The most damaging myth in modern organisations is that leadership is something bestowed upon you. A promotion. A title change. Permission from above.

This myth creates two types of dysfunction. First, it causes people without ‘leader’ in their title to abdicate responsibility for driving outcomes, influencing direction, and creating change. They wait for the go ahead that never comes. Second, it elevates people into leadership positions based on seniority or technical skill rather than their actual capacity to lead. Organisations end up with structures full of managers who don’t know how to truly lead.

So what really is leadership?

Leadership is simply the act of moving a group of people towards a better future state. That’s it. And the most important thing is that this happens at every level of an organisation regardless of position or titles. The junior designer who spots a critical user insight and rallies the team around it? That’s leadership. The IC engineer who facilitates alignment between feuding product managers? That’s leadership.

Example: The Checkout Redesign

At a mid-sized e-commerce company, the checkout flow had been causing problems for months. Conversion rates were declining. Customer support was flooded with complaints. Users were abandoning carts at alarming rates.

Everyone had a different diagnosis. Engineering wanted to rebuild the entire checkout system from scratch because the codebase was old and fragile. Product wanted to add more payment options to match competitors. Marketing wanted better upsell opportunities during checkout. Each team was solving their version of the problem, not the actual user problem.

Sarah, a mid-level product designer, had no formal authority over any of these teams. She wasn’t a lead. She didn’t manage anyone. But she’d been running usability tests on the checkout flow and saw something everyone else was missing.

Users couldn’t tell which form fields were required until after they’d tried to submit. They’d fill out what they thought was necessary, hit submit, and get a wall of red error messages about missing information. Five consecutive test participants had the same experience. Three of them abandoned entirely. The two who persisted did so grudgingly. Yet in stakeholder meetings, nobody was talking about this.

She could have filed her findings in a Slack channel and hoped someone with authority would act. Many designers would have. It’s safer. Instead, she did three things.

First, she built a clickable prototype. A realistic, interactive version in Figma with clear required field indicators and inline validation that stakeholders could click through and experience for themselves. She didn’t ask permission. She didn’t wait to be assigned to a checkout project. She saw a problem and created a solution.

Next, she created a two-minute video showing five users breezing through checkout with the new design, intercut with clips of them struggling with the old one. Not a research report. Not a slide deck. Two minutes of undeniable visual evidence.

Finally, she had individual conversations with each stakeholder where she presented the solution in each person’s language. To the engineering lead: this ships in three days with no rebuild required. To the product lead: this translates to roughly £40,000 in additional monthly revenue. To the head of customer support: this eliminates 67% of your checkout tickets. Same solution. Three different framings. Each one addressed what that person actually cared about but anchored around the same core vision: users should know exactly what’s required before they try to submit the form.

Her solution got the OK and the change went live. Checkout abandonment dropped 23%. Error rates fell 67%. Support tickets about checkout dropped 71%. At their volume, the improvement was worth £480,000 annually.

Sarah received no promotion for this. No bonus. No formal recognition. But she’d demonstrated something more valuable than a title. She identified what needed to happen, built support around a clear vision, gathered evidence that made the decision obvious, and made it easy for people with authority to say yes.

This is what leadership without authority looks like. You see a problem. You build a solution. You gather evidence. You remove friction. You make it happen. The authority to do this doesn’t come from above. It’s already with you.

Within a year, Sarah was promoted to Senior Product Designer. But she’d been leading long before the title recognised it. The title just made official what was already true.

The Three Components of Leadership

We previously established that leadership is about moving people towards a better future, now let’s discuss the three key things it requires: vision, influence, and action. Understanding these components helps you recognise when you’re already exercising leadership and where you might be holding back. We also look at how Sarah specifically demonstrated these in our example.

1. Vision: Clarity About Where You’re Going

You can’t move people towards something if you don’t know what that something is. Vision doesn’t have to be grandiose. It can be as simple as ‘we need a better onboarding flow’ or ‘this feature should prioritise speed over customisation’ or ‘our design system needs better documentation.’ What matters is that you can articulate a desired state that’s meaningfully different from the current state.

