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Key Takeaways
- Decades of experience are most valuable when the leaders who lived through it are willing to pass on what they learned — not just the outcome, but the full story and context behind it.
- Experienced leaders can offer valuable perspectives, help others recognize blind spots, challenge assumptions and provide guidance that frameworks and AI alone cannot.
- When mentoring, leaders should share both their wins and losses. And leaders who mentor others often find themselves learning and growing just as much as the people they’re helping.
Over the past few decades, leaders have lived through the Great Recession, Covid and now the rise of artificial intelligence. Each has fundamentally changed how companies operate and how leaders make decisions.
The experience of leaders who lived through those challenges — and how they pivoted in unprecedented times — contains invaluable knowledge. Too often, people think they can recapture history just by reading about it. Learning from history is useful, of course. But leadership experience isn’t something that can be replicated just by asking AI a question. Real people had to navigate real situations to keep their companies afloat, and that can’t be fully understood from the answer to a prompt.
Decades of experience are most valuable when the leaders who lived through it are willing to pass on what they learned. Not just the outcome, but the full story behind it. Here’s why.
The context gets lost
No two business decisions are exactly alike. Looking back at what someone did in a similar situation and copying it rarely works, because the decision itself isn’t the defining factor. What mattered was the thinking behind it: the pressures, the constraints, the information available at the time. None of that gets passed down unless the person who lived it chooses to share it.
That’s why sharing the context behind a tough call, and not just the decision itself, is so important. The best leaders explain what led them down a particular path, because that reasoning is important. Without it, people start making decisions by pattern-matching to a single past example, and miss the nuance.
Frameworks give direction; experience gives confidence
Frameworks offer direction, but direction isn’t the same as confidence. Confidence comes from people who have been there, done that and can give sound advice. Someone who has faced similar challenges can ask the right questions, challenge assumptions and offer a perspective that helps leaders see their decisions more clearly. That insight can give leaders the confidence to move forward.
A leader’s mettle is tested in situations they’ve never seen before and likely never will again. Leaders who share what they’ve learned give the next generation a real place to start instead of a blank page. That’s a completely different kind of value than theory can provide.
Passing on the learning
Almost every leader who’s achieved something meaningful can point to someone who helped them along the way — a mentor who believed in them, offered guidance or helped them navigate a difficult decision. All those experiences, and all the people who helped you get there, are a gift. And leaders who have benefited from that kind of support often feel a calling to pass it on to others.
It’s why some pursue business coaching as a second career when they are ready to move on from the CEO role. CEOs are builders. While they may be ready to leave the responsibilities of running a company behind, they still want to develop people, solve problems and make a meaningful impact. Looking back over long careers, many CEOs say their greatest successes involved helping others succeed.
There’s another benefit to mentoring that many experienced leaders don’t anticipate: They continue growing themselves. I’ve seen leaders leave the CEO role, begin coaching others and discover they’re developing in ways they never expected. They gain greater empathy for other people and a deeper understanding of the challenges different leaders face. After decades of making decisions and being responsible for outcomes, they find themselves learning just as much from the people they’re helping.
That’s what makes mentoring so rewarding. Mentors are not simply passing along everything they’ve learned over their careers. They’re continuing to grow as leaders and as people.
The danger of confirmation bias
Effective mentoring means helping people see past their blind spots. Confirmation bias might be the most common one of all. It’s easy to believe an idea and then go find justification that matches it. AI is particularly good at feeding that instinct back, since it tends to reflect whatever perspective it’s given rather than challenge it.
That’s what makes outside perspectives so valuable. Experienced leaders can offer fresh perspectives, challenge assumptions and push leaders to think beyond the answer they’ve already convinced themselves is right.
Stories behind setbacks
None of this works if the story that a mentor passes on only includes the good parts. Most of the real wisdom comes from mistakes. When someone is vulnerable enough to admit they messed up, the real learning happens. That’s the full story, not the polished version.
Experience that never gets passed on doesn’t do anyone much good. It stays with the person who earned it. The leaders we remember are the ones who made sure what they learned — wins and losses — outlasted their own careers.
Key Takeaways
- Decades of experience are most valuable when the leaders who lived through it are willing to pass on what they learned — not just the outcome, but the full story and context behind it.
- Experienced leaders can offer valuable perspectives, help others recognize blind spots, challenge assumptions and provide guidance that frameworks and AI alone cannot.
- When mentoring, leaders should share both their wins and losses. And leaders who mentor others often find themselves learning and growing just as much as the people they’re helping.
Over the past few decades, leaders have lived through the Great Recession, Covid and now the rise of artificial intelligence. Each has fundamentally changed how companies operate and how leaders make decisions.
The experience of leaders who lived through those challenges — and how they pivoted in unprecedented times — contains invaluable knowledge. Too often, people think they can recapture history just by reading about it. Learning from history is useful, of course. But leadership experience isn’t something that can be replicated just by asking AI a question. Real people had to navigate real situations to keep their companies afloat, and that can’t be fully understood from the answer to a prompt.
Decades of experience are most valuable when the leaders who lived through it are willing to pass on what they learned. Not just the outcome, but the full story behind it. Here’s why.