Why Everyone Can and Should Be a Leader

“How do I get a leadership position?”

I hear this question too often. It implies that leadership is a formal position. In fact, when I dig deeper I usually find that people equate leadership with management. They believe they have to be a manager to be a leader.

This “Leader = Manager” mental model is common among tech professionals, and it’s driving one of the more challenging problems I’ve seen in tech organizations, lack of ownership. Simply put, if the people in your organization believe they aren’t responsible for leading, they are dropping the ball on ownership. Fixing that problem requires a mental shift in your people.

Everyone can and should be a leader.

That’s the mental model I aim for when I nudge the culture of a tech organization toward more ownership. Leadership is not management, it is a role that is bestowed on someone by a group of people. You can’t be appointed a leader by someone in power. You can be put “in charge,” but that doesn’t mean you are leading. Only the people you work with can decide if you are leading or not. So if you want to be a leader, your primary focus should be on the group of people you want to lead.

You can be a leader at any stage of your career.

In the right context, even the most junior member of the team can and should be a leader. For example, imagine that a junior member of your team suggests that your onboarding process for college graduates would be better if new hires were assigned a guide from the previous year cohort. Creating a program like that doesn’t require any special knowledge, it just requires leadership. And the ideal candidate is someone who has recent experience with the onboarding process. It’s the perfect context for a junior team member to lead. My advice to anyone who sees a potential for improvement like that is to consider the question “is this a context where I can lead?”

Now, you may be wondering if that junior team member needs formal power to lead. Don’t they need to be a manager or executive? The answer is no, they don’t. All they need to do is take action, demonstrate leadership attributes, and apply a basic set of skills.

Taking action means identifying something that can be improved, envisioning a solution, and sharing it with others. Taking action means taking ownership, and it’s the first step toward catalyzing change. But getting others on board requires some key attributes, like courage, confidence, and conviction.

If you don’t feel like you have those attributes, fake it. People actually build their self-image based on their behaviors, rather than the other way around. So demonstrate courage, confidence, and conviction, even if you don’t think that’s you. Hint: eventually you will think it’s you.

Finally, while you are leading, you just need to practice a basic set of skills: raise your hand and say “I’ll do it,” be bold and speak up even when it is unpopular to do so, inspire and motivate others with your actions and your words, and ask great questions. Start practicing those four skills. Get feedback from the people around you, and adjust course. The more you do that, the more you will grow as a leader.

Of course there is a ton of nuance to being a great leader, and you can learn that nuance over time. The important thing is to start practicing now. Find the right context and start today. Leadership is a learned skill, and you learn it by iterating. Try it, get feedback, adjust. Do that over and over again in bigger and bigger contexts. Take on leadership roles in other parts of your life. Even though the context changes, human behavior doesn’t. So you can still learn a lot about leadership by trying it in other parts of your life.

So what are you waiting for? You don’t have to be a manager to lead. Get out there and start leading!