As a designer, you develop vision constantly. Every time you critique a design, you’re articulating what ‘better’ looks like. Every time you advocate for a user need, you’re painting a picture of an improved experience. Every time you explain why one solution is stronger than another, you’re expressing a vision. Every time you create a prototype, you’re making a vision tangible. This is vision work. You do it daily. You just might not recognise it as leadership.

In Sarah’s checkout example, her vision was specific: ‘Users should know exactly what’s required before they try to submit the form.’ She could have said ‘improve the checkout flow’ (too vague, could mean anything, gives people no clear direction). She could have said ‘implement real-time validation with custom error messaging and progressive disclosure patterns’ (too technical, loses people who don’t understand the jargon, makes it sound complicated). Instead, she articulated a clear, user-centered outcome that everyone could understand and rally around. An engineer could understand it. A product manager could see the business value. A customer support agent could imagine the impact.

The best visions are simple enough to remember but specific enough to guide decisions. They answer the question: what will be different when we succeed? They create a picture in people’s minds of the future state. They make the destination clear even if the path to get there is still being figured out. They unite different perspectives around a common goal.

2. Influence: The Ability to Bring People Along

Vision without the ability to rally others is just daydreaming. You can have brilliant ideas about what should change, but if you can’t get anyone else to care, nothing happens. Leadership requires getting people to voluntarily align their energy towards your vision. Notice the word: voluntarily. Compliance is just management through coercion. Someone does what you want because they have to, not because they want to. True leadership inspires people to choose to follow.

This is where designers actually have an advantage over people with formal authority. Because you lack the ability to mandate compliance, you’ve had to become experts in genuine influence. You’ve learnt how to build coalitions across functions. You’ve learnt how to craft compelling narratives that resonate with different audiences. You’ve learnt how to demonstrate value through prototypes rather than PowerPoints. You’ve learnt how to facilitate productive conversations where everyone feels heard. You’ve learnt how to get people to say yes when you can’t make them say yes. These are the real mechanisms of leadership.

Sarah’s influence strategy was methodical and thoughtful. She knew that the engineering lead, Marcus, cared about implementation complexity and technical risk. Engineers respect efficiency. They value elegant solutions. They hate unnecessary work. The product lead, Aisha, cared about conversion metrics and revenue impact. Product managers live and die by their numbers. They need to show results. The head of customer support, Jennifer, cared about reducing ticket volume and team stress. Support teams are overwhelmed. Anything that makes their jobs easier is valuable.

So Sarah didn’t make a generic pitch about ‘better user experience.’ She didn’t talk about design principles or Nielsen heuristics or best practices. She had three different conversations, each emphasising the specific benefits that mattered to that stakeholder. She translated her design vision into each person’s language. To engineering: this is easier than what you planned. To product: this makes more money. To support: this reduces your pain.

She also made it easy to say yes. The prototype removed uncertainty about what she was proposing. People could experience it, not just imagine it. They could click through it. They could see exactly what would change. The usability test video provided social proof. It wasn’t just Sarah saying this would work. It was real users demonstrating it worked. The implementation plan showed it wasn’t a massive multi-month project. Three days. Low risk. High reward. Easy decision.

This is influence in action. Understanding what people care about deeply. Framing your idea in their terms. Removing friction from adoption. Addressing concerns before they become objections. Making success feel inevitable rather than risky. Building a path of least resistance towards yes.

3. Action: The Courage to Move

Leadership is active, not passive. Vision and influence mean nothing without action. It’s not enough to have ideas. At some point, you have to make the move. Question the rationale, challenge the assumption, propose the change, push for the decision, build the thing, ship the work, take the risk. Leadership requires doing.

