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Why Great Leaders Step Outside Their Role · Commander's Intent

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever frozen in the key moment of making a critical decision?
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: Whether it's in business or in life, it can cost you everything.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: Commander's Intent will teach and inspire you how to lead with clarity, courage, and purpose.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: So here's your host, retired Air Force Colonel, fighter pilot, and your leadership mentor, Derek Oakes.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to another episode of Commander's Intent.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm here with my co-host Rob.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: And as always, we're happy to be here, happy to talk about what I think are some critical topics to expanding your leadership capability and expanding your approach to leadership, and not just as a leader, but as a worker.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: And how do I best fit into an organization?
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Rob and I got into this topic a while back of that's not my job, or that's not in my contract.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we've both of us have heard it as supervisors in multiple capacities, where people say, I don't know how to do that.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not trained how to do that.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Or a supervisor will say, Well, that's not their job.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm going to give that to somebody else, or I need to hire somebody else.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give you an example of the opposite of that.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: And both of us grew up in the Air Force where you're skill trained in very specific tasks, but more often than not, you were asked to do things well beyond your job jar, and you just did it because that was the nature of the organization.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, here's a big organization, three, you know, if you include the civilians, probably in half a million people, and you wore a lot of different hats.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: I was trained as a pilot.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: By the 11-year point in the Air Force, I was on my way to the Pentagon and I got my orders and it said, Chief of A-10 and Ranges programming.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't even know what any, I know what an A-10 is, I know what a range is, but I don't know what the chief of programming is going to do for these jobs.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I was leaving a fighter squadron in Korea, going to this job, showing up, and I was going to be the chief of whatever it was that I was supposed to be doing.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: So up until this point, I'd gone through pilot training, flown five different airplanes, and become pretty good at all of those.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I had done multiple other additional duties within a squadron.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Then I walk into this office and I'm the youngest guy in the office, and I get handed a binder.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm told to log in for the secure account.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: And my cubicle mate says, There's the database, figure it out.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and oh, by the way, you have a$5 billion portfolio.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh, so what does that mean?
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I went through the database.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: I started learning what it was.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: I was the money manager, you know, for the future years defense plan for the A-10 and for all of our ranges, you know, all the air and ground ranges and the threat emitters that went with them, and all the equipment and the personnel that went with that position.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: And along with that, I had 362 A-10s and all the people and parts and equipment that went with those A-10s.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then I was responsible for the TACs, which is a tactical air control party.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I was responsible for funding them, ensuring their force structure was right and they had all the equipment that they needed.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know where to start on any of that.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden, I'm the expert.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: And a funny story that the same cubicle mate who's teaching me when we first got there the basics of how to use the database, how to pull information from the database and then manipulate it in a way that I can present it to make arguments or to what is say the status of my program.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: He goes away on vacation and I'm his de facto backup.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: And one of his programs was called UCAV, Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: 25 years ago, that was not a big deal, but it was something that people were starting to think about of how do we have more unmanned aircraft?
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the Air Force hadn't done anything with it really.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: We were kind of experimenting with it.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: And we had this, I think it was a$700 million program wedge in our budget over a five-year budget.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the Secretary of Defense's office said, Hey, you're not using that for what it's for.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: So we're going to take that money.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: My boss comes in and says, Hey, Derek, what's the Air Force position?
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, I don't even know what UCAV is.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so let me look at the numbers.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so I go through the numbers, I go through some of the historical data.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then within a week, literally, I was the one who went through the numbers and I went to my boss and I said, This is what the Air Force position should be.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: And this is how we're going to use that money.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: He took it, he took my answer.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: They took it to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and they said, okay, that works for us.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, that is crazy.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not trained.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: I barely know how to, you know, dig up the numbers, much less say what they mean.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I just spouted off the Air Force position.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Rob, I'm sure there are times in your career where you had very similar situations where all of a sudden you kind of throw in the notebook and said, figure it out.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not the way most of the world operates.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: The flip side of that is I remember being deployed and I had this young airman working in my squadron, and we were doing combat operations 24-7, and everybody's pitching in.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: During those combat operations, we moved from one facility to the other side of the runway.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, you're carrying all your classified data and your all your connections and where we're going to launch out of.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And getting that correct was not easy.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so everyone's just kind of pitching in where necessary, picking up things and moving things.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, we became a moving and storage company.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: We became an IT company.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: And as we're taking care of all this, because nobody else is going to do it for us, because they all had other responsibilities.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I had this one young airman, I asked him to drive the van and to taking pilots to the flight line.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: And his answer was, that's not my job.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like, do you got a driver's license?
