There's a line from Ted Lasso: "A good mentor hopes you'll move on. A great mentor knows you will."
The first time I heard it, I sat with it for a while. Because it's not a comfortable idea. If you're honest with yourself... deeply honest... most mentoring relationships have a quiet pull underneath them. The mentor wants to be useful. Wants to be needed. Wants to feel like their experience still matters.
There's nothing wrong with it. It's human. Zach Mercurio, who studies what he calls the mattering instinct, argues our deepest drive isn't food or shelter. It's finding someone to matter to. We want to feel irreplaceable.
Mentoring feeds that instinct perfectly. You have someone younger, less experienced, looking to you for direction. Of course it feels good. The danger arrives when you start... even without realising it... protecting your position at the centre of their world.
The Ego Trap
I mentored seven engineers into leadership roles during my time at Curve. Each one was different. Some were obvious candidates... natural communicators who needed confidence more than knowledge. Others surprised me. Quiet, technical people who turned out to have strong instincts for people when given space to use them.
And every single time, there came a moment where I had a choice.
The first option was to lean in. Stay central. Keep my hand on the steering wheel. Keep the relationship tied to my methods, my perspective, my approval.
The second was to step back.
The ego trap in mentoring is subtle. It doesn't look like sabotage. It looks like helpfulness. It's offering advice when none was asked for. It's steering conversations back to your way of doing things. It's being a little too available, so the other person never fully develops their own judgment.
I caught myself doing this. More than once. And if you've mentored anyone seriously, I suspect you have too.
The Moment You Know
When Marcus... one of my engineers at Curve... started presenting to senior stakeholders without asking me to review his slides first, I noticed something in myself. A flicker of something. Not quite hurt. Not quite pride. Something in between the two.
He didn't need to run things past me anymore. He'd built his own judgment. His own style. His read on the room was, if anything, sharper than mine. He was closer to the work.
That's the moment.
A good mentor, at this point, thinks: "I hope he stays in touch. I hope he comes back when things get hard."
A great mentor thinks: "He's ready. My job here is done."
The difference between those two reactions is everything.
Why Letting Go Is Hard
Research on this is blunt. A paper in a PMC journal on mentor-mentee relationships puts it plainly: "Sometimes the best thing you get out of a mentor is that they're not your mentor anymore."
Ending a mentoring relationship well requires the mentor to set aside ego and make the whole thing about the mentee's growth... not the mentor's sense of purpose.
Forbes contributors writing on what makes a great mentor name the same barrier: ego. Good mentors help people grow. Great mentors help people grow beyond them.
The uncomfortable part? Most people in mentoring roles don't realise they're holding on. They'd tell you, with full sincerity: "I want this person to thrive independently." And they mean it. They're not lying.
But meaning it and doing it are not the same thing.
Being on the Other End
I've been on the receiving side of this too. I had a manager early in my career... a rare one... who made a deliberate habit of sending me into rooms without him. Senior stakeholder meeting? He'd say "You've got this. Tell me how it goes." I thought he was too busy to come. Years later I realised: he was never too busy. He was building me.
When I eventually moved on to a bigger role, he didn't flinch. He wrote me a reference, introduced me to three people in his network, and told me: "Go. This is what I was preparing you for."
That's what it looks like when someone gets it right.
What Great Mentors Do Differently
I've thought a lot about what the best mentors in my life did differently. A few things stand out.
They asked questions more than they gave answers. The moment I expected a solution, they'd flip it back to me: "What do you think you should do?" Not dismissively. In a way that forced me to trust my own judgment. Over time, I stopped defaulting to them. That was the entire point.
They celebrated wins without inserting themselves. A mediocre mentor, when their mentee succeeds, says "I told you the approach would work." A great mentor says "You did it." Full stop. No co-authorship in the victory.
They were honest when the relationship had run its course. One of the most useful things a mentor ever said to me: "I've given you what I have. You need to find someone who's done what you're trying to do next. I haven't." It took real self-awareness. Real confidence, too.
They made themselves redundant on purpose. They weren't waiting for me to stop needing them. They were actively engineering that outcome from the beginning.
What to Look For If You're Being Mentored
Not every mentoring relationship is what it appears to be. Here are signs your mentor genuinely wants your growth:
They push you toward challenges where they're not present. They introduce you to people beyond their own network. They tell you hard truths about yourself, not flattering ones. They say "you don't need my opinion on this anymore" and mean it warmly.
Signs they need you to need them: they're always available, almost eerily so. They subtly discourage you from taking risks they didn't sign off on. Your successes seem to pass through them before reaching the world.
The best mentors are building you toward independence from the first conversation. If you've had one of those people in your life, you'll know the specific feeling. At some point you stopped thinking "I should ask them about this" and started thinking "I know what to do here." And somewhere, without you knowing, they were quietly delighted.
If You're the Mentor
The question I ask myself now, when working with someone earlier in their career: am I doing this for them, or for me?
Most of the time it's both. And there's nothing wrong with it. The joy of watching someone grow is real. Don't suppress it.
Here's a test: if your mentee got a better opportunity tomorrow... one where your involvement wasn't part of the picture... would you feel pleased, or would you feel something else?
Be honest with yourself about the answer.
The moment your involvement becomes about keeping yourself in the picture... even slightly... you've stopped being their mentor. You've started being their ceiling.
The Ted Lasso line is worth sitting with longer: a great mentor doesn't hope you'll move on. They know you will. Because they've been building toward it from the beginning.
Make yourself redundant. Do it on purpose. Take quiet pride in it when it happens.