Don't wait for an invitation to lead.

From the entry level job of distributing the mail throughout an office building to being the CEO of a company, every job description says, we entrust you with power to get a job done. Every job description sets out a formal authorization. It specifies in a formal, explicit way the powers of the job, and the specific services you are trusted to provide with integrity and competence. If it's the person delivering the mail, they are given power, power over people's mail and resources like a motorized cart. They are trusted to do their job. The trust is based on shared values and competence. And they are expected to serve, to deliver the mail accurately and on time. If they start to open people's mail or take it or lose it, violating the trust they've been given, they lose their authority, their job.

Moreover, nearly every job description gives you a reporting relationship, someone senior to you who is authorized by the organization to check and to guide your work. They play a key role evaluating how well you are doing and if you should get reauthorized to stay in your job or get promoted to another. Supervisory authority relationships go all the way to the top of organizations. In other words, an organization is a system of formal authorizations from top-to-bottom and from side-to-side living in a larger society of authorizations.

We authorize people to do things for us every day. The people we formally authorize also have informal authority. When people have informal authority in our lives, we look to them with broader admiration and respect beyond the specific trust we place in them to get a job done. Sometimes the informal authority we bestow takes extraordinary proportions when people gain charismatic and moral authority in our eyes. When we work in an organization, the informal authority that colleagues give you is enormously valuable. Their respect, trust, and admiration is often crucial.

So while formal authority brings with it the considerable and fairly consistent powers of an office, enduring success in this office usually turns on a person's informal authority. In fact, informal authority also comes with a subtle, yet quite substantial power. The power to extend one's reach beyond the limits of the job description. Often, the real go-to person in an organization, the person you seek if you really want to get something done, has a lot more power than her title would suggest because she's gained so much trust and respect. Your formal authority remains constant for long periods of time, changing in quantum jumps occasionally at discrete moments. At hiring, at promotion, or when you leave the job. But because your success in meeting expectations tends to fluctuate week by week, your informal authority is in constant flux. So in practice, you need to track how your informal authority goes up and down over time. How your credibility, respect, approval, and admiration change in people's eyes.

 Formal and informal authority - each comes with its own set of powers. It is important to remember, though, that whatever powers of authority you have is only because other people have conferred them upon you. In doing so, these people have consciously or unconsciously signed a social contract and put their trust in you to serve. It enables us to celebrate, learn from, and affirm the vital practice of leadership that takes place every day by people going beyond the boundaries of their authority, their job description, and by people leading without any authority at all. One reason this is so important is that many people spend years of their lives waiting to get to an authority position, thinking that when they get to that position they can finally start to lead. The word leader is so bonded to the word authority for them that they waste years of leadership opportunity waiting first for that promotion or election to a senior authority position. They don't realize that many people find ways to lead laterally and upwards beyond their authority and even into communities where they have no authority whatsoever.

 Analyze your leadership beyond your authority by analyzing leadership in all four compass headings - upward north with your superiors, laterally east and west across silos and into other organizations, as well as south inside the organization where you do have clear authority. 

#Exercising Leadership: Foundational Principles