Each week I put down one honest thing about leading, usually something I learned the hard way and would rather have learned another way. If today's note lands, send it on to someone who is somewhere in the hard part right now. That is how it grows.

Friends,

I was talking with a coach this week about the difference between being in charge and supporting the person in charge. It is a distinction I felt in my military career, and I find myself returning to it often with coaches. The conversation was a good reminder of how often leaders underestimate the transition to being fully in charge. The skills are different. The mentality is different. The responsibility is different.

At one point, he explained it better than I could. He said that if he had only worked under one head coach before taking over a team, he would have just copied that coach’s style, since no one would have pushed him to figure out his own approach. As a new head coach, his first concern would have been about tactics, like defending a ball screen, instead of thinking about how to lead the whole program and shape its culture.

Then he brought up Steve Kerr as an example of exactly what he was describing about himself.

In 2014, Kerr had just been hired to coach the Golden State Warriors and had never been a head coach anywhere. He arranged to spend a few days with Pete Carroll in Seattle, watching practice, sitting in meetings, taking notes.

On the third or fourth day, Carroll asked Kerr how he planned to coach his team. Kerr began talking about his offensive strategy, which he had spent almost two years developing. But Carroll said that wasn’t the point, and asked the question again, looking for a different answer.

Now put that answer next to the man giving it. Five championships as a player. A general manager before he was ever a coach. Years inside two of the best programs the sport has produced, playing for Phil Jackson and for Gregg Popovich. He had been standing next to greatness for twenty years, taking notes the entire time, and he walked into Seattle with a plan already in place.

But when someone with real experience asked him the most important question, Kerr focused on the game plan instead.

That is not a knock on Kerr. It is the most useful thing in the story, because it rules out the easy explanations. He was not lazy, he was not unprepared, and he had not been around the wrong people. Proximity to the seat is not preparation for it.

That’s because these two roles aren’t just the same job with more authority. They actually require different skills.

Assistants become experts at turning someone else’s ideas into reality and making sure a decision can be carried out by everyone. They use their judgment in situations that aren’t written down anywhere. They spot things the head coach might miss, read the room, manage their group, and fix small problems before they grow. This is tough, skilled work, and teams struggle if they don’t have people who can do it well.

But none of this means you have to decide the overall direction. That decision is made before you start, and your job is to handle everything that comes after.

The head coach doesn’t have someone above him setting the direction. He has to create it himself, defend it against other opinions, and repeat it until he’s tired of hearing it, even though many people are hearing it for the first time. And his plan has to hold up on tough days, like a bad Tuesday in February, when things aren’t working and everyone is looking to him.

Even if you’re great at being an assistant for years, it doesn’t teach you how to be the head coach. It just can’t. As an assistant, you never have to answer the big question, because someone else already has, and you might not even realize you’ve never faced it yourself.

I got this wrong myself, and it took me a long time to see it.

For years, I was good at following directions from above, even when I disagreed. I thought that was all there was to it. I had plenty of opinions and could have told you which decisions I thought were wrong and what I would have done differently. It was right to keep those thoughts to myself and do my job, but I shouldn’t have ignored them. Each disagreement was a part of my own coaching philosophy trying to come out, but I treated it as something to ignore instead of something to learn from.

No one ever explained to me that those were two separate things.

So if you’re an assistant coach, here’s my advice.

You will not be able to prepare for all of it, and I want to be honest about that. How information should flow to you, how to run a staff meeting where the decision is finally yours, what the weight actually feels like when the room goes quiet, and everyone turns your way. You can think about those things, and you will still have some learning to do once you are in the seat.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t prepare. In fact, it’s a reason to prepare even more. There will always be a gap between who you are before you take the job and who you need to be once you have it. Preparation won’t erase that gap, but it will make it smaller. Every question you answer for yourself ahead of time is one less you’ll have to figure out on the spot while everyone is waiting for you.

The most important part of this work is something you can start right now, and I’m surprised more people don’t do it. Whenever you see a decision being made, come up with your own answer before you know the result, and write it down. When you disagree, note why. When something in your team works or fails, ask yourself what the leader did to cause it. If you do this for a few years, you’ll build your own philosophy instead of just reacting to things.

Then, take some time to answer Carroll’s question for yourself, without thinking about what your head coach believes. Focus on what you believe and what your program would feel like on a regular Wednesday in February if you were in charge.

This question is harder than it seems, and that’s the point. Kerr learned this lesson after he already had the job and was sitting across from a legend. You have the chance to figure it out now, while it’s still easy to make changes.

I have thought about that night many times since, usually when something in front of me has gotten long and unpleasant, and the case for stopping has started to sound sensible. The question worth asking is where your reasons live. If they are all outside of you, the trophy, the title, the record, what people will say, they will feel thin at exactly the moment you need them most. What carries you is the reason about who you are. Decide that part now, on an ordinary day, because you will not be in any condition to sort it out at mile five in the dark.