Leading When You Have No Authority, Which Is Most of the Time

Leading well has less to do with holding a position than most people assume. You become a leader by acting like one, and the opportunity is nearly always sitting in the job you already have. It rests on four moves:

• Embracing responsibility before anyone hands it to you
• Building standing through small, visible improvements
• Asking the way a leader would
• Treating an honorary title as a grant of opportunity

How to embrace responsibility before anyone hands it to you

Authority is granted, while leadership is taken up. Somebody with authority can direct work and expect compliance, which is enough for routine tasks and rarely enough for anything genuinely difficult. Leadership produces people who follow because they have come to want the same outcome you do.

Getting there asks three things, and none arrive with a promotion:

• Embrace responsibility rather than wait for it to be assigned
• Draw cooperation out of people under no obligation to give it
• Place the needs of the group above your own, visibly enough that other people notice

Leadership For Dummies calls the people who rise this way situational leaders, prepared when circumstances turned in their favor. Almost every circumstance carries a version of that opening, and the people who take it stopped waiting to be discovered.

How to building standing through small, visible improvements

Physical conditions at work are easy to dismiss as somebody else's department, and plenty of people refuse on principle to spend their own time fixing what the company ought to fix. The reasoning is sound, and the usual outcome is that nothing changes for another three years. Organizing a few colleagues to repaint a tired office over a weekend lifts the mood twice, once in the doing and again in the result. It also makes your group's leader more receptive the next time you propose something larger.

Information works the same way and is the more overlooked of the two. Effective leaders pursue information so they can decide well, but it is often worth more for what it does for other people. Everyone in your office has a birthday and a family life, and noticing those moments costs almost nothing while doing real work on how a group feels. Where a company newsletter exists, feed it. Where none exists, start one, even as a single photocopied sheet.

How to asking the way a leader would

All of that accumulates into standing, and standing is what you spend when you finally ask for something substantial, such as better training or a change in how work is assigned. Frame the request around what the group needs rather than what you need. A request that plainly represents a group is harder to dismiss, and it reads as leadership rather than self-advancement.

Then approach it as a proposal rather than a favor. The Jaycees, the Junior Chamber of Commerce, treat volunteer projects as a leadership training ground, and the model transfers almost unchanged. Start with a project statement saying what the project is and what it will do for the people it affects. Attach a plan answering the questions any business plan answers:

• What materials are needed?
• What will the work cost?
• Who is doing it?
• What approvals are required?
• Who owns the project once it is running?
• What are the long-term benefits?

Answering those six changes the conversation, because a suggestion invites an opinion while a proposal invites a decision.

Treating an honorary title as a grant of opportunity

Sooner or later somebody names you a leader without attaching any authority to the title. You get asked to chair a committee, or you raise money effectively enough for the volunteer fire department that the members make you honorary chief. The plaque is pleasant, and the real question is what happens next.

Treat a title of that kind as a grant of opportunity, like a sum of money that has landed in your account. You can enjoy it quietly until it runs out, or spend it on something that improves conditions for the people around you. The practical move is to find out what the real leader wishes they could do and cannot, usually because time or money is short, then take one item off that list and carry it yourself.

Three things hold throughout:

• Suggest and offer rather than plan and command
• Prepare for the real leader to say no
• Take care that nothing you do threatens their standing

None of this depends on being given permission. The constraint on leading is rarely authority and nearly always preparation, which is within your control. Start with something small enough that nobody objects, do it visibly and on behalf of other people, and your record will make the case before a position opens up.