Leadership Mentoring Exercises Every Mentor Should Try

Leadership mentoring often starts with a mistaken idea. Many people believe leadership belongs to a title: a manager leads, a director leads. Everyone else has to wait for their turn for a promotion.

This assumption is something we often see unravel in almost every mentoring relationship we support because leadership is really a set of behaviours, not a position on an org chart. Once a mentor recognises this shift, the conversation with their mentee changes entirely, and so does the mentor's own sense of what they bring to the table.

This matters more than it might first appear. If leadership is behavioural, then it's available to everyone, at every level, in every conversation. A junior team member who speaks up in a meeting is practising leadership. A quiet colleague who checks in on someone having a hard week is practising leadership too.

Mentoring in leadership growth, then, isn't about waiting until someone earns a promotion. It's about noticing these small moments and helping a mentee build on them, one at a time.

TL;DR

Leadership mentoring challenges the common assumption that leadership requires a title or a promotion. It reframes leadership as a set of behaviours anyone can practise at any level, and positions mentors as ideal guides for this shift because they sit outside formal hierarchy. They're not managing performance reviews or deciding promotions.

Brancher's mentoring programs put this belief into practice across finance, healthcare and the not-for-profit sector, where the mentors who get the most traction aren't the ones with the longest job titles, but the ones who ask good questions and create space for reflection.

The guide outlines three practical exercises mentors can use to help a mentee explore their leadership style: identifying leadership traits they admire in others, uncovering the natural leadership strengths they already carry, and trying one small "leadership moment" each week. None of this works as a one-off exercise. Leadership mentoring rewards consistency over intensity, built on a repeating cycle of notice, reflect, try, adjust.

Table of Contents

• Exploring Your Leadership Style: A Mentor's Guide to Leadership Mentoring
• Why Mentors Are Well Placed to Explore This
• 1. Identify the Leadership Traits You Admire
• 2. Explore Your Natural Leadership Strengths
• 3. Try One Small "Leadership Moment" Each Week
• What This Means for You as a Mentor
• Making Leadership Mentoring Part of an Ongoing Practice

Why Mentors Are Well Placed to Explore This

Mentors occupy a unique position. You're not managing performance reviews. You're not deciding promotions. You're simply walking alongside someone as they figure out who they are becoming. This distance from formal authority is actually an advantage, because it lets mentoring in leadership development happen without the pressure of hierarchy getting in the way.

Through Brancher's mentoring program, we've watched this play out across industries, from finance to healthcare to the not-for-profit sector. The mentors who get the most traction are rarely the ones with the longest job titles. They're the ones who ask good questions and create space for reflection.

This isn't a niche idea. The Australian HR Institute runs one of the country's largest professional mentoring programs, matching more than 1,000 HR professionals each year, a sign of how embedded structured mentoring has become within Australia's professional bodies.

If you're mentoring someone through their leadership identity, you're likely already doing more than you realise. Here are three ways to help a mentee (or yourself) explore leadership style, without needing a formal role to justify it.

1. Identify the Leadership Traits You Admire

Start somewhere familiar. Ask your mentee to think of someone they admire. It could be a former boss, a teacher, a parent, or even a public figure they've never met. Then ask the harder question: what exactly do they do that stands out?

This exercise works because admiration is rarely vague once you dig into it.

Someone might say they admire a leader's calmness under pressure, or the way they remember small details about people's lives, or their habit of giving credit publicly and feedback privately. These specifics are gold, because they reveal what your mentee values, and values tend to point towards the leadership style they're likely to grow into.

Brancher's mentoring platform includes structured conversation guides that help pairs work through exercises like this one, so the reflection doesn't stay abstract. A mentee who names three admired traits has effectively started drafting their own leadership blueprint, often without realising it.

2. Explore Your Natural Leadership Strengths

The second step flips the lens inward. Rather than looking outward at admired figures, ask your mentee to consider what leadership qualities they may already carry. This is where the mentor's outside perspective becomes genuinely useful.

As a mentor, you're likely to notice strengths a mentee overlooks in themselves. Perhaps they're the person colleagues go to when a project stalls. Perhaps they ask thoughtful questions that unstick a stuck conversation.

Naming these patterns back to your mentee, gently and specifically, can be one of the more powerful moments in a mentoring relationship, because self-perception often lags well behind reality.

This is also where mentoring in leadership growth tends to diverge from generic leadership training. A workshop can teach a framework but a mentor can hold up a mirror.

Brancher's approach to matching mentors and mentees is built around this idea, pairing people whose experience and communication style are likely to draw out these observations naturally, rather than forcing a generic checklist onto every relationship.

One pattern we've seen repeatedly across Brancher's programs, including a recent rollout across eleven regional organisations in Queensland's Natural Resource Management sector, is how often a mentor spots a strength weeks before the mentee names it themselves.

In that program, several mentees initially described themselves as "not leadership material," yet their mentors flagged qualities like calm decision-making under pressure or a talent for bringing quieter voices into a discussion almost immediately.

