Hello Mr. ENTJ! I’m not an entj but I’d love to have you answer this question: how do you… be assertive and make everyone see YOU as a leader? I’m still in school and I’d love to thrive in leadership positions but I’m not a natural leader. It would be a pleasure to become one!
See more in the #leadership tag
For starters, don't focus on being the leader-- focus on solving the problem. If you become excellent at solving problems like figuring out what the hell is going on, what to do next, how to do it, and actually do it well, then you will naturally be thrusted into leadership positions (whether you want to or not). This happened to me throughout my life.
A few thoughts on how to achieve this:
Keep an eye on the big picture. What is the problem we're trying to solve? What are the goals we're trying to achieve? Why is it important? Is it even the right problem? A leader must always keep the big picture in mind and drive everyone's actions towards achieving that goal. To do this, learn to not get stuck in the minutiae, not to go down rabbit holes, and to always anchor actions to impact. If it's not impactful, cut it. If it's impactful, do it. Don't miss the forest for the trees. To gauge how well you're doing, ask yourself: "Does everyone know what the end goal is?"
Break down the problem into manageable steps. A leader can take ambitious goals and ambiguous problems then work backwards to define a plan. A leader must establish clarity. To do this, learn to break down goals into workstreams and break down workstreams into individual tasks. To gauge how well you're doing, ask yourself: "Does everyone know how we'll achieve our goal?"
Prioritize ruthlessly. A leader must be able to decide what's more important and what needs to be done first because there will often be more things to do than there is time to do them. To do this, learn to assign values to tasks so that when tough decisions need to be made you can clearly explain how the decision was made. You need to be comfortable saying 'no' more than saying 'yes'. To gauge how well you're doing, ask yourself: "Does everyone know what we're working on first and why?"
Communicate clearly. A leader needs to be able to articulate his/her ideas clearly and consistently. Bad communication is disastrous for teams because lack of clarity results in confusion and confusion results in inaction, chaos, mistakes, and resentment. To do this, learn to communicate often with your team: document things well, set up sources of truth so information is easy to find, attend meetings and share your perspective, hold office hours, have frequent 1:1s, and be as visible as possible whenever doing so. A leader must always actively combat confusion. To gauge how well you're doing, ask yourself: "Does everyone know what is going or are they confused?"
Delegate effectively. A leader needs to be able to trust others and lean on them to get the job done without micromanaging. Teams perform exponentially better when their abilities are trusted and their opinions are heard-- it builds confidence, loyalty, and growth. To do this, get to know your team really well; their goals, strengths, weaknesses, questions, concerns, quirks, etc. Assign work based on that. To gauge how well you're doing, ask yourself: "Is the amount of work fairly distributed across my team or am I taking on too much?"
Be comfortable being uncomfortable. A leader will shoulder a lot of pressure, responsibility, and blame if things go wrong. You need to mentally prepare for this role because it's less about calling the shots and more about shepherding the team in the right direction. To do this, learn to be courageous when facing resistance, open when confronted with mistakes, and humble when praised with success. Invest a lot of your time getting to know the people you work with to build trust because they will give you benefit of the doubt when you inevitably disagree on something. To gauge how well you're doing, ask yourself: "Am I authentically expressing my thoughts and opinions or am I more focused on pleasing people?"
