The Program

38The Roles of a Leader

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 ...