• Be an expert in your specialized area.
• Isolate the skills and the techniques that are essential to each position.
• Develop a plan on how best to teach these skills and techniques.
• Treat each player as a unique person.
• Demonstrate sincere interest in each player.
• Gain the players’ confidence by working with each athlete to help him reach his full potential by enhancing his level of abilities.
• Determine how each player best responds to instruction.
• Be sensitive to and flexible with the players’ moods and demeanors while teaching and coaching.
• Search for and implement new ways to teach and impart information and to get and maintain the attention level of the players.
• Move on quickly to a different method of handling the situation if your current approach to dealing with and teaching your players is not eliciting the intended level of results.
• Exhibit strength and persistence in your dealings with your players. Hold your players to the highest expectations.
• Be personal with your players, but not too familiar. Excessive familiarity, in a misguided attempt to be socially accepted by your players, will prevent you from fully developing their performance potential.
• Avoid attempting to communicate with your players in their vernacular or their 1990s dialect. Be natural in all of your dealings. Anything else will be perceived as phony.
• Remember that praise is more valuable than blame. Remember too, that your primary mission as a leader is to see with your own eyes and be seen by your own troops while engaged in personal reconnaissance.
• Use every means before and after combat to tell the troops what they are going to do and what they have done.
• Discipline is based on pride in the profession of arms, on meticulous attention to details, and on mutual respect and confidence. Discipline must be a habit so ingrained that it is stronger than the excitement of battle or the fear of death.
• Officers must assert themselves by example and by voice. They must be preeminent in courage, deportment and dress.
• General officers must be seen in the front line during action.
• There is a tendency for the chain of command to overload junior officers by excessive requirements in the way of training and reports. You will alleviate this burden by eliminating non-essential demands.
