THE STANDARDS OF a leader are different from the roles of a leader. Please don’t confuse the two. Leaders are held to two standards: accomplish the mission and take care of your teammates. All leaders will more effectively be able to achieve those standards if they understand and can assume the three roles of a leader: commander, coach, and mentor.¹

Mentoring is about building a culture and teaching our teammates what it means to be “one of us.” Coaching, in our vernacular, is teaching our teammates the skills they need to succeed—the X’s and O’s of how we do things. This could be blocking and tackling in football, sales techniques and procedures in the corporate world, or shooting and close-combat techniques in the military. Commanding is the act of giving direct orders.

Initially, we visualize these roles as a pyramid, as shown in Figure 38.1, for two reasons. One, as a ratio of time, it takes much longer to mentor someone than it does to coach them, and more time to coach than to command. Mentoring can, and often does, last a lifetime. Coaching is an ongoing process, but athletic coaches at every level have rules that outline how much time they can spend on X’s and O’s with their players. Corporate America does not impose this time limitation on training, but we have numerous responsibilities in our lives and therefore there are systemic limitations on how much time we can spend doing so. Commanding takes very little time. It could be as simple as “John, shift left” during a basketball game, a “frag order” in the military (i.e., “2 this is 1. On me. Go, go, go!”), or giving very pointed directions to a corporate teammate.

Second, the pyramid also represents the structure of an effective organization and how its leaders fulfill their roles. The foundation of any organization is its culture, what it means to be “one of us.” We can coach our teammates on the skills they need to succeed, and we can command them, but if we have not mentored them on what it means to be “one of us”—if they don’t fit our culture—they will fail, and so will we as an organization. Commanding is also very counterproductive if we have not first coached our teammates on the skills and procedures of how we do what we do to be successful. Therefore, especially initially, much more time should be spent mentoring than coaching, and more time coaching than commanding.

Part 1: Building Esprit de Corps

The military uses this pyramid very effectively. First, young soldiers, airmen, sailors, and Marines are sent to basic training or boot camp. There is a significant amount of yelling at boot camp. It is used to make young recruits uncomfortable. Much more time and effort is spent with young men and women mentoring them throughout, and an esprit de corps, a common warrior spirit, is created. This mentoring process continues throughout their career.

Graduates of enlisted boot camp or officer training have little to no understanding of tactics or basic warfare. However, after graduating, they are sent to their military job-specific school (infantry school, communication school, logistics school, etc.). Furthermore, after this entry-level training, coaching continues throughout a military member’s career on the skills they will need to succeed in their designated role. Finally, once we are “in the fight,” we can effectively command each other.

Too often we see organizations with their pyramid unintentionally upside down. The senior leaders spend all their time commanding and little time mentoring. This occurs most often with new members to the organization, whether they’re freshman basketball players or new members of a marketing team. “Hey freshman, pick up the balls after practice.” Or “Hey, new person, set up the presentation room.” Those new teammates will benefit far more from mentoring than will anyone else. It is of little to no value commanding them if we have not already mentored them into “one of us.”

Part 2: Intentionally Inverting the Pyramid

However, sometimes it is indeed necessary to invert the pyramid (see Figure 38.2). We believe firmly that if we recruit someone to our organization, we owe it to them to mentor them. However, as discussed in Section 1, there are times when we invest our resources (time and money) mentoring someone on what it means to be “one of us” and we get no return on that investment. We truly believe we can change that individual and so we continue to mentor them while we continue to receive little or no positive return on that time investment. We never want to give up on someone, so we continue to mentor them even though we see no positive change or improvement. At some point, we realize we have poured years of time and effort into mentoring this individual (who, not coincidentally, is usually talented) and yet they will never fit our culture. Meanwhile, we have members of our organization who could greatly benefit from our mentoring, but we don’t give it to them because we’re spending all our time and effort trying to mentor and change someone who will never be “one of us.”

There comes a point, and this is the “art” side of leadership, where we need to invert the pyramid. There is no precise time to do so, but eventually we must decide to spend the majority of our time commanding them. We are still going to spend the same amount of time “coaching” them, but instead of spending all our valuable time trying to change someone who is choosing not to do so, we are just going to command them; to tell them where to go and what to do. Finally, after we flip the triangle, if the individual still does not change their behavior, the only next step is for that individual to leave the organization.

We cannot tell you when to flip the triangle on someone, but whenever one of our clients has followed our recommendation to do so, the common feedback is, “Wow, I should have done that months ago.” Many leaders will push back on this and say that they never want to give up on a teammate. Our response is that leaders are held to two standards: accomplish the mission and take care of our teammates. We do so by making every decision by thinking of what is in the best interests of the team, first and foremost, not what’s best for any one individual, and certainly not for any individual who provides no return on the leader’s investment of time. Our allegiance isn’t to the individual; it is to the team.

Inverting the pyramid does not mean giving up on a teammate. We are still going to coach that person to the best of our ability. We will just spend more time commanding and less time mentoring that teammate to ensure that we will still accomplish our mission and take care of all our people. We realize that our loyalty is not to a specific person, but to the unit as a whole. As soon as we lose sight of our mission, and our team, so that we can avoid “giving up” on someone, we are failing as a leader.

Remember, all leaders are held to two standards: accomplish the mission and take care of our people. Meet these standards and we will be successful as leaders. Fail either one of them and we will fail as leaders. Mentoring, coaching, and commanding—and knowing when to do each—will help us do so.