This One's for Jeff Mikres
How leaders and mentors change our life
Be a Coach, Not a Cop
These words dance through my head every single day as I navigate life on this blue marble:
“Be a coach, not a cop.”
It was the mantra handed to me by my leader and friend, Jeff Mikres, when I worked at Ramsey Solutions. Jeff wasn’t just my boss — he was the reason I packed up my family and moved from Birmingham, Alabama to Middle Tennessee. He gave me a shot, and it forever changed my life.
After I left Ramsey, Jeff and I started building a consultancy from scratch. We’d meet every Saturday, pull up our Miro board, check the Kanban, and decide our course of action for the week. A couple times, I slept in and missed our chats. Those days haunt me.
Jeff passed away in July of 2024.
What I wouldn’t give for his words of wisdom right now.
There’s one moment from my first in-person interview with Jeff that’s emblazoned in my mind — he asked me, “how would you coach a team that was struggling with a concept or practice?” I immediately jumped up, grabbed a marker, went up to the whiteboard, and started diagraming and free forming. When I sat down, he slid a Continuous Flow Diagram across the table and asked me to explain it. No labels. No numbers. Just bars of color.
The record scratch noise played in my ear. The one when you stop the music by grabbing the needle.
He’d called my bluff.
I fumbled. Said some nonsense. Stumbled around until he finally stopped me… and taught it to me.
Right there. In the interview.
I thought I’d bombed it. I assumed I was toast.
But I wasn’t. I didn’t understand why until three years later.
Over lunch, we were laughing about the moment. Then Jeff got quiet. Leaned in.
“Tristan, you’re one of the greatest coaches I’ve ever met.
Remember, be a coach… not a cop.”
What’s that even mean?
I’m an Enterprise Agile Coach — which is a fancy way of saying I help teams and leaders rediscover how to make quick, lean, human-centered decisions.
We’ve done this as humans forever… but somehow we’ve processed it out of our organizations.
When your kid cuts their arm, what’s the first thing you do?
If you said, “Make a project plan,” congrats — your kid just bled to death.
But if you grabbed the nearest cloth to stop the bleeding, you were being nimble. You didn’t check it for health-code compliance. You acted. And if that didn’t work, you adapted.
That’s what we call iteration. That’s how real work gets done.
Over time, we’ve learned some shared practices that help teams move this way at scale. Some call it Agile. I call it being nimble.
And while there are rules of the game, there are a hundred ways to play within those rules. Just like football. Every team plays their own way — but the game itself doesn’t change.
That’s where Coach vs. Cop comes in.
A cop enforces the rules. They hold people to the letter of the framework.
A coach equips people to win.
Cops say, “Don’t do that.”
Coaches say, “Here’s how to do it better.”
Cops care about compliance.
Coaches care about outcomes.
A coach knows that sometimes you have to break a rule on purpose. If you’ve ever run a red light to get someone to the ER, you get it.
Jeff helped me see this: while people need rules, they also need the space to grow. Rules should serve outcomes, not the other way around.
A coach helps people question the rules — not to ignore them, but to refine them. To innovate. To own the consequences of meaningful decisions. That’s how we build confident, courageous teams.
More than anything though… Jeff was my friend.
He wasn’t measuring my output. He was investing in my life — in my walk with God.
We’d talk about faith and family and failure. He’d challenge me. He’d share what God was showing him, then ask me what I was learning.
He gave me wisdom I can’t put a price on.
One of the last things I told him before he passed was this:
“You’re gonna live forever.
These things you’ve poured into me — I’ll carry them forward and pour them out for as long as I live.”
Jeff wasn’t a father figure. He was a brother.
And I miss him dearly.
But I won’t forget those words.
Be a coach. Not a cop.