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Well, then it's your job.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to do it.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: It made me kind of angry, but but then he did have a valid point.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Was I, and it's something as his supervisor, I needed to step back and say, Am I pushing people to do something that they're not trained to do?
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Am I cutting into their time to take care of their primary responsibilities?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: Or am I just approaching it with an all hands-on-deck and everybody's sharing the load to take care of it?
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, those are all important questions.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what you'll find as we get into this is it all comes down to leadership and culture and the culture that the leader establishes and the approach to it that he establishes.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so we have these rules of how do I protect an employee for doing something where he's going to break equipment or hurt somebody.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: And those exist.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I don't want somebody who's not trained on a piece of equipment fixing my aircraft.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Just like nobody wants me flying them around in an airplane if I don't know how to fly that airplane, if I'm not qualified in that plane.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what qualification looks like and what does the training look like, that's a different question, but nobody wants it.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to have that.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: And you're going to say something, Rob, good.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: I was going to say, I mean, look, this is an age-old question is you need to have regulations in order to ensure ensure safety and security for the people that are working with you or for you or for your customers.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: We both know because of the way the aviation industry is regulated, you know, the FAA is very, very specific about what you need in order to fly a commercial airliner and a commercial aircraft and what things need to be checked off every six months or every, you know, however long to make sure that you are qualified in the airframe.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: But we've also seen that in many, many industries, we've seen these other regulations and rules and barriers and boundaries set up around jobs that are not necessarily built on the idea of safety and security, and you must have highly trained members, but it's built to either protect an industry, you know, try to protect workers in some way, which isn't a bad thing.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_02: But I think that that's always where this conversation looks interesting because there is no cut and dried answer, uh i.e., you know, everybody should be able to do everything.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we know that's not true, but we also know that it's not true that you should stick to your job, as you've alluded to.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh in the Air Force, let's don't just fly airplanes.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's been hard for civilian bosses to get in their minds that when I've come to them and talk to them about problems, I'm not approaching the problem as I what?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_02: I'm approaching the problem as a guy that's run a training shop, that's run a standardization shop, that's run a computer shop, that I've done all of these things because that's what the Air Force asked me to do.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think that really what we need to explore and dig into is you know, where do we think it's appropriate to have these barriers and boundaries around a job or a job task, and where maybe that those job boundaries stand in the way of our ability to get the job done and to grow the potential of our employees and the workers.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: You know, in the Air Force, and obviously that's both of our background, it is a fine line because an air force, a typical squadron, like I don't know about an airlift squadron, the kind of squadrons you have, but a fighter squadron is perpetually undermanned.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: They don't have the support personnel to do things.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: So everybody's coming down, like in a perfect world from an efficiency perspective, I would have pilots literally flying five days a week.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: And they're completely focused on their flying skills because when we go to war, that's what they're going to be doing.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's what and so you want them to be razor sharp.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: You want them to be so good at flying that airplane and employing that airplane.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so having support personnel around, having people who do the scheduling and who manage the training and who take care of the paperwork and do, you know, our security paperwork and manage the vault where we kept our secrets and did the facilities management, that would be awesome to have people who do all those things so that you could just focus on flying, but that wasn't reality.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so myself and everyone who's been through a flying squadron knows that everybody's just going to pitch in and do things.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the double-edged sword of that is while sometimes you feel like I'm not focusing on my primary job of being an operator, being a pilot and a crew member, but I'm also expanding in doing all those different jobs, it really opened my eyes to my capabilities.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: It opened my eyes to really how to run an organization.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: In general, pilots run the Air Force or operators run the Air Force.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason is in part because that's the mission is to fly, fight, and win.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: But the other reason is because every single pilot who gets to the general officer level or gets to even the level of a colonel has done dozens, literally dozens of other jobs that were just ancillary to their primary duty, what their job description was of being a pilot and being an operator of whatever aircraft they were flying.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so as they did those dozens and dozens of other jobs, you just learn how it all fits together and you learn what's important, what's not important.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: You learn how to make judgment calls on where to dedicate resources, where to dedicate your energy.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: So that's my paradigm.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's your paradigm.