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Learning to Lead Without a Title
Being a leader is not simply holding an office or a position of power and authority. Instead, leadership requires a certain skill set, including strong administrative skills, a willingness to serve, goal-setting and achieving, and project managing. Leaders also have key characteristics, such as empathy, confidence, and influence. When I began graduate school, I believed leadership lied solely in the title one held, but through reflection with the help of my friends and family, I found that leaders are leaders because of what they do, not what they’re called. I learned that leadership isn’t a job that stops when the title goes away, but is a set of skills and qualities that can be found in our everyday actions.
Quote on leadership by Peter Drucker, author and
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient
My path to learning what leadership means
Through most of graduate school, I didn’t think of myself as a leader; I believed a leader to be someone with a title – Director, Manager, Rabbi, President. My time at the Bush School was not distinguished by one of these titles, or by the characteristics that I felt made someone a leader. I was in no student organizations, and in my work life and personal life I was not a manager or lead of any special projects. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be a leader, but leadership roles and extracurriculars took a spot on the backburner during grad school. Graduate school was a time in my life where I had more going on than I thought I could handle. In addition to being a full-time student, I had many life-changing transitions: I lost my job; I moved from living in my car to my first home; I went from engaged to married; And my partner and I devastatingly lost a pregnancy. This, combined with the COVID-19 pandemic that affected us all, didn’t leave me much time for extracurricular activities, let alone enough time to be a leader.
I was no stranger to leadership, however. In undergrad, I held a variety of leadership positions: Vice President, Treasurer, and Section Leader, to name a few. I also frequently volunteered with women’s rights groups, the local food bank, and participated in Texas A&M’s annual community service celebration “The Big Event”. While reflecting on leadership roles I had during my time at the Bush School, there are flashes of moments when I was the head of a discussion group, or was in charge of planning an event, but those were miniscule compared to leadership roles I had earlier in my life. And most importantly – those roles lacked a title. The lack of recent leadership experience in my life worried me, as I began thinking about future interviews and resume-building.
Formulating a “new” definition of leadership through service activities
It wasn’t until speaking with my family and friends about my worries that my views on leadership changed. Leadership came to mean identifying ways to serve others through volunteering my time and resources without expecting anything in return. My friends offered small instances of leadership through service I had done over the years – planning vacations, drives to doctor’s appointments, offering to be a short-notice sober ride home, volunteering to house- and pet-sit – all without judgement or expectation of reciprocation. These activities were all non-mandatory and did not benefit me monetarily or professionally, but required me to take charge of a situation by lending my time and effort in order to make sure events ran as efficiently and safely as possible. These activities also demonstrated a sense of empathy for mistakes that had been made, poor planning, or just bad luck.
The importance of goal setting to effective leadership
My wife offered some other instances of leadership via goal-setting, such as taking lead on finding a new home, continuing my education, losing weight, and fighting addiction. By setting goals and having a system by which to achieve them, my time in grad school led to a new home, twenty pounds lost (and still losing), and will soon culminate in a graduate degree. None of these accomplishments would have been possible without the emotional intelligence required of a leader who is able to set reasonable and achievable goals, even if they were mostly individual goals and not team-focused.
Leading through project management
Finally, it was my family who showed me that I had been a leader to them, through my project management skills. My eldest sister runs a small business, and because of the 2020 COVID lockdowns, was forced to move her business completely online – a project I helped her with by creating a website, managing her clientele index, and keeping up to date with local safety news. My nephew reminded me that when he graduated high school the year before, I helped him manage his move from home to college, including everything from school applications, to scholarship hunting, and signing up for dorms and a meal plan. My mother brought up smaller, more physical projects I maintain, such as my garden. All of these tasks require skills such as organization, prioritization, and adaptability, as well as planning, document management, and task management. More than just taking on the project myself, however, all of these tasks required me to have authority and impact, and to influence others to handle these projects with me.
Takeaways
My family and friends showed me that although I may not have held a leadership title during my time in grad school, I was not any less of a leader. Through service, goal-setting and achieving, and project management in my everyday life, I demonstrated the skills and characteristics of a leader that would always be a part of me, in any position I find myself in – title or not.
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