Mentoring: How Great Leaders Build the Leaders Who Replace Them

When you think about the most influential person in your leadership journey, it probably wasn't your biggest promotion or the best training programme you ever attended. It was likely a person — someone who let you observe how they made difficult calls, explained their reasoning when they didn't have to, and gave you responsibility before you were certain you were ready for it.

That kind of mentoring is harder to find than it should be. And it's harder to do well than most leaders realise.

Mentoring isn't advice — it's exposure

There's a common misunderstanding about what a mentor actually does. Many people picture a formal arrangement: scheduled meetings, a structured programme, performance milestones. But real mentoring, as Brad Hauck describes it on Leadership in the Line of Fire, is something different.

"A mentor doesn't just simply tell someone what to do. They help them understand how to think, assess, look at different risks and make their own decisions."

On the fireground, that looks like an experienced officer explaining why a decision was made — not just issuing the instruction. It's the difference between "hold the line here" and "we're holding the line here because the wind direction means the fire will track left, and if we let it through this point it doubles the area we're working."

The second version teaches. The first one just gets compliance.

Peter, a business consultant who mentored Brad during the early years of his digital marketing agency, operated the same way. Peter had never run an SEO business, but he'd worked with enough organisations to understand how decisions were made at scale. He didn't tell Brad what to do. He let Brad work through the problems himself, make his own mistakes, and come back when he got stuck. Those conversations helped Brad build a million dollar business — and the lessons have since been passed on to others Brad has worked with, including his daughter.

Informal mentoring is still mentoring

Mentoring rarely starts with a formal agreement. Most of the time, it begins when someone watches a more experienced person work and decides they want to understand how that person thinks.

People take on mentors without that person realising they're being watched and learned from. That has a practical implication for anyone in a leadership role. How you handle a difficult conversation, how you respond when a plan falls apart, how you treat people when the pressure is on — all of that is being absorbed by people around you. Whether you intend it or not, you're already influencing how the next generation of leaders in your team thinks and operates.

Responsibility before readiness

A common mistake leaders make is waiting until someone is "ready" before giving them real responsibility. The problem is that readiness comes from experience, and experience requires being given something real to do.

In the fire service, new crew leaders don't start on the fireground. They start by running training nights, with an observer present for safety. That person isn't there to take over. They're there to watch, make sure instructions are safe, and give a gentle nudge if someone gets genuinely stuck. Small, controlled opportunities to lead build both the confidence and the competence to handle bigger jobs later.

The same logic applies to a business team or a volunteer organisation. If you break a project into smaller components, you can give multiple people genuine leadership opportunities while maintaining overall oversight. Each person is responsible for their part. Each person learns by doing.

Share the mistakes, not just the wins

The most honest piece of advice in this episode: good mentors share their failures, not just their polished success stories.

Many leaders only share their successes in order to seem capable. The leaders who actually develop other leaders are the ones who say "here's a situation I got wrong, here's what I missed, here's what I'd do differently."

On the fireground, this happens in debriefings. Stories carry particular weight in this context. Brad describes being taught how to use steam to extinguish a burning log — a lesson passed on from his own first officer. The technique is counterintuitive: instead of drenching the log with water, you use short bursts to generate steam that penetrates the cracks. He's demonstrated it on logs taller than he is. The story sticks because it's specific, demonstrable, and grounded in experience. Abstract advice rarely has the same effect.

Don't mentor someone to be like you

The goal of mentoring isn't to produce someone who leads exactly the way you do. Different personalities, different communication styles, and different experiences produce different kinds of effective leaders. When you try to create a replica of yourself, you're placing your own approach above the person's natural strengths. Give people your perspective. Share your experience. Explain your reasoning. Then let them apply those inputs through their own lens.

Know when to step back

Real mentoring eventually requires stepping back. Not abandoning someone, but asking questions rather than providing answers, letting them make the call, and supporting the outcome.

The test of good mentoring isn't how the person leads when you're standing beside them. It's how they lead when you're not there. And when they eventually surpass you — which is the intended outcome if you're doing this well — the right response isn't to feel threatened. It's to recognise that what they've achieved is evidence that the mentoring worked. At that point, the job becomes finding the next person to develop.

Three practical steps

Give someone a real piece of responsibility this week — something that requires them to think, assess, and make decisions. Stay close enough to help but far enough back to let them own it.

When something goes wrong, tell the story of what happened. Explain what you missed, what you'd do differently, and why the mistake mattered. Don't skip this step to protect your reputation.

When you give feedback, ask what they were thinking before you explain what you'd have done instead. Understanding their reasoning is more useful than replacing it with yours.

A question worth sitting with

Who in your team is ready for more responsibility than you're currently giving them — and what's actually stopping you from handing it over?

This episode of Leadership in the Line of Fire covers all of this in detail. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.