We Are All Leaders

We Are All Leaders

You don’t need a leadership title to exercise leadership. Every day, we make decisions, deal with uncertainty, influence others, set priorities, take responsibility, and choose how to respond when things do not go as planned. The difference lies in who we lead, what responsibility we carry, and what consequences our actions have.

I once had a colleague who could not understand why anyone would voluntarily want to become a leader. To her, leadership mainly seemed like a great deal of responsibility — quite intimidating, in fact. She was also completely certain of one thing: she had no leadership qualities, and she never would. I challenged her on that. Did she ever have to make decisions without being completely sure what the right answer was? Of course. Did she have to choose between things she wanted to do and things she knew she should do? All the time. Had she ever taken initiative because something needed to be done, without anyone asking her? Yes. Did she sometimes have to manage her own frustration or uncertainty, help others, show consideration, set boundaries, keep commitments, or take responsibility when she had made a mistake? All of this was simply part of her everyday life.

So how certain could she really be that she had no leadership qualities?

Much of what we associate with leadership is something we already do every day. The difference is that we do not necessarily call it leadership. We tend to think of leadership as something that happens in a formal role, in a management meeting, during a development conversation, or when someone with personnel responsibility has to make a difficult decision. But leadership also happens in far less visible situations. It happens when someone takes initiative, creates direction in an unclear situation, influences others to act, or has to manage their own reactions, priorities, and effort.

Leadership Is Bigger Than a Job Title

When we use the word leader, many people automatically picture someone with personnel responsibility, budget responsibility, and a name somewhere on the organizational chart. That is natural, because formal leadership is what we most often talk about. But leadership is also an activity. It is something people do. You exercise leadership when you influence direction, create progress, make a decision, bring others with you, deal with uncertainty, or take responsibility for making sure something actually gets done. Sometimes you do this as a formal leader. Other times you do it as a professional, colleague, project member, parent, coach, friend, or simply as another human being.

And throughout all of this, there is one person you cannot delegate responsibility for leading to anyone else: yourself. This does not mean that everyone is a formal leader. Nor does it mean that everyone is automatically good at leading. The point is that all of us exercise leadership to some degree, because we constantly influence our own choices, our own direction, and the people around us. Seen this way, the question of whether you are a leader becomes less interesting. The more useful question is how you exercise the leadership you are already practising.

Self-Leadership Is Still Leadership

It is easy to make self-leadership sound a little vague. Good routines, calendar management, exercise, sleep, and techniques for getting more done during the day. All of that can be useful, but self-leadership is about more than that. Much of what we expect from a good leader, we should also expect from ourselves. You need to prioritise. You need to make decisions with incomplete information. You need to deal with setbacks without completely losing your sense of direction and motivation. You need to be able to change your mind when new information justifies it. You need to set boundaries, follow through on what you have decided, and tolerate the discomfort that comes when the right choice is not necessarily the easiest one.

What is particular about self-leadership is that it is often easier to let yourself down than to let others down. If you are responsible for a team, you will usually follow up on the commitments you have made to your employees. You prepare for the development conversation. You make room in your calendar when someone needs you. You make sure others get breaks, development, feedback, and the priorities they need. But the agreement you made with yourself to finish work at a reasonable time can be moved. The workout can wait. The difficult task you know you should deal with can be pushed into next week. The time you intended to spend thinking, learning, or preparing disappears because everyone else seems to need something first.

The paradox is that many people exercise better leadership towards others than towards themselves, and that rarely works well over time. Prioritising yourself does not mean becoming self-centred. For a leader, good self-leadership can actually be a prerequisite for being available, clear, and stable for others. If you continuously exhaust your own capacity, jump from task to task, postpone difficult decisions, or allow stress to control your reactions, it will eventually affect the people around you as well. Self-leadership is therefore not only about personal effectiveness. It is also about the foundation you create for the leadership you exercise towards others.

Sometimes the Person Who Sees the Situation Must Take the Lead

Imagine a workplace where something suddenly goes wrong. It does not need to be dramatic. A system goes down, a delivery comes to a halt, or a situation arises for which the organization has no ready-made procedure. The formal leader is not available at that moment. One relatively new employee happens to know the system better than anyone else in the group. She sees what is happening, understands what probably needs to happen first, and at the same time notices that everyone else is standing still, waiting for a decision.

She has no leadership title, no personnel responsibility, and no formal authority beyond her own area of expertise. Yet she takes the lead. She explains what she sees, proposes a direction, assigns a few essential tasks, and asks one colleague to contact the formal leader. When the leader enters the situation a few minutes later, she hands the leadership back just as naturally as she took it. This is not an argument that organizations can function without clear roles, responsibilities, and authority. Quite the opposite. But it illustrates something important: in well-functioning organizations, leadership can move to where the competence and the situation require it.

This is familiar in operational environments. Formal authority matters, but rank or title does not automatically make one person the individual who knows the most about every situation in front of them. A resilient leader must therefore be able both to take the lead and to step aside when someone else’s competence matters more in that particular moment. That requires confidence on both sides. The person taking initiative must understand the limits of their mandate, and the formal leader must be able to tolerate others acting without interpreting it as a challenge to their position.

A resilient leader must be able both to take the lead and to step aside when someone else’s competence matters more in that particular moment.

