Matching your mode to the moment

Telling, Teaching, Mentoring, Coaching. Four methods of communicating, all of which are valid at different times. With junior team members you'll start with telling/teaching, and over time progress to mentoring and coaching.

I've used telling with principal level people. I've used coaching with junior new hires. You'll go back and forth depending on what the situation calls for.

Being aware of the four modes and what's required in the moment is how you drive success (or failure, if you use the wrong mode in the wrong moment).

From the article:

Telling is direct instruction. “Please use the staging environment for this test.” or “This needs to go live Friday at 9am.” It’s the fastest mode, but it’s one-directional.

Teaching is transferring a specific skill or piece of knowledge. This is the screen-share where you walk someone through a new tool, or the Loom video explaining your testing workflow. You’re the expert closing a knowledge gap. The other person doesn’t need to figure it out. They need you to show them and then it’s up to them to decide how to apply what they’ve learned.

Mentoring is sharing your own experience as a map. “When I was leading a similar migration, here’s what I wish I’d known about stakeholder communication.” You’re offering pattern recognition from your own career, but you’re not pretending your path is their path. They still have to do the driving. You might also consider ‘modeling’ as part of the mentoring; doing something with them ‘looking over your shoulder’ to see how you handle it in practice.

Coaching is the most powerful and often most underused mode for teams. It’s purely inquiry-based. You’re not giving answers. You’re asking questions that help someone find their own answers. “What’s the trade-off you’re most worried about?” or “What would success look like here?” It develops judgment and helps the other person find their own solution (and grow).

And the failure modes:

• Telling typically fails when the person needs to build judgment for future similar situations. You’ve solved today’s problem, but you’ll get the same question next week.

• Teaching usually fails when they already have the knowledge but lack confidence to apply it. Walking them through the steps again won’t help. They need you to trust that they can figure it out.

• Mentoring often fails when contexts are too different (your path isn’t their path). Your war stories from scaling a B2B SaaS product won’t help someone launching a consumer mobile app. The principles might transfer, but the specifics won’t.

• Coaching typically fails when there’s a genuine knowledge gap or time pressure. Asking “What do you think we should do?” when they’ve never done it before just wastes time and erodes trust. And during an incident, nobody needs Socratic questioning.