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: So, like I said, it's double-edged.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: In some cases, I'm like, I really hate being the scheduler.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: I wish I could just fly.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I had jobs where I was doing scheduling at the wing level, you know, high organization level.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: And because of it, it took me off the flying schedule over and over and over again to do that job.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I really did not like that.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: But I learned so much from it, even if I wasn't learning how to be as good of a pilot as I wanted to be.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: You have a notoworker and he is on the line and he is only allowed to touch a certain part of the machinery, and he's only allowed to work during certain hours.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: And if he does anything else outside of his normal job, well, it's got to be in his contract.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: And he's going to get compensated for that.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it's designed to protect him, and it does protect him.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it protects a lot of other jobs because you don't want him to, if you're paying him to do one thing and then there's other work to be done.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the union's perspective is well, you need to hire somebody else to do that because clearly you have more work than you have people.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: So you need to hire somebody else to do that.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: But what that does, or what it can do, is that worker is now being limited by those rules.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that worker is now not able to expand and to grow to the level that they otherwise could.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Just because they're fixing one thing doesn't mean they're not capable of doing the other job.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't mean that they can't learn it like that.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like me being that forced programmer would hand them a book and say, just figure that out.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_02: So this is the stick and point, right?
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: This is the hard, hard understanding.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: I do think that the easiest way to delineate these types of things we're talking about, though, is does flying an airplane take a particular skill set and you have to have a certain amount of training or that kind of thing?
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_02: Does operating some heavy machinery take the same kind of skill set?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: I think there are plenty of jobs out there where you need particular training.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: But then the fact that you limit these folks.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so I look at my friends that fly for Delta Airlines, and even particularly some of the guys I flew with in the general aviation world that I flew in, private jets and some of the charter business, you know, some of these folks that had grown up in the civilian world, they had never done a job other than flying airplanes.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so, in their estimation, when I explained to them that hey, I was a pilot in the Air Force, I flew airplanes, but on the side, I was the training officer.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_02: So I was responsible for all the training of everybody in the unit.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: And they were like, Wow, you had to do that?
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_02: Well, yeah, because we didn't want a training guy like they do now.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like if you go to Delta, like or you got to under Southwest, they've got entire divisions that are set up to do training and to do paperwork and to do weather and to do so as you as a pilot, when you show up to fly a Delta Airlines flight from Dallas, Fort Worth up to SeaTac in Seattle, but generally speaking, you're gonna get there and they're gonna give you a sheep of paperwork that tells you, oh, here's your flight plan, here's your fuel load, here's how your aircraft is balanced and weighted, here's how the weather is supposed to be, and here's all of the things you need to know about those airports you're going to.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, yeah, they pretty much spoon feed that organization set up a spoon feed.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_02: But in smaller organizations that are light and green, and so it is in the military.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_02: The military is very much about trying to maximize the use of its resources.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so I would say to those folks that are out there listening, if you're in an organization or if you're in a place that is not as tightly regulated as, say, aviation business is, and you've got a small team, you know as well as we do that you're asking multiple people on that team to do multiple jobs.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the person that is your ops manager may also be your primary safety person, or your person that's doing your administration may also be doing your security paperwork.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there's all of these different things.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think, and Derek, you hit it at the outset, it really comes down to leadership and culture about understanding when is the appropriate time to ask someone to multitask, and when is the appropriate time to say, hey, I need a trained and qualified expert on that piece of machinery.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I like I said, I can see both sides of this point.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_02: There are pros and cons.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: And to your point, I think one of the cons to severely limiting people is the lack of potential growth that you get for people as they learn to experience other parts of the job.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_02: I would never have been prepared to run a squadron as a squadron commander had I not had experience in almost every facet of the squadron's operations before I was at that leadership level.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_02: If you'd asked me to be in charge of something that I had no idea about, it's a very daunting talent.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_02: And yet, we still see that play out very, very often in C-suites across the country, where you put, you know, a guy that's a finance guy and you put him in charge of a company that's building airplanes.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: And you have to ask yourself, how much does that CEO actually know about what goes on in building those airplanes?
