one, threw it at the other one's shirt. And so then maybe I did it first. My brother did the same thing to me, flipped a forkful on me. We did that about two or three times. My mom wasn't paying attention at that point. She had her back to us. But then at some point, I picked the pie up and my brother ran out of the room. And my mom kind of saw what was going on, and she stepped in between us as my brother's running out. And she said, No, no, no, no, no. And I took the pie and I dumped it on her head and I smashed it on her head. And I don't know why I would ever do something like that, other than a dumb teenager. And she just stood there, this pie that she had just spent, I don't know how long making, but she had made it for us to eat, not to wear. And then she just started to giggle. And we never got in trouble for it. We probably should have. I don't think she ever told my dad about it, hopefully, because he was not one to waste food. But that's the kind of person my mother was. And I always felt like I could really do anything in my life. And I think it was because of my mother and the confidence that she instilled in me. Not every mother is fantastic, but I would say the role of mother and what they do does enable greatness. So it was no surprise to me when I became a fighter pilot. I didn't understand it at first, but when somebody explained it to me, it made a lot of sense. When I became a fighter pilot, they talked about motherhood. And you would brief, and the first thing you would brief before you would go fly is the motherhood. And why would they call it the motherhood? Well, moms enable greatness. They take care of the necessary so that those random can do the extraordinary. And you know, if you're a mother, you know that much of what you do is thankless. And yet if you don't take care of it, the wheels of the bus are quickly going to come off and nothing of substance is going to get done. Every house is pretty much like that, I think. Flatter pilots use the term motherhood to cover the necessary, the events that you're not really there to do, but they have to be done and have to be done well in order for the rest of the mission to go well. I'm talking about takeoff and landing, what formation you're going to fly, your instrument setup, your fuel system checks, your basic flight requirements, your radio setup, and more. Even when you're performing very complex missions, we would always cover the motherhood at the beginning of every flight, at the beginning of every brief to ensure that the mission doesn't fail because of something mundane and yet entirely necessary. Hence the motherhood. Motherhood involves a task that must be done right before anything else works. It makes it decisionless so that you don't even have to think about it because you've already taken care of it in your mind before you do it. In a typical fighter pilot brief, we would brief for about an hour and you would cover the motherhood in just a few minutes at the very beginning of the brief. And after you cover the motherhood, then you're able to talk about the advanced maneuvers. You're able to talk about getting better at the stuff that really, really mattered so that you could move on. And so just to give you an example of what motherhood was, I already gave you some examples, but I want you to think about if you're a pilot, and then I'm gonna equate it to for a normal pedestrian life. If you're gonna fly an airplane, what are some of the things that you just have to have nailed down beforehand? They're not right why you're flying, but they're elements that were gonna keep you safe. You gotta think about, and you gotta plan for your fuel requirements. You've got to plan for what your power settings are gonna be and bank angles and things like that, what your rhythm is for running your checklist, for walking around the aircraft to check and make sure everything's safe and ready to go. When and how you're gonna configure the aircraft for takeoff and for landing. If you have passengers, when are you gonna brief those passengers on what they can expect on the flight? How are you gonna set up your radios? What your routines are gonna be, how are you gonna interact with outside agencies? How are you gonna interact with the airtraff controllers? When are you gonna review the notices to airmen, which are there are notices that come out that tell you that there's a runway closed, certain air spaces close, or a navigation aid is not gonna be working, or you're gonna fly at a higher altitude, all those things. Those are some examples of motherhood. I want you to think about your own life. What are some things that need to be taken care of that just have to be taken care of, and they have to be taken care of right before you can step into bigger and better things into greatness? If you're driving a car, you got to take care of the car, you gotta do maintenance on it, you have to have regularly scheduled maintenance. If you're gonna be an athlete playing games on Saturday, you've got to be working on drills and you gotta be making sure your uniform and your equipment is set up properly. If you are a machinist, again, you have to take care of your tools. You have to have some kind of a rhythm of how you're managing your tools, where you're setting them up, what your power sources are, and on and on and on. Even if you're working in an office and you've got a team, by setting up motherhood, kind of like office standards, and I'm not saying make a huge list of rules, standards and expectations so that people aren't thinking about what's happening. It could be something as simple as what time are we doing a huddle in the morning? What time are we going to do a wrap up at the end of the day? What are some of the expected deliverables, you know, at different times during the day? When are we going to block aside time to call our suppliers? Any number of things. You just look at your area of expertise and think about what motherhood would look like for you. Because you're not there to call your suppliers. You're not there to have that huddle. You want those elements of your work to be able to enable greatness, to be able to enable you as an organization, as an individual to move forward and to be better at whatever it is that you're doing. As I've said a couple of times now, motherhood matters and it enables greatness. If you create and evaluate your own motherhood standards, you can think through those unexciting yet essential tasks that slow you down and then kind of set them off to the side, push them into your subconscious because they're already kind of taken care of. You're going to be able to focus more on the extraordinary and expand your own skills, whether it's as a pilot or as a driver or as an office manager, I don't care what it is, that to where you're going to be able to be better at what it is that you do. So fighter pilot motherhood is it's kind of an element of a leadership philosophy that's going to emphasize an intense prioritization of tasks. You're going to think through all the things, all the nuts and bolts that surround what you do, you personally, you with an organization as a team, and pre-decide on those things and pre-plan on those things so you're not having to take care of it in the moment. You know, they seem like secondary tasks. They seem like unimportant tasks. And yet if you take care of them right, they even seem more like unimportant and unnecessary tasks because you don't even think about them. But if you take care of them wrong, you're going to have mission failure. The mission is the primary goal, whatever it is that you do. The motherhood is the complex web of logistical, technical details that are going to keep the aircraft flying and keep the team safe, keep your organization flying in the right direction and keep them safe. Things that you think about are what do I need to do to maintain my situational awareness? What are my priorities looking at that mission and that target, longer-term target? What are my priorities? At what level am I empowering members of my team to do things? And when am I making that decision to delegate and to empower them so that they have expectations that they know what they're supposed to be doing? How do I avoid target fixation? That's a you know a flying term of I get just fixated on a certain task that's gonna slow me down, that's gonna knock me off the rails to where I end up missing what really matters long term. I don't care what it is that you do, you have motherhood standards, and you have motherhood elements of what is going to make your organization click better, what is gonna make you a better leader, what is gonna make your team perform at a higher level. Think through those motherhood standards, write them down, brief them, talk about them, refine them, and you'll see that you'll be able to focus significantly more on the extraordinary, on the real goals, not just the mundane tasks. I'm so grateful for my mother, well, for a lot of reasons, but in part because it made it very tangible. When I first heard the term fighter pilot motherhood, it made it very tangible to me. I instantly understood what they were talking about. I instantly understood the importance of getting those tasks done and getting those tasks done correctly so that I could focus on the extraordinary. My mother helped me focus on the extraordinary. My mother helped me dream and think about what I really wanted to do because I wasn't stuck in the mud. I wasn't stuck in those details. And yes, she did a lot of thankless things for me, but I am forever thankful and grateful for everything that she did. If you've got any questions about motherhood and fighter pilot motherhood, reach out to me and we'll have a further conversation on it. If you haven't already followed, please do so. And together we'll all become better decision makers for better results.

SPEAKER_01 10:52

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 Intense Podcast.com and pick up a free copy of Derek's Leadership Guide and join us on the next episode.