ALL LEADERS ARE held to two standards: accomplish the mission and take care of your people. Taking care of your people is easy. As young Marine Corps officers, we certainly thought so. We enjoyed taking care of our Marines. We were good at it. Initially, “taking care of our Marines” meant letting them out early on a Friday, it meant getting some “hot wets” (hot coffee and soup) brought out to the field when we were training in the cold. Taking care of our Marines, our “people,” meant making popular decisions that helped our Marines like us. We would come to realize just how wrong we were.

Jake MacDonald and his platoon were one of the first conventional units to cross the border during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is tough to adequately put into words the chaos and stress they were feeling at the time. Mac’s unit had been tasked with patrolling the Kuwaiti side of the border in the days leading up to the invasion. When everything kicked off on the night of March 19, they had already been awake and working for close to 24 hours. They crossed the border into Iraq at night. The oil fields had been set ablaze and they could barely see through all the smoke. Due to the threat of weapons of mass destruction, they wore full chemical suits, and every time they took incoming enemy fire, they had to put on gas masks, often for hours at a time. Their greatest advantages on the battlefield were speed and violence of action, so there was no time to stop. No time to rest, eat, or drink. This was the first time in combat for Mac and his Marines and they fully expected to run into a battalion of enemy tanks every time they crested a rise or turned a corner. The constant ebb and flow of adrenaline only added to their fatigue.

After moving for another 24 hours (a total of 48), they were finally given the order to stop and set into a security position. Mac knew that he would finally be getting a chance to get some sleep and food. He knew his Marines would get the same, and the overall feeling of pleasure was palpable.

However, as soon as they had moved their vehicles into position, Mac’s commanding officer, Captain (at the time) Gil Juarez, requested that Mac and the other leaders rendezvous at his own vehicle. When Mac arrived, the first thing Captain Juarez said had nothing to do with his personal welfare. He did not ask, “How are you?” Instead, he said, “Mac, I need a patrol out within the next 10 minutes.” Mac answered, “Yes, sir,” but inside he was seething. Didn’t the boss know how tired and hungry Mac and his platoon were? Didn’t he know how to take care of his Marines?

Mac continued to rage internally at the unfairness of it all on the walk back to his platoon. However, as Mac admits, by the time he got there, he was embarrassed. He realized that taking care of his Marines was exactly what his commanding officer was doing!

As General Gray taught, at The Program, we define taking care of our people as “making every decision we ever make with the team’s best interests at heart.” Captain Juarez knew exactly how tired and hungry Mac’s platoon was. He hadn’t slept or eaten either. He knew how badly the entire company wanted sleep and how much they would resent an order to immediately go back out. However, he also knew that taking care of Mac and all his Marines had nothing to do with being nice to them. It had nothing to do with sleep, food, or comfort. In that situation, it meant making sure Marines were outside of the lines, watchful and aware to ensure no bad guys attacked their sleeping teammates. Taking care of his Marines meant bringing all of them home alive to their loved ones, and he was willing to make unpopular decisions in order to make sure he brought those Marines home.

Making every decision with the team’s best interests at heart rarely means giving the answer the team might want to hear. It involves holding your teammates accountable to the standards of your organization. It may mean taking the keys of a teammate who’s been drinking, knocking on a door to make sure a teammate gets to an early class, or correcting a teammate whose behavior is hurting mission accomplishment. These actions may not make you more popular or better liked. You do them because you care about the well-being of your teammates and are willing to make unpopular decisions because they are in the best interests of your teammates and, most importantly, the entire team.

The team accomplishing its mission is in the best interests of its teammates. We stay focused on the mission first, but on our teammates always. “Taking care of our teammates” means making every decision not with wants and desires as the priority, but with the team’s best interests at heart.