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: And it does affect the ability for that person to both understand the business and to make good quality decisions.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_02: I used to ask a lot of friends all the time, I would say, Hey, who's the chief of staff of the Air Force?
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_02: And most people would say, Well, I don't know.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_02: And to be honest, right now, I don't know either.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_02: But I would say, I can tell you one thing about them.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: I can tell you that they're a fighter or a bomber pilot.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: And why is the chief of staff of the Air Force a fighter or a bomber pilot?
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_02: Because the business of the Air Force is breaking things or destroying things in wartime.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_02: That's their business.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_02: And the Air Force made the decision long ago that the person running that business needs to know that business at an intimate and tactical level.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: And that's why you get those folks up there making those decisions at that level.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: Where I think that's one of the major failures that I see in the civilian world is this too narrow at the bottom end where they try to keep people in these well-defined jobs.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm not talking just about the companies themselves.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: You alluded to it.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes it's unions and contracts and other things, but I think they're too narrow at the bottom.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I think they get too wide at the top where they start giving executive positions to executives rather than people that know anything about the business.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_02: And just because you know how to run one business, that's essentially meaning you know how to run another.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think you're right.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that brings in another problem of it of promoting somebody that hasn't been trained, putting somebody in a position where they haven't been trained.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's almost an argument for the protections.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's an argument for keeping people in their lane, and yet it's not because those individuals, if they're going to get to that point, they can't just be an accountant who becomes the CFO and now he understands all the numbers of the company, so he'd make a great CEO candidate, or it can't be just an engineer because the engineer needs to understand the costs and he needs to understand the operations and needs to understand how the whole company is put together.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do you get to that point without breaking things that you don't want to break?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I came across a quote that I really like, and it says, you can't always expand somebody's job, but you can expand their thinking.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not a big believer in dipping people, you know, where you spend six months in a job and six months in another job.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: And there's some value to it, but then you become very much a hobbyist in everything that you're doing.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: You want to get good, you want to have expectations levied on you in whatever it is that you're doing so that you can take ownership of it and you can learn from that particular position.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: So let me ask you a question.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: As a supervisor, let's say you're in a uh, I'm gonna ask two questions.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: So, first, you're in a small organization, you've done this before in a small company.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: How do you protect?
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: And in a small company, you're struggling to make ends meet, you're struggling to generate revenue and stay out of the red and move your company and grow at the appropriate level.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I've seen this before in small companies, you know, I get to this level.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: When do I jump to the next level from an organizational structure perspective and bring in that next level of people?
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm down here and the work is growing, but I'm not quite ready to jump to that level personnel-wise, how do I manage not burning people out?
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: And how do I manage expanding their thinking and helping the team grow while still allowing them to be good at their primary job?