This is often where designers hesitate. We’ve been conditioned by years of organisational socialisation to wait for approval, to defer to product or engineering, to position ourselves as service providers rather than strategic drivers. We’ve been taught that initiative without permission is overstepping our bounds. We’ve internalised the idea that designers design, product decides, and engineering builds. We’ve learnt to stay in our lane. But leadership demands that you act within your sphere of influence, even (especially) when you lack explicit permission.

Sarah didn’t wait to be assigned the checkout project. The company had no formal process for designers to identify and fix problems independently. She didn’t wait for someone to ask for her research findings. Nobody was asking. Nobody was even aware there was research to ask for. She didn’t wait for permission to create a prototype. Her job description didn’t include ‘build unsolicited prototypes in your spare time.’ She didn’t wait for a quarterly planning cycle to prioritise this work. That could take months. By then, the company would have lost hundreds of thousands of pounds to poor conversion.

She saw a problem. She developed a solution. She took action to make it happen. The action came first. The permission came later, after the value was obvious. The recognition came last, after the impact was undeniable.

This is crucial to understand. In most organisations, permission is granted retroactively. You demonstrate capability through action, then people give you more room to act. You prove you can handle ambiguity, so they trust you with harder problems. You show you can ship valuable work independently, so they involve you in bigger decisions. Waiting for permission upfront means you never get the chance to prove yourself. You stay small. You stay safe. You stay stuck.

Of course, this requires judgement and political awareness. You can’t just ignore your organisation’s processes or override your manager’s decisions. You can’t ship changes to production without code review. You can’t make promises to customers without product approval. You can’t spend company money without budget authorisation. But there’s a wide space between reckless insubordination and passive waiting. Most designers operate far too cautiously within that space. We wait when we could act.

The question to ask yourself is: what’s the smallest action I can take that would demonstrate value and build credibility? For Sarah, it was building a prototype, running five usability tests, and bringing her solution into the room. The prototype made the conversation concrete. The research made the case compelling. Speaking up made it visible. That combination created momentum.

Formal vs. Informal Leadership

There are two types of leadership in organisations: formal and informal. Understanding the difference is critical because most designers will spend years (perhaps their entire careers) operating in the informal space. Recognising informal leadership as legitimate leadership changes how you see your role and your impact.

Formal leadership is granted through organisational structure. It comes with titles (Director, VP, Head of), hierarchical authority (you report to me), and institutional power (I control budgets, I make final decisions, I hire and fire). A VP of Design has formal leadership. They can mandate design system adoption. They can veto design decisions that don’t meet quality standards. They can allocate designer time across projects. They can set standards for the entire design function. They operate within established authority structures that everyone recognises and respects.

Informal leadership is earned through trust, competence, and influence. It has no official power but often drives more actual change. It’s the designer everyone goes to for feedback even though they’re not the design lead. It’s the engineer whose technical judgement shapes architectural decisions even though they’re an individual contributor. It’s the product manager who can get any stakeholder aligned even though they have no direct reports. It’s the customer support agent whose insights shape product priorities even though they’re not on the product team. These are informal leaders. They move groups towards better outcomes without positional authority.

Here’s what’s crucial: informal leadership is often more powerful than formal leadership. Formal authority can mandate compliance (‘you will use the design system because I say so, and if you don’t, there will be consequences’) but informal influence generates genuine buy-in (‘I’m using the design system because it makes my work better, faster, and more consistent’). And in knowledge work (where creativity, discretionary effort, and collaboration determine outcomes) buy-in is everything.

You can force someone to attend a meeting. You can’t force them to contribute their best thinking. You can mandate they follow a process. You can’t mandate they care about quality. You can assign them to a project. You can’t assign them enthusiasm for the work. You can tell them what to do. You can’t tell them to innovate. This is why informal leadership matters more than formal authority in creative fields. The most valuable contributions come from people who choose to give them, not people who are forced to.

Most designers operate in the informal leadership space. You lack positional authority, but you have tremendous influence potential. The question is whether you’re leveraging it consciously and strategically. Whether you see yourself as a leader or as someone waiting to be given leadership. Whether you’re acting within your sphere of influence or waiting for a title that might never come.