Leadership is NOT a Job Title

It’s a way of being.

Recently, I had the chance to host Dr. Alyssa Westring for a keynote that felt less like a talk and more like a proper conversation about how we actually want to live. Not just how we lead at work, but how we lead our lives. Which, it turns out, is a rather more interesting question.

Dr. Westring is a researcher, educator and co-author of Parents Who Lead, and her thinking cuts through a lot of the noise that tends to surround leadership development. No corporate buzzwords. No hierarchy worship. Just a clear, practical framework for thinking about what kind of leader you actually want to be, and whether your daily life reflects that.

Rethinking what leadership even means

Most of us have inherited a definition of leadership that looks something like: senior title, large team, corner office, authoritative presence in meetings. It is a definition that excludes the vast majority of people before they have even started.

Dr. Westring offered something more useful. Her definition: a leader is someone who brings themselves and others towards a vision of a better future. That is it. No title required.

What makes this definition worth sitting with is what it opens up. Leadership becomes something you practice across your whole life, not just at work. In how you show up for your family, your community, yourself. It becomes less about position and more about intention.

A four-part framework for leading with purpose

Rather than a checklist, Dr. Westring offered a way of thinking. Four questions, essentially, worth returning to regularly.

What do you actually value? Not the values you inherited from a job description or a management course, but the ones that are genuinely yours. Curiosity, courage, humour, whatever they are. The point is that opportunities should align with your values, not the other way around. If you are constantly contorting yourself to fit a role, that is worth noticing.

What does your current reality actually look like? Dr. Westring framed this across four areas: work, family, community, and self. The question for each is the same: are you spending your time and energy in ways that reflect what you say matters to you? Her line that "how you spend your time is the ladder you are climbing" is one of those observations that sounds simple until you actually apply it to your own diary.

Who is in your corner? Leadership is not a solo endeavour, and the people around you either support your direction or quietly undermine it. Being honest with the right people about your goals and ambitions requires a degree of vulnerability that can feel uncomfortable. It is usually worth it. Being selective about who gets access to your bigger thinking is not cynical, it is sensible.

What are you willing to experiment with? This is the bit that tends to make people slightly nervous, which is probably a sign it is the most important. Dr. Westring frames experiments not as high-stakes bets but as hypotheses. You are not committing to an outcome, you are testing an idea. Whether it works or does not, you learn something useful. The goal is curiosity, not perfection.

Why this matters beyond the keynote

What struck me about Dr. Westring's approach is how practical it is without being reductive. There is no pretence that leadership is easy, or that aligning your life with your values is a one-time exercise. It is ongoing, iterative, and occasionally uncomfortable.

But that is rather the point. Leadership as a way of being means it is never finished. You are always somewhere on the journey, which is either reassuring or mildly terrifying depending on where you are standing.

The reminder that it is a journey, not a destination, is one worth holding onto. Especially on the days when the gap between the leader you want to be and the one showing up in your actual life feels a bit wider than you would like.

A question to sit with

When you look honestly at how you spent your time this week, what does that tell you about the ladder you are currently climbing? And is that the ladder you actually want to be on?