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so that's a really interesting and tough question.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: But I think it goes back to the elements of leadership that we were taught at a young age.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_02: And the number one thing that I remember learning as a young lieutenant, and then later on as a young commander, was get to know your people.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_02: I was reminded by my DO, my second in command, one day, that not everyone in my squadron was going to be like me.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_02: Not everyone in the squadron is going to become a squadron commander, and that I should not treat them or expect them to be at my level, maybe ever.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: And what he taught me, I think, through that best was yes, there are some people in your organization that are going to be able to multitask, handle multiple different roles or divisions, and to carry on more weight as you're in that transitory period between a small company and a medium-sized company.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so you as a leader have to know who those people are and how you can rely on them, both to understand who can carry the load and then how much load they can carry without you uh getting into a position where you put things in jeopardy is really what I think it comes down to.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's knowing your people because there are some people that work for me that I think I could have piled on the world on their shoulders and they would have continued to take it on and move forward.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's other people who, if I asked them to do one thing outside their job, I think it would have caused a short circuit in their brain, and you know, they would have gone haywire and we've lost not only that additional duty, but we would have lost their primary.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_02: And so this is where the art, the art of being a reader really comes into play here.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: It and it's sitting down and getting to know your folks.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_02: And just because one of your folks has been, you know, a phenomenal rock star, uh, you know, super person that's superhuman and being able to carry out everything doesn't mean that the situation in their lives doesn't change at some point and that you may need to take more off of their plate.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_02: So this really comes down to the capital L leadership that you need to really know your folks.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that same person is going to change throughout time.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that same employee may be knocking out of the park and then he runs into a family crisis, or he just gets overwhelmed with something else that he's doing and you can't ask the same of them.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that becomes the art of leadership and knowing your people and knowing where they are, so that you can put the right amount of load on them at the right time.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because you can, I've been in small organizations where you can get run ragged.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: Even if you're only working a 40-hour work week, you can be run ragged in those 40 hours if you're not careful.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: I've been in organizations where you work in a 60-hour work week, and you can also get run ragged doing that with the outside forces, you know, the outside responsibilities that you have.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so recognizing that and also getting a gauge of where that individual is from a growth perspective.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: Are they in a position where they want to grow?
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, as a leader, hopefully you're inspiring them to want to grow.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: But sometimes as we're climbing in our capabilities, sometimes it's okay just to take a pause and do our job and then pick it up back again.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: I look at all the schooling that I did, and I didn't mind schooling, but there are times I'm like, I'm done with schooling and I just need a break.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'll do my job, I'll take care of what I need to take care of, but I am not taking another test for at least a period of my life.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that's okay to do that.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so ask yourself is this individual Does he want to pause from test taking?
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: Does he want to pause from additional challenges?
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: Does he just want to feel really good and comfortable and competent in her job or his job right now and let them do something like that?
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the other thing is, does the organization have the ability to do that?
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you'd like to give people break.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, a mother's a great example.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: A mother is a jack of all trades, not trained in any of them.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: And they often don't get the break that they deserve, that they should have, because a kid's crying at three in the morning and a kid's sick and they've got a doctor's appointment and they've got a school project that was due yesterday, on and on and on.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I say mother because I still think even with dual-working homes, the mother is more often than not the one who's taking on the greater load with regard to the kids.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to transition to a large organization.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: How do you handle it in a large organization?
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do you, you know, let's say you've got those kind of rules and you want to get the most out of your people, but you also want them to get the most out of work.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because I would say a complacent worker is not a satisfied worker.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: And a complacent worker is not somebody who is in it for the long haul and is going to be overly productive.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: So how do you balance that?
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a little tougher.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_02: Because generally, with a large organization, you've got a lot of things that are written and built into manuals and contracts that start to bind your hands a little bit tighter.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: I think some of this is having the right mid-level supervision.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's another failure that I have seen quite often in the civilian world where mid-level supervision is generally below par.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_02: They don't see themselves as leaders per se at that level.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: They see themselves as people whose job is to be a program manager and to make sure that the widgets get made or, you know, that the work gets done on a particular timeline and under a particular bill, cost structure.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_02: When in reality, I look at them from a military perspective, like I looked at my subordinate commanders when I was an upper level leader.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_02: I expect them to know their people and to be able to do the things that I would have done in a small organization.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_02: They should be doing that in their own purview, right?
