Pastor, mentor, coach. In that order, on purpose.
Pastor, mentor, coach. A well rounded leader plays all three, in that order.
The order you play them in decides whether feedback lands as care or as a hit.
Read, answer the prompts, take it into your week. Your notes stay on this device.
When my wife and I met with some of our staff to begin a season of leadership development, the first thing I told them was not a lesson. It was the order I planned to show up in: pastor first, mentor second, coach third. This session walks through what each layer is, what it is good at, what it is not concerned with, and why the order matters more than most leaders realize. It works for a ministry team, a business, a classroom, or a family.
Each layer follows the same shape: what it says, what it is good at, what it is not concerned with, and what it runs on; then the detail, a verse or two, one thing to try, and a place to reflect. Read a layer and answer the prompts before moving on, then take the checklist at the end into your week. Plan on about an hour, or one layer per sitting. Everything you type stays on this device only, so be honest.
Number one is pastor. The strength of that layer is spiritual development. As your pastor, I am really concerned with your soul. I am concerned with your family and your marriage. That is the highest level, and everything has to flow from it. If I am really intent on being your pastor, I am going to lead you with love and with care, and everything else is going to flow from that.
Soul, family, marriage. Trust, safety, being known.
That comes later, from a different layer.
The care has to come first and keep coming.
Trust. Safety. Being known. The pastor layer is what makes the other two layers survivable. A manager who asks about your kids before he asks about your numbers is playing this role, whether or not he would ever use the word pastor.
Professional development. That is a lot lower on the list in a pastoral relationship, and it should be. The pastor layer is not where you sharpen someone's skills. It is where you make sure the person carrying the skills is whole. If you lead someone only from this layer, they will feel loved and they will not grow. But if you skip it, nothing you build on top of it will hold.
Here is the difference between the first two layers. A mentor says follow me. A pastor says follow Christ. There is some follow me in pastoring, but the aim is different: the pastor is pointing past himself. My hope is that if I can be a pastor, truly a spiritual leader, and then a mentor, someone you aspire to be like, then maybe at times I can also be a coach, because those other two precede that.
The pastor layer only works if the other person is open to receiving you that way. If we are talking about your spiritual development or your marriage, you have to be willing to say, okay, you are my pastor. You are who God has put in my life to lead me in that way. A leader cannot force that. It is given, and it is given because the care came first and kept coming.
Every piece of encouragement and every piece of correction I give gets filtered through this lens first. If I jump straight into coaching mode, hey, I noticed this, let's fix it, I can do a lot of damage, because nobody needs a coach from their pastor unless they already know him as their pastor. The first layer is what earns the right to the third.
Ask about the person before the work.
In your next one-on-one, do not open with the project. Open with their life: their family, their week, what they are carrying. Then, and only then, get to the work. Notice how differently the work conversation goes.
1 Name the people you lead. For how many of them could you say, right now, one true thing about their life outside the work?
2 When was the last time someone you lead brought you a personal problem before a work problem? What does that tell you?
Notes save on this device only.
A mentor is someone you aspire to be like, and the strength of the relationship is proximity. A pastor says follow Christ. A mentor says follow me, and lets you get close enough to see how it is actually done. Most of what I have learned about leading I did not learn in a classroom. I learned it standing next to somebody who was doing it.
Growth in every part of life, personal and professional, by watching it done.
Mentoring moves at your pace. If you do not reach, the mentor invests elsewhere.
Relationship first, but with a direction to it.
Growth and development in every part of life, personally and professionally. The mentor wants to see you become something, and lets you watch. That is the whole method. Where the pastor is concerned with your soul, the mentor is concerned with your trajectory: who you are becoming as a leader, a spouse, a worker, a person. And the way a mentor develops that is not a lecture. It is access.
You cannot mentor from a distance. Advice from a distance is just advice. Mentoring is what happens when someone is close enough to see how you prepare, how you handle the phone call that went wrong, how you talk to your wife when you are tired, how you make a decision you are not sure about. Jesus ordained twelve, the scripture says, that they should be with him. Being with him was the training. If nobody you lead is ever with you when the real work happens, you may be teaching them, but you are not mentoring them.
