Leadership has always involved helping people move forward. But in periods of uncertainty, leaders are increasingly required to do something less visible: help people deal with the anxiety that comes with change.

Recent thinking from INSEAD suggests that this is also changing the role of mentoring. Mentors are no longer simply experienced professionals who provide advice, open doors or explain how to navigate an organisation. Increasingly, they provide a space in which uncertainty can be examined before decisions are made.

From advice to containment

Traditional mentoring is often built around a simple assumption: the mentor knows something the mentee does not.

Experience is transferred. Problems are discussed. Advice is given.

But many of the challenges facing younger leaders today do not have obvious answers. Artificial intelligence is transforming professions. Career paths are becoming less predictable. Organisations restructure continuously. Geopolitical and economic uncertainty can change assumptions almost overnight.

In such an environment, giving somebody an answer may be less valuable than helping that person think.

INSEAD describes an important psychological dimension to this relationship: containment. Rather than immediately trying to remove anxiety, a mentor can help a mentee hold, examine and understand it.

That is a very different form of leadership.

Leaders do not have to eliminate uncertainty

There is a temptation to associate leadership with certainty.

A leader is expected to know where the organisation is going, what should happen next and how problems will be solved.

But pretending to possess certainty when none exists can produce poor decisions.

Future leaders may therefore need another capability: the ability to remain thoughtful while uncertainty remains unresolved.

A good mentor can help develop precisely that capacity.

Instead of saying “Here is what you should do,” the mentor might ask:

What is actually making this situation difficult? What assumptions are you making? What are you afraid might happen? Which parts of the problem can you influence, and which parts must you simply accept?

The objective is not indecision. It is to prevent anxiety from becoming the decision-maker.

Mentoring is leadership education

This matters particularly to universities and business schools.

Leadership education understandably concentrates on knowledge: strategy, finance, technology, negotiation, organisational behaviour and decision-making.

All are necessary.

But future leaders will also encounter situations for which no case study provides an answer.

Their ability to lead will then depend partly on whether they have learned how to think when the answer is unclear.

Mentoring can become one of the environments in which that capability is developed.

Not because the mentor knows the future.

But because a good mentor can help someone face the fact that nobody does.

The Future Leadership Question

Perhaps we should therefore ask a different question when evaluating leadership programmes.

Not only:

What have our future leaders learned?

But also:

Who teaches them how to think when they do not know what to do?

That may be one of the most valuable roles a mentor can play.

Source: Roger Lehman, Brett MacFarlane and Geert Vercaeren, INSEAD, Containing Anxiety: The New Role of Mentoring, 1 October 2026.