By the time these mentees reached their own reflection exercises, they were often surprised at how visible these traits already were to the people around them.

Research from Harvard Business Review Analytics Services found that 86% of respondents agree personalised leadership development, such as coaching and mentoring, is required in today's work environment, with coaching rated as extremely or very effective by 60% of respondents, compared with just 35% for traditional skills training alone.

Both can play a role. But leadership and mentoring, when combined thoughtfully, may offer something a classroom setting struggles to replicate: a consistent, trusted space to test ideas about who you're becoming.

3. Try One Small "Leadership Moment" Each Week

Reflection matters, but leadership is ultimately practised, not just discussed.

The third step is deceptively simple: encourage your mentee to try one small leadership moment each week. It doesn't need to be dramatic. It could be:

• Initiating a conversation with someone they don't usually speak to
• Speaking up in a meeting where they'd normally stay quiet
• Supporting a colleague who seems to be struggling
• Offering an idea, even a half-formed one, rather than waiting for certainty

The value here lies in the accumulation. One small moment rarely feels significant on its own. But over weeks and months, these moments tend to compound, and a mentee may start to notice a shift in how they see themselves, and how others respond to them in turn.

This is where mentoring in leadership development shows its long game. It's rarely a single breakthrough conversation that changes someone's trajectory. It's the steady rhythm of trying something small, reflecting on it with a mentor, and adjusting slightly before the next attempt.

Brancher's mentoring software supports this rhythm by prompting check-ins between sessions, so these weekly moments don't get lost between one meeting and the next.

What This Means for You as a Mentor

If you're mentoring someone through their leadership identity, it's worth remembering that you're modelling the very thing you're trying to teach. Every time you ask a thoughtful question instead of offering a quick answer, you're demonstrating leadership behaviour. Every time you notice a mentee's strength before they do, you're practising the kind of attentiveness that good leaders tend to carry.

This doesn't mean the process is always tidy. Some mentees will find this reflective work uncomfortable at first, particularly if they've spent years associating leadership with titles they haven't yet reached. Naming this discomfort, rather than rushing past it, often helps.

A mentor who can sit with a mentee's uncertainty, without needing to resolve it immediately, is likely offering more value than one who jumps straight to advice.

Making Leadership Mentoring Part of an Ongoing Practice

None of this works as a one-off exercise. Leadership mentoring tends to reward consistency more than intensity. A single deep conversation about admired traits may spark insight, but it's the repeated practice, revisited over months, that's more likely to shift how someone shows up at work.

This is partly why Brancher builds mentoring programs around structured, ongoing relationships rather than isolated sessions. A mentor and mentee working through these three exercises together, over time, are creating a kind of feedback loop: notice, reflect, try, adjust. Repeat. It's unglamorous work, but it's the kind that tends to hold up over the long term.

If you're new to mentoring, or new to thinking about leadership as behaviour rather than title, it may help to start smaller than feels comfortable. Pick one of the three exercises above and try it in your next conversation. You don't need a grand plan. You simply need a willingness to notice what's already there, and the patience to let it develop.

Leadership mentoring, done well, rarely announces itself with fanfare. It shows up quietly, in the small moments a mentor and mentee choose to explore together, week after week.

How are you helping your mentees become better leaders in your organisation today?

Frequently Asked Questions

What is leadership mentoring?

Leadership mentoring is a one-to-one relationship in which a mentor helps a mentee develop leadership behaviours (such as communication, self-awareness, and initiative) rather than waiting for a formal title or promotion. It treats leadership as a practised skill available at any level, not a position reserved for management.

How is leadership mentoring different from leadership training?

Leadership training typically delivers frameworks and theory in a workshop or course setting, while leadership mentoring focuses on personal reflection and behaviour change through ongoing one-to-one conversations. Training teaches concepts; mentoring helps someone apply and adjust those concepts to their own situation over time.

What are examples of leadership mentoring exercises?

Common leadership mentoring exercises include identifying traits a mentee admires in others, helping a mentee recognise leadership strengths they already have, and setting one small "leadership moment" to practise each week, such as speaking up in a meeting or supporting a struggling colleague.

Why are mentors well-suited to develop someone's leadership skills?

Mentors sit outside formal hierarchy, so they aren't managing performance reviews or promotion decisions. This distance removes the pressure that comes with authority, allowing mentors to ask open questions and create space for honest reflection that a manager may struggle to offer.

How often should leadership mentoring conversations happen?

Leadership mentoring works best as a consistent, ongoing practice rather than a one-off session. Regular check-ins (built around a cycle of noticing, reflecting, trying, and adjusting) help small leadership moments compound into a lasting shift in how a mentee sees and leads themselves.

Author Bio

Holly Brailsford is the co-founder and CEO of Brancher, Australia's mentoring platform. Learn more about Brancher or explore our mentoring software to see how structured mentoring might support leadership growth in your organisation.