Mentoring moves at the pace of the person being mentored. Every mentor I have in my life, I am the one who has to reach out. If you are not pushing for growth, the mentor has other people to invest in and other priorities. So the mentor is not the one who pushes things to happen. That is not a flaw; it is how the layer works. Which means if you are the leader, you need to be honest that this layer alone will let a passive person drift.
Follow me is an expensive thing to say. It means letting people close enough to see the unpolished version. It means your life becomes the lesson, not just your words, and people will copy what you actually do long before they copy what you tell them. If there is a gap between the two, the mentor relationship exposes it. That is not a reason to keep people at a distance. It is a reason to close the gap.
A mentor without the pastor layer underneath produces admirers, not disciples. People imitate the leader without ever being cared for by him, and they learn the moves without the heart. The only reason my example is worth following is that I am pointing past myself. So the order holds here too: earn the right to say follow me by first having said, and meant, follow Christ.
Here is the line between layer two and layer three. The moment I start driving the pace, setting the target, and pressing you toward it, I have stopped mentoring and started coaching. That is not wrong, but you need to know you have changed layers, and so does the person in front of you. A mentor who chases without saying so feels like pressure with no explanation.
Give one person the room.
Pick one person you lead and invite them into something you actually do this week: a planning session, a hard phone call, the preparation before a meeting. Let them watch. Afterward, ask what they noticed. You will learn as much from the question as they do.
1 Who is mentoring you right now? When did you last reach out to them, rather than waiting for them?
2 Which person you lead has enough proximity to you to see how you actually do the work, not just hear about it?
3 Where is the gap between what you tell people and what they would see if they were close? What would it take to close it?
Notes save on this device only.
I never played football, but I was a football chaplain, and I sat in on a lot of film sessions. What is amazing about a coach is that the feedback is extremely direct, extremely goal oriented, and abundantly clear. And the reason a coach can do that is film.
Goal oriented and abundantly clear, because you can both see what happened.
Not out of cruelty. The goal is the goal.
Not anger. I am going to get this done.
Coach and player can both watch exactly what happened. You did that wrong. Yes, I did. My bad. In most of life feedback is subjective, because you were not there. On film it is objective, and objectivity is what makes brutal feedback survivable. Nobody argues with the tape.
Your feelings. Not because the coach is cruel, but because the goal is the goal. That is the strength and the danger of this layer at the same time. It is the strength because nothing else produces improvement that fast. It is the danger because a coach who has not first been a pastor is just a critic with authority.
Most of us do not lead football teams, so we have to go looking for film. Film is anything the two of you can look at together that is not just my memory against yours: the actual email that went out, the numbers on the page, the recording of the service, a second person who was in the room, a goal we wrote down before we started. If you are coaching without film, you are coaching on hearsay, and the other person knows it. The first job of a coach is not to give feedback. It is to get the tape.
A coach can only be goal oriented if there is a goal, and the goal has to belong to both of you. You cannot coach someone toward a target they never agreed to; that is not coaching, it is correcting. So before the direct feedback, make sure you have both said out loud what we are trying to hit. Once the goal is shared, the feedback stops being about you and me and starts being about the gap between where we are and where we said we were going.
Every one of us carries two things inside: connection and aggression. Not aggression as in anger, but as in I am going to get things done. The coach lives in aggression. The pastor lives in connection. A well rounded leader needs both, and needs to know which one they are running on in a given moment. If you are all connection, nobody grows. If you are all aggression, nobody stays.
Because this layer is direct, the people you lead need to know when you have stepped into it. Something as simple as, can I coach you on this for a minute, changes everything. It tells them the pastor has not left the room; he has just put on a different hat for a few minutes, and he is going to take it off again. That one sentence is the difference between feedback that lands as care and feedback that lands as a hit.
Coach one thing, with permission.
Before your next piece of direct feedback, do three things: get the film, name the goal you both agreed to, and ask, can I coach you on this? Then be direct. Afterward, check how it landed.
1 Where do you have film with your team, a place where what happened is objective and can be reviewed together? Where do you not?
2 Think of your last piece of direct feedback. Did the person have the film, or only your word?
3 Are you mostly connection or mostly aggression? What does the other one cost you when it is missing?
Notes save on this device only.
