Mission first, people always

I learned a lot of things in the Army that I use even now, 20+ years after I joined. I picked up lots of cool techniques, and skills, and creative profanities. I also learned a lot of idioms shared across generations of soldier. One sticks with me eery day, and anyone who has worked with me has heard it: Mission First, People Always.

It sounds like a contradiction until you live it. The mission doesn't stop because things are hard. You don't lower the standard because the conditions are difficult. The objective is the objective.

But your people are not simply extension of your will, or purely instruments of the mission. They are not interchangeable. You cannot burn them out, dismiss their humanity, or treat their wellbeing as a variable to be optimized. Completing mission is your objective, taking care of the people is your duty.

Running a company is a continuous negotiation between those two things. There are weeks where the mission demands more than is comfortable to ask. There are decisions where protecting the people means slowing down or changing course. Neither principle yields to the other.

Many failures of leadership I've observed come from abandoning one side in service of the other. Either the mission drifts because no one holds it, or the people are ground down by a mission that was never actually about them.

The rule doesn't resolve the tension. It holds both things at once, which is the point.

I'd be remiss to not add my second favorite saying, one we learned in the Cavalry: "There is nothing to be learned from the second kick of a mule." We'll talk more about that one for sure.