You can be a leader in any position. Here's how.

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Dec 29, 2024

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Leadership is a loaded word. One with many connotations and many assumptions. The number one assumption is that a leader has a team, is in a senior position, or manages a number of teams. It’s an assumption that stops many incredible leaders from getting the practice before they actually have a team to manage.

Getting to do that, the team bit I mean, often takes a lot of work. If you want to manage a team and you currently don’t, you’ll need to get a promotion or ask for a new job opportunity in your current role. While both of those things are doable, they take a lot of work and come with a lot of pressure.

The good news is, there is another way. The good news is that you can lead from where you are, right now.

And disclaimer here, there is a fine line between wanting to lead because you think you are capable, you can see the gaps, and you want the whole team to benefit and do great work vs. wanting to lead a team because you think that’s what you should do. Leadership doesn’t have to be this ‘icky’ thing. The world needs great leaders who are in it for the right reasons. It needs fewer people obsessed with climbing the ladder so they can make more and appease their own ego. It needs more people that love to coach and drive a team forward because that’s what they’re great at.

If you feel like want to start leading but you’re not in the ‘right’ position — remember you can lead from wherever you are, and here’s how.

1) Solve problems that bug you, the problems you’re not solving because you’re worried you're overstepping

Maybe standups aren’t going to plan, maybe every day you get on and you bite your tongue because you’re worried people will think you’re trying to take over. Maybe you’re sitting there thinking ‘this could be so much better’ and you have lots of ideas about how to make the whole thing more beneficial to everyone.

It doesn’t have to be a point of frustration every day, it can be a ‘you’ problem to solve if you take ownership of it, the question is how do you do that in a way that makes everyone feel like as a team, you’re moving forward.

Here’s how:

Contact the team lead and ask for a 1–2–1. I have a 1–2–1 with my team lead every week, a meeting that we have in the diary and if we don’t have anything to catch up on, we skip.

Let’s use the standup as an example. It’s an opportunity for me to take ownership if I wanted to, and here’s how I’d approach the whole thing.

M: “At the minute, I’ve got some capacity to help with ‘team’ things. And I actually love doing that stuff and will happily take something off your plate. I’ve been thinking about standups, I think there’s an opportunity in standups to make them more valuable. What do you think?”

If the reaction was positive, I would have a list of suggestions ready to go to help me articulate my point. Just saying ‘more valuable’ peaks somebody’s interest but concrete examples are powerful and add weight to what you are saying.

In my notes, I would have 2–3 bullet points of improvements I think we could make to the team work more effectively. Essentially you are presenting to your boss or lead and saying ‘I’ve spotted this problem and have loads of ideas about how to make it better’ — part of your job, in whatever role you do, really is to make your boss’s life easier. That’s really what it’s about, so if you can spot problems and take them away before them asking, it’s hard for them to say no.

2) Position your ideas as ‘running an experiment’

Although some managers welcome the idea of making things better, some have reservations about how that might work. They’re concerned that things might not work out and that they’ll have a load more work to sort out if they have to put things back together once your idea flops.

I would be the same.

If somebody came to me and said ‘I have a list of ways I think we could make things better’ my first thought would be ‘data’. How do we know this will actually improve the thing and can we measure it?

Now of course, not everything can be measured but we can get a sense of if things are moving in the right direction. So positioning your idea as an experiment to be measured can help overcome the initial resistance to the idea.

M: “I’d love to run a test with shorter standups where each person updates for 30 seconds but we track their blockers. I sense that blockers are getting lost and I’d like to write them down and make sure they’re captured. My thought is that we do this for a week, see what people think and we can decide to keep it or bin it if it doesn’t work”

Positioning your idea as a ‘test’ is a much simpler, easier, less risky way of starting to do the leadership thing without any ambiguity. You’ll let the data speak for itself.

3) Move fast and make things better

Half of the battle of having the confidence to lead is showing that you are good. You do that not by talking about the things you can do, but by showing people. The proof really is in the pudding and if you want to do more stuff, get more opportunities, lead stuff, push yourself — you have to show people you can.

