In an age of remote and hybrid work, it can be hard to be recognized for the impact you’re making in your organization, especially if you’re not getting facetime with key leaders and stakeholders.
But even if you’re not working in the traditional way, you can be a leader who drives meaningful change in your organization.That’s because leadership is more than a title. It’s about your ability to lead change, champion ideas, and come up with innovative solutions to challenging problems in your work. In a world constantly shifting work, fortune favors the bold – and employees who take the lead on initiatives and projects regardless of their title or role at the company. Plus, being known as a leader can have positive career outcomes, create opportunities, and even increase your earning potential over time.
Demonstrating leadership skills is not something you have to wait to have a formal leadership position to do, but rather, you can lead right from where you are. And, in fact, any executive or formal leader with real position or authority, would be better off if they championed, supported, and encouraged more individuals to actively practice and exhibit their leadership skills each day, regardless of where that individual sat within the organization.
Why is this the case? Well consider some of these realities of the modern workplace:
- Innovation comes from anywhere – Great ideas can come from anywhere. Innovation is no longer “top down,” and everyday employees are often closest to the action of what customers and clients really need
- Cross-Functional Work is The Norm – We all have to work with other people in order to achieve desired goals or outcomes. This means there are far more people who need to demonstrate leadership in a team-based setting who don’t formally have “leadership” authority
- Unstructured Problems Require Creative Solutions – For many of us, the deliverables and tasks we have to complete require some kind of creativity, ideation, and innovation. They aren’t just things we can just “rinse and repeat” – this requires people to cooperate with one another, bounce ideas, and share thoughts with one another. Ultimately, someone needs to step up to make this happen
So what does that look like? Here are just a few examples of people who I’ve encountered who have demonstrated the ability to lead from anywhere:
People like Diego Granados, who after using his MBA to transition into a career in product management, starts to post YouTube videos about tips for others to break into product management, eventually gets thousands of subscribers, builds a PM Community to help thousands of other people break into product management, and through his work, makes a career transition into a PM role helping employees who want to transition careers.
People like Megan Loyst, who after seeing how challenging it was to break into Venture Capital, decides to start a community for Gen Z students who want to learn about the venture capital industry and land internships and jobs in this space, and then scales the community to over 20,000 members.
And people like Willie Sullivan, who after reflecting on his own thoughts and concerns after the murder of George Floyd, decides to start The John R. Lewis Racial Justice Case Competition which garners support from his classmates and school, and ends up getting over 1000+ students across the world to participate.
So how can an employee who wants to embrace their leadership skills and lead from where they are do that starting today? Here are a few ideas:
1) Start From Where You Are – It’s easy to mark leadership as a title or as the thing you formally work toward before you can start demonstrating it, but the best place to start with leadership is right where you are, regardless if you’re a new intern up to the CEO, or if you’re working remotely or in the office.
All of us work in systems and organizations that are much larger than ourselves, and in today’s collaborative work environment it’s really hard to work on something entirely on your own. Acknowledging this idea that leadership is a verb and a set of actions that you can take today and choosing to exercise that agency is a mindset shift. Now, as you start to to think about the cross-functional projects you are managing, or the times when you need to get the support and buy in from your peers to get resources or get something done, you can think about the lease
2) Give Yourself Credit – I think we all need to give ourselves a bit more credit for the work that we do each and every day. It’s really easy to just get in autopilot mode to knock off things on the priority list and not really think about what we are doing or the impact we’re making. Taking the time to actually understand how the work you are doing and the skills+attributes you are using are driving outcomes and making impact helps you figure out what you can double down on, or perhaps use in other areas to drive even greater impact for your initiatives and projects.
3) Be the Connective Tissue – Leadership is really about being the connective tissue and spotting where the cracks, inflection and connection points and disparate ideas are, tying them together, and then conveying that to others. When working with others, try seeing and finding the broken points or connection points and being the connector/integrator. We all have our own agenda items even when we are collaborating and it’s easy to miss those integration points, so find where those are and connect the dots.
4) Find Your Greater Good – Leadership is about scale, and getting to a sizable outcome that you or others couldn’t achieve working on your own. From a tactical level there are things that you can do to get there, but from a strategic level that means having a desire and ambition that is for something that is far greater than just a singular goal/outcome. Simon Sinek would call this your “why” but I think it’s more than that. It’s a mindset and a fundamental belief/desire to work towards something impactful or meaningful however you define that. For Diego, the greater good was watching other career switchers break into product management, or for Willie, it was about educating and making MBA students aware of the importance of racial justice in the business world.
If you agree (or disagree) that you can lead from anywhere, I’d love to hear what you think, or how you’ve done it!
