Well you spam "follow me!" over and over, and they just run around with 5 stacks of Aleph on them punching mooks instead of overloading extractor on Short fused. Then you lose the mission because they got back broken from an Elite commander with 60 seconds of the mission left. You practically have to just expect they are cannon fodder and do the mission yourself and race their death rate with the mission objective.
I realize I was a noob to, so I'm not going to completely blame them. I just want them to have some kind of gating mechanism before playing online multi-player. When I started this game I to, as well as others above, played offline to understand it. I'm not sure what the answer to this would me? Maybe you have to complete offline Hanging by a Thread before online mode? Seems too harsh. Maybe in game chat? Even typing would be good. I can at least spam, "BLOW UP EXTRACTOR PLEASE!!!" or "RUN OVER HERE FAST BEFORE YOU BLOW UP!!!" or "KILL ADDS! I'LL KILL DRONES!".