Reflections on Leadership

Who Says You’re Ready to Lead?

Leadership Drift This Week

Who Says You’re Ready to Lead?

I recently saw a post about the signs that you’re not ready to lead (yet). It offered a familiar list of skills aspiring leaders should develop: making decisions with incomplete information, accepting and giving difficult feedback, delegating, managing conflict, and overcoming the need for approval.

Most of the advice was reasonable, but I disliked the underlying premise.

Who decides what “ready” actually means, and who gets to decide when you are ready?

Plenty of people in leadership positions today couldn’t pass a ten-point test. They avoid difficult conversations, micromanage, and paralyze teams by waiting for perfect information. They seek constant validation, protect their reputations at the expense of their people, and blame external circumstances when things fail. They hold the title, the authority, the corner office, and the salary, and they still aren't leading well.

Leadership is a behavior and a practice, not a credential. The idea that you first become “ready,” someone certifies your readiness, you receive an opportunity, and then you lead is simply not how leadership works.

Leadership Isn't a Permission Slip

Leadership happens in real-time circumstances. You inherit a struggling team. A critical decision needs to be made. Two team members aren't getting along. An angry customer needs a resolution. A process is broken. People are confused about priorities. Your boss is ignoring a glaring problem.

In those moments, you don't get to pause reality and announce, “Unfortunately, I'm not fully ready to lead this situation yet.” The situation doesn't care. Someone has to step up.

That's where the standard narrative gets it backward. Leadership isn't primarily about whether you're “ready.” It comes down to a more fundamental question:

Are you willing to take responsibility for what happens next?

What Does It Take to Be Ready?

Competence, experience, judgment, and authority matter. And nobody should mistake raw confidence for capability. But leadership doesn't require passing a complex psychological checklist. To me, it requires five basic commitments.

1. Take responsibility for your impact.

You don't get to blame external factors for everything that happens around you. The organization might be dysfunctional. Your boss might be difficult. Your inherited team might be underperforming. Fine. Now what?

Leadership begins when you accept responsibility for your contribution to what happens next.

2. Tell yourself the truth.

You don't need all the answers, but you must acknowledge when something isn't working. It takes honesty to say, “This isn't going well,” “I'm part of the problem,” “We're avoiding something,” or “I don't know what to do yet.”

That isn't weakness. It's actionable information.

3. Make decisions.

Leadership rarely operates with complete information. At some point, you have to evaluate what you know, make the best judgment available, and act. You might get it wrong. Learn, adjust, and try again.

Indecision is still a decision. It simply shifts the consequences onto someone else.

4. Tell people what they need to hear.

Do not tell people what keeps them comfortable, makes you look good, or postpones the inevitable. Tell them what they actually need to hear, clearly, directly, and respectfully.

Leadership sometimes requires disturbing the peace because the peace is costing people something.

5. Take initiative.

If you see a problem, help solve it. If you see someone struggling, support them. If you see confusion, create clarity. If you see a decision stalled, help move it forward.

Recklessly bypassing authority or stepping outside your legitimate scope is different. But don't automatically wait for somebody to designate you the leader.

Lead.

You Don't Need a Title to Find Out

The “not ready yet” mindset can easily become a very comfortable collection of excuses: I need more experience. I need a mentor first. I need formal authority. I need the promotion. I need someone to give me the opportunity.

Maybe.

Or maybe you're simply waiting for permission that isn't required.

You can test your leadership right now. Lead a project. Fix a broken process. Help someone solve a difficult problem. Create clarity where there is confusion. Have the conversation everyone else is avoiding. Take responsibility for something that matters.

Then pay attention to what happens.

Some people will follow you. Some won't. If nobody follows, don't automatically conclude that they're the problem. Maybe your idea was flawed. Maybe your communication was poor. Maybe you haven't earned their trust, or they have good reasons for disagreeing with you.

Leadership also requires you to be willing to learn from that. Act, observe, learn, adjust, and act again. That's leadership development in the real world.

What About the Signs of Readiness?

Absolutely keep working on them. Get better at decision-making. Refine how you give and receive feedback. Learn to delegate. Develop your ability to handle conflict. Become less dependent on approval. Learn how to work effectively with people who don't think or operate like you.

All of that matters. But treat these things as ongoing leadership work, not prerequisites for entry.

You don't become ready and then begin. You begin, and the work makes you better.

You don't need a title to find out whether you can lead. You don't need someone to announce that you're ready. You don't need permission to demonstrate responsibility, judgment, courage, initiative, and care.

Start leading. Make something better. Help someone. Tell the truth. Take responsibility. Create clarity. Make the hard decision. See what happens.

Leadership isn't something somebody gives you when they decide you're worthy of it.

Leadership is what you do when you decide to take responsibility.

Manage Better. Lead Well.

Drift Pattern of the Week: Weak Accountability

Responsibility deferral occurs when a leader recognizes a problem, opportunity, or decision but implicitly assigns ownership somewhere else.

It sounds like: “That's not my area,” “Someone needs to address this,” “I'll wait for direction,” or “Once I have the authority, I'll deal with it.”

The pattern is easy to overlook because legitimate boundaries and appropriate delegation are important. But when responsibility is continually pushed upward, sideways, or downstream, accountability weakens.

Left unaddressed, responsibility deferral creates a culture where people become increasingly dependent on formal authority to act. Problems linger, initiative declines, and leaders become bottlenecks.

Leadership Practice

Identify one problem you've been waiting for someone else to address. Define what is legitimately within your responsibility, then take one concrete action this week.

Diagnostic Question

Where in your organization are people waiting for authority to do something they already have enough responsibility, judgment, or influence to begin?

From My Desk

Leaders often talk about accountability as though it begins with holding other people accountable. In practice, it starts much closer to home: What am I taking responsibility for?

In healthy organizations, people understand the boundaries of their authority, but they don't use those boundaries to explain away every problem they encounter. They know when to escalate, when to collaborate, and when to act.

You don't need authority to notice something, raise it, help with it, or take responsibility for your part of it.

When everyone waits for someone else to act, the organization may still have plenty of people with authority. What it lacks is leadership.

Recommended Resource

Leadership Drift Self-Check

If you're wondering whether this is an isolated behavior or part of a broader leadership pattern, the Leadership Drift Self-Check provides a useful starting point.

It helps you look at observable leadership conditions, including accountability, rather than relying on your intentions or self-perception.

The value is not simply identifying what's wrong. It's creating enough clarity to determine where leadership is currently creating friction and what deserves attention first.

The Leadership Drift Self-Check