Mission First – People Always

“The effective leader must find a way to balance mission completion with the welfare of the team.” — Bill Hunt

Balancing high performance with human-centric leadership is another key to successfully managing high-performing teams.

At NCO school in the Marine Corps, I was taught “Mission First, Marines Always” to take care of my Marines while trying to accomplish our mission. Over time, this principle has softened in translation, but the essence remains powerful, especially applicable in business. You have goals to achieve, but you can’t reach them without people. More importantly, without motivated, empowered, and supported people.

This epiphany became more important to me as I observed countless middle managers struggle with two competing forces: pushing hard to meet targets and ensuring their team doesn’t burn out.

The Balancing Act: Purpose vs. People

“Can you achieve your mission without burning your team out or breaking their spirit?”

Every leader faces a fundamental tension: deliver results or protect the team. The best leaders do both—and they do it intentionally. The real question isn’t whether to prioritize the mission or the people, but how to pursue the mission with your people, not at the cost of them.

In many organizations, success is narrowly defined by outcomes—revenue targets, deadlines, KPIs—while the team’s well-being is treated as someone else’s job, or worse, an afterthought. This imbalance leads to burnout, attrition, toxic culture, and sometimes poor decision-making or ethical failures. Conversely, leaning too far into team comfort without pushing for meaningful progress can dilute standards and erode accountability. The art of leadership is knowing when to push, when to pause, and how to keep the team aligned, energized, and resilient along the way.

Actionable Takeaways

• Set dual metrics: Track both performance outcomes and team health—things like engagement, sustainability, and turnover.
• Normalize the check-in: Regularly ask your team how they’re doing, not just what they’re doing.
• Build psychological safety: Make it okay to speak up about workload, mental strain, or ethical concerns—without fear of fallout.
• Model it yourself: Don’t glorify overwork. Show that boundaries, rest, and reflection are part of long-term success.
• Reward the how, not just the what: Celebrate leaders and contributors who get results and do it without leaving scorched earth behind.

Great leaders don’t choose between purpose and people. They create a culture where both thrive.

The Neural Seesaw: Results vs. Relationships

Working on this lesson, I recalled an executive board meeting in 2004 when a couple of male executives discussed an article in the Harvard Business Review by Daniel Goleman titled “What Makes a Leader.” They were going on about the last thing they needed, which was to have a “more emotional manager”, and that there were already enough women they had to deal with.

On the flight back home, I read the article. The author argued that these managers were precisely the type of managers who get promoted due to performance, only to reach a peak of “intellectual performance” and then fail because they don’t have the “emotional intelligence” necessary to manage and motivate people from the top. The article discusses five variables for emotional intelligence, including self-awareness, empathy, self-regulation, motivation, and social skills.

Mr. Goleman later wrote about the Neural Seesaw, describing how analytical and social functions are performed in two different parts of the brain, resulting in the need to “seesaw” between them. He digs deeper into understanding managers’ performance, specifically those who can effectively balance intellectual abilities and technical skills with emotional intelligence. His research found that it is rare to find leaders who are strong at both driving results and caring for people. Most lean one way or the other—and the further you go up the ladder, the more costly that imbalance becomes.

“Results-only leaders succeed—until they need to build followership. People-only leaders build trust—but often miss the target.”

Professor Goleman’s research found that leaders focused only on results were seen as “great” just 14% of the time. But those who were strong in both results and people? A whopping 72% were considered great leaders. This is precisely why the title statement “Mission First, People Always” must be the key mantra for managers. Yes, you need to deliver and have the skills and intelligence to do this, but you rarely work alone and need people to trust and follow you.

Actionable Takeaways

• Create leadership development tracks focused on emotional intelligence alongside business acumen.
• Promote based on dual strength, not area of excellence.
• Bake people development KPIs into leadership scorecards.

Rewarding Performance

Give me enough medals and I’ll win you any war,” Napoleon Bonapart

Recognition is one of a leader’s most powerful—and underutilized—tools. People will go to extraordinary lengths when they feel seen, valued, and part of something meaningful. But rewards aren’t just about trophies and titles. What matters most is what we reward, how we reward it, and why it matters. There can be challenges to rewarding performance that you must consider, but don’t let them become a reason not to recognize teams.

In many companies, performance rewards are disproportionately skewed toward short-term financial gains, individual heroics, or outputs that are easy to measure. This approach reinforces behaviors that may not support long-term mission success, or worse, may come at the expense of team cohesion or ethical standards. If you’re not careful, you can reward the wrong behaviors: burnout masked as hustle, bravado over collaboration, or quick wins that undermine lasting value.

Rewards come in many different forms from a pay bonus, a trophy, trips or simple recognition for a job well done. Not everyone needs or wants rewards but they do want to be acknowledged for improvements, achievements and teamwork. Develop a robust and varied program that does motivate and incentivise effort, performance, teamwork and being a good human.

