Leadership Starts Before the Title
It’s easy to think leadership begins when you step into a formal leadership role - managing a team, running a business, increasing responsibilities, or finally having “manager” in your title.
But most people who lead well didn’t start there.
They started earlier - in the way they approached their work, how they showed up in conversations, how they handled challenges, built resilience, and supported the people around them.
Because leadership isn’t a title.
It’s a skill.
And like any skill, it’s built over time, in small, everyday moments:
How you take ownership
How you communicate
How you follow through
How you respond when things don’t go to plan
How you build resilience when things feel challenging
If you’re waiting for permission or a title before you start leading, you’re missing the opportunity to build the skill now.
Wherever you are right now, there is space to lead - you just have to choose to step into it.
A simple place to start is asking yourself:
Where am I already influencing others - even without the title?
And how could I be more intentional in how I show up there?
In 2020, at the beginning of the first Covid lockdown, I made a slightly unexpected decision - I ran away to sea.
My training work had stopped almost overnight. Clients weren’t quite ready for online training, and suddenly, I wasn’t doing the work I love.
So I picked up the phone and called the fishing company I was partnering with to deliver leadership programmes. A fishing veteran had made the comment, “You’d be too soft to go to sea”, so I decided to put that to the test.
I wanted to see a) what it would be like to live and work on one of their deep-sea fishing vessels and b) see if I could understand why the training wasn’t quite hitting the mark.
Three days later, I boarded a ship in Bluff.
I then spent the next 35 days at sea in the Southern Ocean.
At the time, it felt like a big shift - from the familiarity of my work into something completely different. But what stood out quickly was this:
Leadership doesn’t disappear just because your environment changes.
It showed up in how people communicated, how they handled pressure, how they supported each other, and how they responded when things didn’t go to plan.
It showed up in resilience.
And it reinforced something I’ve always believed - leadership isn’t tied to a role or a title. It’s something you carry with you.
The video below is a short snippet of an interview I did unpacking this experience at sea - it explores what this looks like in practice, drawing on my experience, and how small shifts in how you show up can create a much bigger impact over time.
At my core, I’ve always been someone who leads and teaches - and those instincts aren’t tied to a role or title.
They’re something you carry with you, and can apply in any environment.