Ask most people when they started leading, and they'll point to a promotion. Ask the people who actually got promoted, and a different pattern shows up: they were leading before anyone made it official.
Leadership, in practice, is a set of behaviours — taking responsibility for outcomes beyond your job description, telling the truth when it's inconvenient, making a decision when no one else will. None of that requires a title. All of it is noticed, eventually, by the people deciding who gets one.
“Leadership, in practice, is a set of behaviours — none of which require a title.”
The danger of waiting for the title first is that it trains you to treat authority as a prerequisite for responsibility, when in most functioning organisations it works the other way around.
If you're waiting for permission to lead, look closely: the room may already be waiting for you to start.