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: In their own small organization.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: So knowing their people a small level.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_02: And that's why you can't have, you know, if you've got a supervisor that's supervising a thousand people, that's way too many.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: There's no way you're going to get to know a thousand people and understand their ideas.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_02: So you've got to have that right leadership all the way down the chain, all the way down the line.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: That's number one.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_02: Number two, I think then you've got to cultivate a unit or an organizational culture and build the contracts and the things such that everyone understands there has to be trust, a mutual trust between leadership and the workers, so that people don't immediately start to think the worst when the boss tells them, Hey, I need you to stop doing this job and go over here and do this job.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_02: And instead of their reaction, well, wait a minute, you're trying to hose me over and you know, use me in a way that I'm not trained for, or you're trying to use me in a position that you should be hiring somebody with more experience or more money, you're trying to get off cheaply.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: There's this automatic, it seems to me, uh, that you hear in a lot of places where everybody feels like leader, you know, management's trying to get over on them and workers are trying to hose management.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_02: And you have to build a win-win culture inside your organization where everyone is kind of moving towards the same direction.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_02: And unfortunately, uh, that's hard to do.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: That's hard to do in today's environment because there are so many things working against against you doing that in a large organization.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_02: But I do think that it's important that you set standards inside your organization, that you know how to make those things happen.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_02: Because I think the organization and the individuals in that organization are better off when they have the ability to flex outside of a standard box of you know job sets.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_02: When they're able to kind of move into some new areas, number one, keeps your workers from becoming, like you said, complacent or bored and gives them new challenges, but it also brings in new ideas from the lower level.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_02: It's one of the things that I think is the strength of the military, even though it appears to be a weakness from the outset.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: You know, Derek, you and I knew that no matter what, as a commander, I had two years, two years only to get done what I wanted to get done.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_02: And that part of my job was to make sure that I built the bench of potential leadership behind me to take over and to be able to continue to run the unit at a high level.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: That was part of our job.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: And if you if you aren't constantly looking for that new influx of ideas and energy, if you've stagnated with your leadership team or your management team and you're not doing anything different or new, you're rapidly going to get left behind when your environment changes.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I hadn't thought about that as we were going over this topic, but the thought came to my mind, a quote from my wife's grandfather, and he was a three-star general in the army and nearly 40 years in uniform.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: And in his late 70s, early 80s, his statement that he said to me often was, you got to train your replacements.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a shot for lead, you should always be looking at which one of these kids is going to replace me.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: Or you know, because they may want to get promoted or eventually move on, but which one of these kids is going to replace me?
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: Not all of them are going to, but in order to keep the organization healthy, I need to be looking for people that think that way.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: And as a CEO, who is going to replace me?
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: This is not my job till I die, or it shouldn't be, because then we get stagnant.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: Who is going to replace me?
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: And am I preparing them to get there?
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: I came across a quote that I really like.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: It says, the moment rules replace judgment, leadership quietly exits the room.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: And that's really what we're talking about in this entire segment is that if you hide behind rules, whether it's to protect the worker or the organization, to stowpipe people in an organization, then you're hurting the organization and you're abdicating your leadership.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we're going to do it this way because that's what the book says.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: I just finished watching a series.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you've seen it on Apple, it's called The Last Frontier.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the underlying premises, it's about this, you know, CIA operatives and the leadership in the CIA goes bad and they're killing people they shouldn't be killing.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, very much kind of us, you've heard that same genre before.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then you have a cop who's a U.S.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: Marshal, and he did something early in his career that was against the law because he reasoned that it was for the greater good.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: And the decision he made hurt some people, but helped other people.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, it what he did was against the law.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not advocating we break the law, but this was the whole question should I turn myself in for this something that I did many years ago?
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then the other part of it within the CIA, the element of the storyline that had to do with the CIA is I break the law for the greater good.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: If I just follow the rules, these rules that are being implemented by corrupt political appointees or corrupt operatives in the CIA, I never get to where the greater good occurs.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so how do I do that?
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: How do I get there?
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a big question.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: How do I manage the rules?
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer is leadership.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, leadership of myself, leadership of my environment, leadership of my team.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: How do I manage all of that?
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because sometimes I can hide behind the rules and that's not leadership.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: I can ignore the rules, that's not leadership either.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: I have to always be asking myself, what is the greater good?
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: What is the most important thing for me to do?
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't mean that people are going to make the right decision all the time.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: They're not going to.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: I can tell you right now, I have broken rules or regulations in the Air Force, and afterwards went, and I did it for the right reasons.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: And afterwards I thought that probably wasn't the right thing to do.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: That probably wasn't the best answer.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I caught and reprimanded, and sometimes I didn't.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: So it's just my own debrief of myself.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: So this topic, I think, is a longer topic than you know 30-something minutes, but it all goes down to leadership and culture.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: How do I create a culture?