My grandad told me once ‘Eve, if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing right’ and it’s the sort of mentality I take into most things now. If I’m doing a thing, I’m doing a proper job of it, otherwise, what’s the point of doing the thing?

So whether it be big or small, you can show you can improve stuff.

From a team meeting to a presentation to little things like sending emails or solving small problems. Everything you do, shows other people how you operate and how effective you are. So move fast where you can and make things better.

I’ll give you an example.

This week, long story short, something changed and a previous function didn’t exist anymore. Somebody mentioned it in passing. I could have left it, it would have been easy not to clock it or pay attention because it was said amongst other things. But I wanted to understand it in more detail and see if I could solve it. Within an hour, I’d understood the problem, spoke to the person who could fix it, worked out the fix, and scheduled the fix.

Sometimes little problems present themselves and you can fix them quickly. And it’s not all about showing other people you are capable and can do stuff, it’s also for yourself. It feels good to solve problems and sort stuff out — it gives you confidence that you can and should lead.

4) Help other people progress

Part of any good leadership role is spotting talent and helping people progress. You do that by listening, learning, asking questions, and working out if you can help in any way. I love this part of leadership.

People will tell you in their own way what they want to do. And also, you can ask them — Ask people what their aspirations are, what they want to achieve, what lights them up about their work. Then look at your work and see where there are gaps, and see where you might be able to support them.

In any leadership role, big or small, you will need to help your team and people around you progress and get better, if you want to start leading from where you are, look for opportunities to do that now.

Is there work on your project that you can involve them in?
Can you help them with experiences that they might be lacking in?
Is there somebody you can connect them with to help them in their career?

You don’t have to create a load of work for yourself to help someone in their career, there are high and low-leverage ways to help people depending on what time and capacity you have.

Some of the easiest ways to help people is just with an introduction to somebody else — it’s very little effort on your part and goes a long way to somebody else.

5) Solve ‘system-level’ problems

Some problems are isolated to the product or service you are working on. Increasing users is a problem isolated to your product for example. But there are other problems that exist system-wide, other problems that if you solve that problem, you’ll solve the same problem across the board.

In other words, the problem exists in many places — in the UK we have this saying ‘two birds, one stone’ which admittedly, isn’t the nicest of sayings but essentially it means one action, multiple problems solved.

System-wide problems are things like:

How to run a meeting effectively
How to run a standup efficiently
How to present back to stakeholders appropriately
How to run a retro that is outcome-focused
How to teach people to make better decisions
How to document the next steps appropriately

System-level problems exist everywhere and when you solve them once, you actually have a ripple effect elsewhere. So look for those problems across your team and see where you can make a difference.

For example, let’s say you work in an office where you do outbound calls, if notice somebody has a way higher success rate than the team, how can everybody learn from that approach? What is that person doing to increase the likelihood of success? How can the team learn from that and improve?

6) Don’t stop shouting about your work

If you work in a big company, part of the job is communicating what you do and how you’ve done it. Communication is a huge part of leadership. Some people have a real issue with this — they hate talking about their work.

But really, ‘your’ work is always a team sport. I have no problems talking about the work I’m doing because I make it a team thing. I make sure I reference the fact that it’s a team effort and there are many working parts I’m just the voice of the thing.

7) Lead in your work

What are the attributes of a good leader? For me it’s simple: they listen, solve problems, tell the story, and are there to take the rubbish and protect the team, they create an environment for people to do their best work and they make sure everybody is pulling their weight. Above all, they are a great communicator who challenges, understands and gets stuff done.

You don’t need a team to do that stuff. You can listen and solve problems in any role. You can go out of your way to support people, you can spend time creating an environment for people to do their best work.

You can focus on your communication skills now, you can challenge in your work today, you can refine your art of getting stuff done. All of that you can do from wherever you are.

What about you…what are you doing? Are you wanting to lead from where you are?

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