What volunteering as a mentor taught me about leadership style

I spent three years volunteering as a mentor with a community programme in Sydney's Inner West, meeting women from Bankstown to Bondi who were rebuilding careers after redundancy, migration or burnout. The arrangement was simple: two hours every fortnight, a quiet café, and a conversation that belonged entirely to them. I expected to give advice. Instead, I left every session recalibrating how I lead, speak and show up in every other room I stand in.

The experience taught me that leadership style is not a fixed costume you put on each morning. It is a practice shaped by the people you serve, the questions you are willing to sit with, and the habits you are prepared to leave behind. Whether I am hosting a corporate breakfast in Melbourne, facilitating a workshop in Brisbane, or writing a column for a national audience, the lessons from those mentoring sessions travel with me. They are not soft skills for the side lines; they are the operating system of how I now work.

From commanding to collaborating

The first lesson arrived within weeks. I had assumed that leadership meant having the answers. Mentoring forced me to sit with uncertainty. When a mentee from Parramatta asked how to negotiate a pay rise in a male-dominated engineering firm, I caught myself reaching for the script. The mentor programme taught me that her context, her nerves, her relationship with her boss, mattered more than my polished advice. Leadership stopped being about delivering a verdict and started being about co-creating a path.

This shift mirrors what I observe across Australian workplaces. The old command-and-control hierarchies of the mining sector and large financial institutions are giving way to flatter, more collaborative models, especially in the creative industries of Surry Hills and Fitzroy. Recent amendments to the Fair Work Act around consultation and positive duty have reinforced the legal expectation that leaders listen before they decide. Volunteering showed me that listening is not a preliminary step to action; it is the action.

I also learned that collaboration does not mean consensus. A mentee in Adelaide once asked whether she should leave her stable government role to start a skincare brand. I could have agreed to avoid conflict, or disagreed to prove a point. Instead, we mapped the risks, the runway, the worst-case scenario, and the support she actually had. The decision was hers. My job was to widen the lens, not to narrow it. That distinction reshaped how I run production meetings now: I am there to expand possibilities, not to police them.

Listening as a leadership discipline

We talk about listening as if it were a passive virtue, something you do while waiting for your turn to speak. Mentoring disabused me of that. A young teacher from Wollongong taught me that listening is an active, almost athletic discipline. She would describe a classroom scenario, pause, and I would feel the temptation to jump in with a solution. The mentor programme trained me to count silently to five, to ask one more question, to wait until she had finished processing her own thought. Often, the answer she needed lived in the silence after my question, not in my response.

This discipline changed how I host panel discussions and corporate events. Instead of racing to my next point, I now treat audience questions as invitations to slow down. The technique works whether I am speaking to fifty people in a Perth convention centre or ten thousand online. Listening, I discovered, is the difference between being heard and being influential.

There is a practical rhythm to it. I keep a notebook for every mentoring session and every speaking engagement. I write down what was said, but more importantly, what was not said: the hesitation before a sentence, the topic avoided, the question deflected. These gaps tell me where the real work is. It is a habit I now recommend to emerging leaders across every industry I serve, from healthcare to hospitality to the resources sector.

Adapting style to the person in front of you

Early in my mentoring work, I assumed a good leader had one strong style and applied it consistently. The mentees quickly disabused me. A FIFO worker from Karratha processing grief after a workplace incident needed steadiness and brevity. A founder in Hobart scaling a fintech needed permission to be ambitious. A returning mum in Brisbane needed reassurance that ambition and care could coexist. One style cannot serve all three.

This is where the mentor experience reshaped my public speaking. I used to prepare a single keynote and deliver it everywhere. Now I read the room before I take the stage. The cultural references that land in Parramatta do not always land in Penrith. The pace that suits a boardroom in the CBD overwhelms a community hall in the outer suburbs. Adaptive leadership is not about abandoning your values; it is about expressing them in the register the listener can receive.

The shift also showed up in how I manage my own team and collaborations. I stopped treating introverts and extroverts as problems to solve and started treating them as different instruments in an orchestra. Some need a one-to-one walk. Others need a group brainstorm. The leader's job is to conduct, not to conduct everyone the same way.

The courage to be honest about your limits

Mentoring forced me to confess what I did not know. A mentee running a small accounting practice asked about cyber-security obligations under Australian privacy law. I had to admit I was not the right person to advise her, and together we identified a specialist. That moment taught me that admitting a gap is not a failure of leadership; it is the foundation of credibility.

I brought this lesson into my broadcast work and my writing. In my column and on officialandreamclean.com, I am now more explicit about the edges of my expertise. Audiences respect honesty more than they respect false omniscience. This was reinforced by feedback from women across Australia who told me they were tired of polished perfection. They wanted leaders who admitted mistakes, named their doubts, and showed the work.

The mentor experience also taught me that vulnerability must be bounded. Sharing your own redundancy or breakdown can build connection. Sharing it to seek reassurance in every meeting drains the room. I learned to dose vulnerability like medicine: enough to humanise, not so much that the conversation centres on the leader. The skill is knowing which stories serve the listener and which serve the leader's ego.

Designing for sustainability rather than spectacle

The final lesson was the hardest. Mentoring showed me that heroic, last-minute interventions are a poor substitute for steady, boring systems. Several of my mentees had been "rescued" by previous managers and were now exhausted. The real work was helping them design routines: weekly planning, monthly check-ins, quarterly reviews of their own goals. Leadership, I learned, is less about the grand gesture and more about the unglamorous rhythm.

This applies to my speaking business too. Spectacle sells tickets, but sustainability builds reputation. I now build recovery time into every tour, schedule reflection after every major event, and protect mornings for the work that does not have a deadline. The Australian cultural expectation to "just get on with it" can be a virtue, but it can also burn out the very people we are trying to develop.

I have written elsewhere about the cost of trying to be everything to everyone, including in an article on pleasing audiences that explores similar territory from the stage. The message is the same whether you are mentoring, managing or speaking: design for the long game, not the standing ovation.

Daily practices that keep mentor lessons alive in leadership

• Schedule two listening-only conversations a week, with no agenda to solve.
• Keep a "gaps" notebook and review it monthly for patterns.
• Ask one more question before offering an opinion, even when you are certain.
• Name your limits out loud and recommend someone better suited.
• Adapt your register to the room without diluting your core message.
• Build recovery into every project as a non-negotiable line item.
• Measure success by the capability of the team after you exit, not the applause during.