To reward performance effectively:

• Reward behaviors, not just results: Celebrate not only what people achieved, but how they did it—especially when they embody the organization’s values or elevate others around them.
• Make recognition timely and specific: A delayed thank-you or vague praise doesn’t stick. Call out contributions in the moment and link them directly to impact.
• Incentivize team success, not just individual stardom: Share wins collectively and design rewards that foster collaboration, not competition.
• Diversify recognition: Not everyone values public praise or financial bonuses. Some respond to growth opportunities, trust, or personal gestures. Know what resonates.
• Model upward and downward recognition: Recognition shouldn’t just flow top-down. Build a culture where peers and team members highlight each other’s contributions—especially the quiet wins that are easy to miss.

When aligned with mission and values, rewards don’t just motivate—they multiply. The goal isn’t just to win—it’s to win together, without leaving the team behind.

When Overtime Becomes a Warning Sign

“If someone is working 20+ extra hours a week, it’s not dedication—it’s dysfunction.” — Bill Hunt

In a recent conversation with two separate managers, both declared they and their teams were exhausted from working 14 to 20-hour days. They felt this created a toxic work environment and wanted to know how to get back on track. I laid out a simple truth: consistently excessive overtime isn’t a badge of honor; it’s a red flag. When people are regularly working late nights and weekends to keep up, something’s broken. In my experience, there are usually two main culprits behind this imbalance:

I asked the following questions:

Why are you working 20 hours more than usual? They seemed puzzled. Let’s assume there are 10 hours daily in agency life, or 50 hours weekly. If you are working 14 hours, then that is 70 hours, or 20 more than the norm. Why so much extra time?

I then asked if these “additional hours” are billable. Understanding why helps identify ways to remedy the problem. If the time is billable, it helps understand how it is being utilized.

1. Misallocation of Resources

The most common reason is simply poor resource planning. Sometimes, managers underestimate how much effort a project requires. Other times, they know exactly what’s needed but choose to staff it thin anyway—hoping to maximize margin or “stretch” the team. Either way, the result is the same: too few people doing too much work. If you have a solid resource utilization system, you should immediately see the problem.

Under Capacity, this means you have too few people to do the work and require one or more to work extra to get the work done. This is a management problem that does not monitor utilization and either reallocate resources to your team or hire. While short bursts of extra hours are expected, it should not go on for months and months.

2. More Time Than Expected to Complete Tasks

If you are working a lot of “overtime” and are adequately staffed with the proper headcount, there are often two reasons tasks take longer than “budgeted.” If team members don’t know how to perform a task efficiently—or are spending hours researching how to do it—they’ll take longer than necessary. Add in non-billable distractions like back-to-back meetings, unclear priorities, or multitasking chaos, and productivity nosedives.

Time spent “figuring it out” is often a hidden cost of undertraining.

• Lack of training—those doing the work take longer than expected because they are not trained to do the job. If team members don’t know how to perform tasks, do them efficiently, or spend hours researching how to do it, they’ll take longer than necessary. They either have to learn it or make mistakes and need to correct them, which takes up more time.
• Distractions – they are being distracted with other tasks, administrative activities and a significant time suck during regular working hours are meetings. If they are tracking their time you can see the number of admin events they participate in and make adjustments where necessary.
• Billable & Non-Billable Meetings – meetings, especially when not billable are massive time sucks. How many did the client agree to pay for? Are these incremental due to your lack of information for developers, or to build a consensus, or meetings for the sake of meetings?
• I had a consulting project once that was 40 hours a week with a long list of expectations. At the end of the first week, I spent 32 hours in meetings (most had a closed laptop rule), leaving 8 hours to do any actual work. The second week, similar breakdown except the manager wanted me to be on site twice a week because she was concerned I was not being productive, which meant a 1.5 hour drive each way to the office. Contractually, this was billable time. I wasted 6 hours a week on top of as many meetings to ensure productivity, resulting in only 2 hours available to do any work. I told my direct manager and her manager that I would only attend necessary meetings to focus on deliverables. She told me I needed to participate in meetings and do the work on “my time.” I explained to her how a consultant works and gave them a choice to cut down on the meeting or increase the billable hours. They cut the meetings as most were not valuable.

Other Common Reasons for Unsustainable Hours

While the two scenarios above cover most cases, here are a few additional patterns I’ve observed that lead to chronic overtime:

• Scope Creep occurs when the client demands a balloon beyond the original agreement without corresponding resource increases. This needs to be managed at all costs.
• Hero Culture: When individuals assume they need to over-deliver to prove their value or cover for systemic issues.
• Poor Delegation: Managers hoard work they should be training others to handle.
• Lack of Prioritization: Teams are working on everything at once instead of what truly matters most or in a more logical sequence of events.
• Fear-Based Environments: These are where people work extra hours to avoid scrutiny, impress managers, or expect it, not because it drives value.

