Nobody is coming to promote you into leadership
There is a story we tell about leadership that goes like this: work hard, be noticed, get given a title, then start leading. The title arrives like a permission slip, and only then are you allowed to have opinions about where the group should go.
I have watched that story waste a lot of good people.
The truth is almost the reverse. Leadership is not granted and then practised. It is practised, clumsily and in small ways, until the title becomes a description of what you were already doing.
Three things you can do on Monday
One: name the thing nobody has named. Every project has a problem that everyone can feel and nobody has said out loud. The deadline that will not hold. The meeting that should be an email. Saying it plainly, without blame, is the single cheapest act of leadership available to you. It costs ninety seconds.
Two: write the summary nobody asked for. After any meeting of more than four people, send ten lines: what we decided, what we did not, who owns what, when we look again. This is not admin. This is how a group discovers it has a memory, and the person who builds that memory becomes, without asking, load-bearing.
Three: take the worst job once. Not forever. Once. The task nobody wants — the migration, the complaint, the cleanup — is usually the place where you can learn the system end to end faster than any onboarding document. And people never forget who showed up for the bad one.
The part about being wrong
You will do these things and sometimes be wrong. You will name a thing that turns out not to be a problem. You will write a summary that misses the real decision.
This is fine. Leadership is not being right in advance; it is being willing to be visibly wrong in service of the group, and then updating quickly and without ego. The opposite of leadership is not error. The opposite is silence.
What I am actually asking
Your title describes your accountabilities. It does not describe your contribution. Those are different, and only one of them is yours to decide.
So decide something this week. Name the thing. Write the summary. Take the bad job once. Then watch how fast the room starts turning toward you when a hard question is asked.