Every organization I have worked with —city government, non-profits, churches, and fast-growing companies — eventually arrives at the same question: are we building leaders, or are we just filling positions?
After more than thirty years serving in the highest offices of Government, a Corporation C-suite, and non-profits, I have come to believe that leadership is not a title someone hands you. It is a decision you make, usually long before anyone notices. And the leaders who last tend to do four things consistently: they lead, they mentor, they encourage, and they sacrifice.
Choosing to Lead
Think back to the first real leader in your life. For most people, it is not a CEO or a general. It is a teacher who refused to let you coast. A coach. A parent, aunt or grandfather who set a standard and lived by it.
That is worth sitting with, because it tells you something important: the people who shaped you most were not leading from an organization chart. They were leading from character. They chose to step forward when it would have been easier to stay quiet.
Leadership begins with that choice. Before the promotion, before the budget authority, before anyone is watching — you decide what kind of person you are going to be under pressure. Everything else is built on that foundation.
To lead effectively, you must make the decision to prepare yourself, step forward when no one is willing, work harder, and make a conscious decision to lead when the time comes!
Mentoring: Preparing the Organization for What Comes Next
Here is a hard question for anyone in a leadership seat: how can you claim to lead an organization if you have not prepared it for the future?
Good leaders live by what I call the “hit by the bus” rule. If you were gone tomorrow — not fired, not retired, just gone — would your team know what to do? Would decisions still get made? Would the standards you set survive your absence?
If the answer is no, you have not built an organization. You have built a dependency.
Mentoring is how you fix that. It means teaching the reasoning behind your decisions, not just issuing the decisions. It means letting capable people take real responsibility before you think they are fully ready, because that is the only way they ever get experience.
Mentoring is uncomfortable precisely because it makes you replaceable and, that is the point.
Encouragement Is Not Optional
We all have bad days. Bad weeks. Some of us have had bad months, and a few have had bad years.
Your team is no different. The person who seems disengaged this week may be carrying something you know nothing about. The employee whose performance slipped may be one honest conversation away from turning it around.
Leaders have two jobs in those moments: offer genuine encouragement and offer a vision for what is ahead. Encouragement without vision is just sympathy. Vision without encouragement is just pressure. Together, they give people a reason to keep going.
This is not soft leadership. It is one of the most practical tools you have. People rarely leave organizations because the work was hard. They leave because no one seemed to notice how hard they were working.
Sacrifice: The Order of Priorities
The clearest test of leadership is the order in which you rank people when resources are tight.
In the organizations I admire most, the order looks like this:
- The people we serve come first. Customers, clients, citizens, guests — whoever the mission exists for.
- Our employees are a close second. They are the ones who deliver the mission every day.
- We, as leaders, come last.
That order is easy to put in a values statement and very difficult to live out at 4:45 on a Friday afternoon when something has gone wrong. But it is the difference between authority and influence. Authority comes with the job. Influence is earned when your team watches you absorb the cost instead of passing it down.
A founder I once worked alongside put it in a way I have never forgotten: “To keep what you have, you must be willing to give it away.” Position, credit, opportunity, information — the leaders who hold these things loosely end up with far more of them than the leaders who guard them.
What History Keeps Telling Us
We do not have to theorize about this. We have examples.
George Washington’s most consequential decision was arguably not a battlefield victory — it was walking away from power, the Presidency, when he could have been King. He chose to lead, he mentored many future great leaders, he encouraged a people to become a great nation, and he was willing to sacrifice life and fortune.
Martin Luther King Jr. led a movement with no formal authority at all, relying entirely on moral clarity and a vision compelling enough that others carried it forward after he was gone. Dr. King made decision to lead even thought it would bring great turmoil, he mentored many who would become civil right giants and future national leaders, he encouraged a nation to live up to its founding documents, and he sacrificed his life for the cause of all Americans.
Both men understood something the rest of us must relearn constantly: leadership is measured by what continues after your time in leadership concludes.
You almost certainly have your own examples — someone in your life who led without a title and changed your direction. Name them. Then ask whether anyone would put you on their list.
Final Thought
Our future is only as bright as those we have prepared for leadership.
Where will our next generation be if YOU fail—To Lead, To Mentor, to Encourage and to Sacrifice?
Every organization is, at any given moment, either developing its next generation of leaders or quietly betting that the current ones will never leave.
Only one of those is a strategy.