“I’m Not a Leader” Can Become a Convenient Excuse

There is also a downside to defining leadership too narrowly. If leadership belongs only to the leader, it becomes very easy for the rest of the organization to wait. Someone should do something about this. The leader should have noticed. Management should decide. No one has asked me to do anything. Sometimes that is entirely correct. There are decisions you do not have the mandate, competence, or information to make. A formal leader has responsibilities that cannot simply be pushed down the organization through attractive language about self-leadership and empowerment.

But not always.

If you see a new colleague struggling to understand the systems, do you really need a leadership decision before you help? If you notice a risk that others have missed, is it enough to assume that HSE or management will probably pick it up? If a meeting is going in circles and you see the question nobody is willing to ask, do you need to wait for the most senior person in the room to ask it? If you have made a mistake that affects others, who is actually responsible for bringing it to light? Taking responsibility is not the same as taking over someone else’s responsibility. It is about using the room for action you actually have, and recognising when the situation requires you to do more than wait.

This is where much of the informal leadership in an organization takes place. It happens every day, often without anyone putting a name to it. People observe one another. We are influenced by who takes initiative, who speaks up, who keeps a clear head when pressure increases, who includes the new colleague, who does what they said they would do, and who disappears when the task becomes difficult. Your job title determines where you are placed on the organizational chart, but it does not determine how much influence you have on the people around you.

This Does Not Remove the Formal Leader’s Responsibility

At the same time, we need to be precise. The idea that we are all leaders must never be used as an easy way to push leadership responsibility down through the organization. There is a significant difference between leading yourself, exercising informal leadership, and having formal responsibility for other people. The formal leader is not only responsible for their own choices. A leader must create direction for others, make priorities that affect several people, allocate resources, follow up performance, handle conflict, build trust, develop people, communicate decisions, and sometimes make choices that are unpopular. The leader also carries responsibility for the working environment and for the conditions in which other people are expected to perform.

That is something different from self-leadership. Nor do I believe that everyone should necessarily become a formal leader. Being professionally strong, proactive, and good at leading yourself does not automatically mean that you should be responsible for others. Leadership requires competence, training, experience, and a willingness to remain accountable when the working day becomes difficult. But the formal leader still starts in the same place as everyone else: with the ability to lead themselves. A leader who cannot regulate their own reactions, manage their own time, or stand in difficult decisions will also struggle to do these things on behalf of others.

Resilient Organizations Need People Who Do More Than Wait

For me, this is closely connected to resilient leadership and the way we at TEAM NORSO work with ROBUST360™. An organization becomes vulnerable if every thought, initiative, and decision has to move upwards before anything can happen. The quality of the organization then quickly becomes dependent on the right leader being available, having noticed the problem, and having enough time to deal with it. In calm periods, that can appear to work. When the pace increases, information is incomplete, or something unexpected happens, the weaknesses become much more visible.

Resilience requires something else. It requires clear direction and strong frameworks from leaders, but also people further out in the organization who understand the mission, use their competence, ask questions, speak up when something does not seem right, and take responsibility within their room for action. That places demands on employees, but it places at least as many demands on leaders. You cannot ask people to take initiative and then punish them when the initiative is not exactly what you would have done yourself. You cannot say that you want independent employees if every meaningful decision still has to go through you. And you cannot realistically expect people to speak up early if their experience is that bad news is met with irritation or a search for someone to blame.

If you want people to take the lead when the situation requires it, you also need to create an environment in which that is actually possible. That means clear expectations, clear boundaries, and enough trust for people to use their own judgement. The formal leader must also be clear about which decisions can be made further out in the organization, which must be escalated, and which responsibilities can never be delegated. Resilience does not arise because everyone does whatever they want. It arises when people understand what they are trying to achieve, understand the boundaries, and are willing to act when the situation requires it.

Leadership Can Be Trained

Another thing I said to the colleague we met at the beginning was that leadership is not some mysterious quality that a small number of people are simply born with. Of course, some people have personal qualities and experiences that make certain aspects of leadership easier. But leadership also consists of skills that can be developed and knowledge that can be acquired. You can become better at making decisions. Better at communicating. Better at listening. Better at handling conflict. Better at giving feedback, prioritising, delegating, dealing with uncertainty, and understanding how your own behaviour affects others.

That requires training, experience, and reflection, and it requires you to recognise where you actually have something to develop. That applies to the new leader, the executive with thirty years of experience, and the person who has no intention of ever taking a leadership title. Because even someone who never has personnel responsibility still needs to be able to lead themselves, stand in difficult situations, influence others constructively, and understand what their own behaviour does to the people around them.

Because everyone leads someone.

At the very least, themselves.

So What Kind of Leader Are You?

I still believe what I told my colleague back then: we are all leaders. Not because everyone should have personnel responsibility, not because the distinction between leader and employee is unimportant, and not because formal leadership responsibility can simply be distributed to everyone when things become difficult. We are leaders because we constantly make choices that influence direction, quality, action, and other people. We lead ourselves, and we influence the people around us. In some situations, some of us will also need to take the lead before a formal leader has the opportunity to do so.

The question, then, is not only whether you have leadership qualities. Look instead at the past week. When did you take initiative without being asked? When did you take responsibility for something that did not go as planned? When did you help someone else succeed? When did you choose not to speak up even though you probably should have? Which commitments to yourself did you deprioritise because everything else came first? And how did you affect the people around you when the pressure increased? The answers probably say more about your leadership than your job title does.

That former colleague of mine was a leader too.

She had simply never thought of herself that way.