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the leader has to be looking at how do I know my people, expand my people's capability, my team's capability while still protecting them, helping them to grow without running them into the ground.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: And because if the truth is that unions were a response to corrupt corporate leadership, unions were a response to managers trashing their people.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a necessary response.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: And the pendulum will go back and forth about who's protecting who and who is taking advantage of who and what's the right answer.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the right answer is the supervisor knows their people and cares about their people, treats them as individuals instead of just a number on a balance sheet, instead of a statistic on a spouse sheet.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: If they do that, and if they're always thinking that way, they're not always going to make the right decision, but more often than not, they're going to.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the need for those rules, the need for unions starts to fade a little bit, or maybe fade completely because the leadership team is taking care of their people.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_02: And the you know, flip side of that is if you are a worker that's in that situation where you see a need in a corporation or that you get asked to go do something that's outside of your technical sphere that you're used to doing, you know, if you find yourself with your first inclination to say it's not my job, it's not my thing, you know, I don't have to worry about that.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_02: You know, boss, I'm not going to do that.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_02: Fine.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_02: But recognize that you are limiting your growth potential, your potential to actually see something different and to move into a different sphere that maybe fits you and your skill set better, or maybe allows you to be that person or that leader later on in the company that fixes the problems for those that are down at the lower level.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think this really is a lesson for both sides of that coin, you know, from the leadership and management side and to the to the folks at the bottom side, you're not going to ever get better, you're not going to grow without challenging yourself to do something a little bit outside your sphere.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_02: And thank goodness, now today, you know, when we were young and we got told to go be whatever it was in the military, the training guy or the logistics guy or the whatever, all I got pointed at was a set of rules and regulations.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_02: Well, this is what the Air Force says that we have to do for our logistics.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I tried to put that in, think my way through the problem.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_02: Now, almost anything that I want to learn how to do or that I want to figure out, I can go to the internet somewhere and find somebody that's giving some advice about it, whether it's on a podcast like this or on YouTube.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: Heck, I can't tell you how many things I've learned how to do in the last five to ten years just by watching a YouTube video and figuring out how to do my own, you know, mechanical stuff, my own construction stuff, my own, you know, cooking stuff.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's amazing that the resources that are out there that will allow us to continue to expand our capabilities, both for ourselves and our own lives and for our organizations, our employers, and the people around us.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to piggyback on that a little bit as we close out here.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: When I was selected to be the force programmer in the Pentagon, in my mind, I was going to go to another flying squadron.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: I was in Korea and I was going to go back to Davis Mothan in Tucson, and I was going to be a flight instructor in the schoolhouse training other pilots.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I was excited about that.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't going to have to move my family.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: And they told me, no, you're going to the Pentagon.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I was not happy about it.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: It was not what I wanted to do.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, I was a better pilot.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: I was a better commander later on in my career.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: I understood how the Air Force fit together so much better.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: I was a better communicator because over and over, I'm standing in front of the three-star general explaining my position and may having to argue why I think the Air Force should go in a certain direction.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: I learned so much in those two years that I never wanted to do because somebody pushed me a little bit outside my comfort zone.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was grateful for bosses that did that to me that said, no, you need to go do this.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: It'll be good for the Air Force and it'll be good for you.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: And they were right.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: It is my job.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I would say.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: It is my job.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then I have to figure out what that looks like.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to figure out what it's doing for me and how am I helping the organization.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then, as that supervisor, am I helping the individual and the organization?
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's always front and center what I'm doing while I'm executing the mission, while I'm realizing the vision of the organization.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to talk about this more, go to asterisknow.com and we'll have a direct conversation about it.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to talk, I'd love to hear from people who are part of a union or who deal with a union on a very regular basis.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'll be honest, I've dealt with unions on a very ancillary basis, not on a day-to-day basis.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so my knowledge is not as good.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: I don't consider myself the expert on it.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: I read about it and I've studied it, but that doesn't mean I'm fully the expert.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd love to hear other perspective on this.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love somebody to tell me that we're wrong, and we'll talk about that.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: Have an episode on that or just have a conversation between us.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: If you haven't subscribed, please subscribe.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: Follow us on wherever you get your podcasts, and join us next time.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: See ya.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: So that's it for today's episode of Commander's Intent Podcast.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: Head on over to Apple Podcasts iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: 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.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: 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.