~by Haley Lynn Gray~
Building the next generation of leaders is one of the most important things I do. I mentor colleagues and the people who work for me, I do it at home with my own children, and I’ve done it for years through Girl Scouts.
Wherever I am, the same few things keep working.
Give support, but don’t do it for them
When I mentor someone, I make clear that I’m available to answer questions — and that I’m not going to do it for them.
If they flounder badly, I step in. Otherwise I let them work at the problem first. That gap, where someone is struggling but not sinking, is where the learning actually happens. Rescue too early and you’ve taught them that someone will always arrive.
It applies identically to employees, children and Scouts. The hardest part is tolerating the discomfort of watching, which is a skill in itself.
Teach them to fight for themselves
Advocating for yourself is a learned skill and most people never learn it. I’ve watched one of my daughters become genuinely formidable at it, and it started with small things: making her own case, asking for the thing she wanted, staying in the conversation after the first no.
If you always speak for someone, they never develop the muscle. Prepare them, go with them if they want you there, and let them do the talking.
Let them do real things, with real consequences
Not simulated responsibility — actual. A budget that can be overspent. An event that can go wrong. A project where the outcome depends on them.
Scouting does this well: girls run things, and sometimes those things fail, and that’s how the learning lands. Businesses often do it badly, giving young employees tasks rather than ownership and then wondering why nobody develops judgement.
And watch the messages about gender
I had dinner with my eldest daughter while she was working on her Gold Award. We talked about her project, what she’d learned, growing up, the skills she was building. A genuinely mature, enjoyable conversation.
In the next booth was another family, and we could hear snippets. The contrast stayed with me — a conversation about what someone was building, alongside one that was mostly about what was owed, and in which a mother’s full-time job was described as though it were an optional extra.
Nobody sets out to teach that. It arrives in fragments: who is assumed to handle the house, whose work is “only” a job, which child is praised for being helpful and which for being clever, who gets asked what they think.
What I want, for girls and boys both, is that they reach their full potential — and that we stop routing them through gender stereotypes on the way.
Boys need to know that running a household is a shared job, not assistance. Girls need to know their ambitions don’t require anyone’s permission. The habits girls are praised for — being agreeable, being helpful, not making a fuss — are the ones they have to unlearn later, usually in their thirties, usually at cost.
Practical things that help
Ask them what they think, and wait. Being asked for an opinion, repeatedly, from a young age, is how people learn theirs is worth having.
Praise the effort and the judgement, not the tidiness or the compliance.
Let them see you do things badly and continue anyway. Competence looks innate from the outside; children need to watch the messy middle.
Give them somewhere to lead now — a troop, a team, a project — rather than waiting for adulthood.
And notice the language. “Only” working full time. “Helping” with the children. The words carry the lesson far more reliably than anything you say deliberately.