Imagine if I approached the people I lead as a coach first. It would do real damage, because most of what we do together is not goal oriented alone. It is a mixture of relationship and goals. If you skip the first two layers and jump straight into coaching, the person on the other side does not hear a coach. They hear someone who does not care about them.
Care for the person. Lead with love. Everything flows from here.
Proximity and example. Growth at their pace. They reach for you.
Direct feedback with film. Goal oriented. Earned, never assumed.
If you are not careful, you walk into a conversation and the other person does not know what it is about, so they spend the whole time trying to figure out where it is going. Are you being nice? Are you being mean? Am I in trouble? None of that is listening. Say the end first: I want to keep raising the ceiling on your leadership, and I think you can go higher. Now they can hear the rest.
Every growth conversation is a leadership risk. I am willing to risk your feelings to coach you, because I want you to grow. And the reverse is true: if I saw no potential in someone, I would not risk the conversation at all. The people I am willing to have hard conversations with are the people I believe in most. Say that out loud.
Before you move on, stop and ask. How did that land? Are you in fight, flight, or freeze right now? Push back on me if you need to. The goal is not to win the conversation. The goal is for the person to walk out with something they can use, and you only know that if you ask.
These came out of the same conversations. Open the ones you need.
A line from Boundaries for Leaders by Dr. Henry Cloud stopped me cold, because I was standing right in the middle of it. Most leaders are decent at creating: a good environment, good relationships, new rhythms. What we quietly lose on is allowing. Some allowing is on purpose and needful, letting people grieve, recover, and figure out who you are. But picture the alternative taken to its end: someone has an outburst and I say, everyone has been struggling, so I will allow it. Somewhere along the line, allowing became enabling, and nobody announced when. A culture that only holds together when the leader is in the room is not finished being built.
Drawn from Boundaries for Leaders by Dr. Henry Cloud.
Take it into the room: write two lists, what I am creating and what I am allowing. Pick one thing on the second list that has quietly become enabling and close that door.
People experience authority figures in the present as if they were the authority figures from their past. If someone had damaging leaders early, that is imprinted on them, and when they sit across from you they are responding to everyone who has ever held authority over them. It shows up in sentences like, I know you are not like this, but when that happened it made me feel like before. Because of my role, I may be experienced in a way I did not create, and my words carry more weight than I realize. The answer is not to go soft. It is to be steadfast and set clear expectations without being harsh, because if I do not set them, the unhealthy predecessor in that person's memory will.
Drawn from Boundaries for Leaders by Dr. Henry Cloud.
Take it into the room: name one expectation you have been assuming your team already knows, and say it plainly this week with no edge in your voice.
Positive stress is when we are concerned about an issue: a deadline, wanting the service to be good. That is a sign of ownership and I would be worried about a team that did not feel it. Destructive stress is when you are afraid of a person, of me or the leader, more than you are concerned about the work. It sounds like, oh no, they are going to be mad, instead of, this needs to be done well. Destructive stress is quiet. People just start hiding things and delaying bad news. The goal is high standards and low fear.
Drawn from Boundaries for Leaders by Dr. Henry Cloud.
Take it into the room: ask one person you lead, privately, whether they are more worried about the problem or about your reaction when something goes wrong. Believe the answer.
The most visible moments carry outsized weight. A missed cue in a visible moment does not get judged as one missed cue; it gets judged as, nobody cares. The same is true of relationships: people follow what they observe far more than what they are told, and the way you treat the people closest to you is the strongest signal they will get about your leadership. So, compliment publicly and correct privately. And complaints come to leadership and die there. If someone brings you a complaint about a teammate, it is your job to handle it, not to hand it along.
Take it into the room: affirm someone in front of others this week, specifically and by name, and let the next complaint that reaches you stop at your desk.
Check these off as you do them. Your checks and notes stay on this device.
1 Which layer does our team default to? What has that cost us?
2 Where do we have film, and where are we coaching on hearsay?
3 What have we been allowing so long that it now looks like something we created?
4 Who on this team needs a pastor from us right now, before they need a coach?
Finish this: The layer I have been skipping is ____, and this week I will ____.
Notes save on this device only.