There's a moment every mentor eventually faces, and most avoid it: the moment a person you've been guiding no longer needs you the way they used to. Their questions get sharper than yours. Their instincts start outpacing your advice. You can feel the balance of the relationship shift.
Most people experience that moment as a small threat. I've come to believe it's the entire point.
The Ego Trap Every Mentor Falls Into
It's easy to build a mentoring style around being needed. Being the person with the answer feels good. It builds a following, a reputation, a sense of importance. But a mentor who needs to be needed will — consciously or not — keep people slightly dependent, because independence in the people you mentor can feel like it threatens your relevance.
I've mentored thousands of young Indonesian entrepreneurs through The Entrepreneurs Society, and the ones I'm proudest of aren't the ones who still ask me for permission. They're the ones who stopped needing to.
What Humility Actually Looks Like in Practice
Humility in leadership isn't self-deprecation, and it isn't false modesty. It's an accurate assessment of your role: you are a temporary scaffold, not a permanent structure. The building is supposed to stand on its own eventually.
Practically, that means a few uncomfortable habits: telling someone when their idea is now better than yours. Introducing your mentees to other people in your network instead of keeping them close. Answering "what should I do?" with "what do you think you should do?" more often than feels efficient. Being genuinely happy — not performatively happy — when someone you mentored outgrows the room you built for them.
The goal of mentorship was never to create followers. It was to create people who no longer need a mentor.
Why TES Is Built to Graduate People, Not Collect Them
This philosophy is why The Entrepreneurs Society is structured the way it is. TES isn't designed to be a permanent dependency for its 12,000+ members — it's designed as a launchpad. Members move through mentorship, into ELITES, into running their own ventures, and eventually into mentoring the next cohort themselves. The community's health isn't measured by how long people stay attached to any one person's guidance. It's measured by how many go on to build something that no longer needs that guidance at all.
The same is true of the "naik kelas" work we do with UMKM founders across Indonesia. The measure of success was never "how many businesses still call us for advice." It's how many businesses reached the point where they didn't have to.
The Uncomfortable Math of Real Impact
If you mentor well, your relevance to any single person should decrease over time — even as your relevance to the ecosystem as a whole grows, because more people are out there building, teaching, and lifting others the way you once lifted them. That's not a loss of influence. It's influence compounding through other people instead of concentrating in you.
The founders and leaders I respect most in Indonesia's entrepreneurship scene share this trait: they talk more about the people they helped succeed than about their own accomplishments. That's not humility as a personality trait. It's humility as a leadership strategy — because a leader whose people keep outgrowing them is a leader building something that will outlast them.
Three Questions I Ask Myself as a Mentor
- Am I building this person's judgment, or their dependence on mine? If every decision still routes through me, I haven't finished the job.
- Would I be genuinely glad if they no longer needed my advice? If the honest answer is "not really," that's worth sitting with.
- Who am I actively preparing to replace me in this relationship? Real mentorship builds its own succession plan.
None of this makes mentorship easier. It makes it more honest. And the entrepreneurs who've gone furthest — inside TES and outside it — are almost always the ones who had a mentor willing to make themselves unnecessary.
Want to Build the Kind of Leadership That Compounds?
Klemens mentors founders directly through TES's ELITES community, and speaks on humble, sustainable leadership for organizations and audiences across Indonesia.
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What Mentoring Thousands Taught Me About Young Indonesian Entrepreneurs ↗
