The leaders I've walked with for years almost always come around to the same question eventually, even if they don't know they're asking it.
Who am I supposed to be father to now?
It rarely sounds like that. It sounds like I don't know what to do with this guy on my team who keeps coming back to me. Or my son-in-law is asking me things he should be asking his own dad. Or there's a young man at church who keeps finding reasons to talk to me after the service. Or one of my employees lost his father last year and I can tell something has shifted in our relationship and I don't know what to do about it.
A leader who's lived a few decades, raised some kids, taken some hits, and stayed faithful in the small things eventually gathers around himself a group of younger people who are waiting on him. Not for what he can do for them. For who he is to them.
This is the part of leadership that nobody trains you for, and the part the next generation is starving for.
I've spent the last year writing a book called Walking Alongside about this exact thing. Three decades of mentoring, coaching, and fathering, and what I've learned about how it actually works. Here's the line that keeps coming back to me as I write it:
The person God is leading you to father is not waiting for your credentials or your approval. They're waiting for your initiative and your loyalty.
That's a hard line for a lot of men in their fifties and sixties, because we're inclined to wait. We don't feel qualified. We don't want to overstep. We assume the people we'd most want to invest in are getting their fathering from someone better suited for it.
They're not.
In my Convene CEO and Owner team, I've been watching what happens when a man in his fifties or sixties takes seriously his role as a father figure to the men in his orbit — his employees, his sons-in-law, his neighbors, the leaders he's mentoring. The room he creates around himself changes shape. The next generation around him stops drifting and starts ordering itself toward him. Not because he asked for it, but because he showed up.
The seat you'll regret is the empty one.
If you're in your fifties or sixties or seventies and you've been wondering whether the world has anything left for you to give — there's a young man near you right now who's waiting for you to notice him.
He doesn't need your résumé. He needs your initiative.