Leadership isn’t something you have. It’s something you keep doing, or stop doing, every day.

Treating it as a possession makes it something you can win once and then own. It behaves much more like a practice: present on the days you do the things, absent on the days you do not, regardless of what the roster says. Nobody keeps the standing on reputation for very long.

Rather than asking whether you are a leader, ask what you did today that a group could rely on. If the answer is nothing, that is not a verdict on your character, just a description of today. Pick one thing for tomorrow and do it.