Actionable Takeaways

• Track overtime patterns: Who’s logging extra hours and why? Look for patterns, not exceptions.
• Separate “can do” from “should do”: Just because someone can handle an unrealistic workload doesn’t mean they should.
• Audit distractions: How much time is lost each week to unnecessary meetings, email churn, or unclear instructions?
• Review capacity vs. scope: In services and consulting, map actual deliverables to available hours.
• Evaluate bandwidth needs before launching new initiatives or assigning resources to projects.

Mission Ownership and Earned Effort

Fostering belief, driving performance, and rewarding the right behaviors are critical to achieve a high-performing organization.

“When people believe in the mission, hard work isn’t demanded—it’s volunteered.” — Bill Hunt

One of the most powerful things a leader can do is inspire genuine belief in the mission. When people feel connected to why the work matters, they’re more likely to bring energy, focus, and resilience. But belief doesn’t just happen—it has to be cultivated.

1. Connect Work to Purpose

Start by making the mission real. Don’t just state what the company does—show people how their specific role contributes to impact. Whether it’s helping a client succeed, making a product better, or improving someone’s day, meaning drives motivation.

Purpose is fuel. Connect the dots between daily tasks and the bigger picture.

2. Create Opportunities for Ownership

People work harder when they feel ownership over outcomes—not just assignments. Let them lead a project, influence the strategy, or own a piece of client delivery. Ownership creates emotional investment.

Actionable Tip: Give stretch goals that align with the mission, not just with KPIs.

3. Recognize and Reward the Right Behavior

If you want people to work hard for the right reasons, make sure you’re rewarding the right behaviors: initiative, follow-through, creative problem-solving, teamwork, and contribution to mission success—not just working the most hours.

“What gets recognized, gets repeated.”

Actionable Tip:

• Build peer-nominated recognition programs for mission-driven contributions.
• Celebrate not just what was done, but why it mattered.
• Tie promotions and bonuses to impact, not just effort or tenure.

4. Feedback as Empowerment

People rise to expectations when they know where they stand. Clear, constructive feedback reinforces belief that growth is possible and that leadership is paying attention.

Actionable Tip: Create quarterly “mission alignment” conversations—not just performance reviews—to reinforce how each person is contributing and where they can grow.

Belief in the Mission

“Do they believe in the mission? Are they on the right team to deliver it?”

Many companies fall into the trap of hiring “plug-and-play” talent only to discover a cultural mismatch. I saw it repeatedly: companies hiring experienced search pros with impressive resumes who couldn’t work within their process or types of clients. Skill mismatch is one thing, but mission misalignment is far more toxic. You can train someone to perform a task. It’s harder to convince them to care about the output.

I learned that training a skilled consultant in search marketing is more effective than trying to transform a tactically brilliant search marketer into a strategic-thinking executive consultant. Human skills—empathy, client management, presentation polish—are often the differentiators.

In the lesson, I talk about a client that would hire popular SEO consultants, paying a premium for them, only to find they were not a fit for their type of clients, brought bad habits and practices that could not work effectively within their legal and business guidelines. I convinced them to hire people with soft skills and personalities and teach them their SEO methods. This immediately cut costs, reduced turnover, increased client satisfaction, and overall department performance.

Actionable Takeaways

• Audit for mission buy-in during team meetings: ask, “Do you believe this is doable?”
• Don’t be afraid to reassign a misaligned employee—it’s a benefit to them and the team.
• Build cross-training opportunities to test team fit in new contexts.

Clear Career Progression: The Power of Transparency

“People need a path. They want to know what it takes to get to the next level.”

One of the biggest drivers of disengagement is ambiguity over their future. If your team members do not know how to grow, they’ll stagnate or leave. I have never been a fan of org charts and prefer flat organizations with clarified roles and career progression. Everyone knew what it took to move up. Client-facing roles were based on managing client revenue and the size and complexity of the engagement. Technical roles were based on skillsets and people management skills.

We implemented a shadowing program in which someone eyeing a promotion would begin taking on some of the responsibilities of the role above them. It was practical, merit-based, and fair. It was also a fantastic way to ensure they fit for the next level. As the pressure and level of client interaction increased, some people found they were not a fit for it, but could then follow an internal team pathway. At the same time, not everyone wants to move up. I cannot understand it, but I have seen it too many times from employees who resisted every attempt to push them beyond their goals and abilities.

Actionable Takeaways

• Define every role’s path to promotion with clear, measurable criteria.
• Use mentoring and shadowing as structured development—not favors.
• Reward people development as much as revenue generation in performance reviews.