I mentored seven engineers into leadership roles during my two years at Curve. Not one of them had a title when I started working with them. Not one of them needed one.
They already had influence. People went to them with problems before anyone put "lead" or "manager" in front of their job description. My job was not to create leaders. My job was to notice who already was one and get the org chart to catch up.
This is the whole argument of this post. Titles do not make leaders. They make it official, sometimes years after the fact, sometimes never.
The manager door meaning nothing
I have worked for people with big titles who were unable to get a team to follow them into a meeting, let alone a hard decision. Head of this. VP of something else. Rooms went quiet when they walked in, and not the good kind of quiet.
And I have worked alongside people with no title at all who had a room's full attention the moment they opened their mouth. Not because they were loud. Because when they spoke, it was worth hearing, and people had learned it the hard way, through repetition, through being right when it counted.
A title tells you who has the authority to fire you. It does not tell you who people will follow when the plan falls apart at 4pm on a Friday.
What the research says
This is not only my opinion dressed up as insight. Gallup has tracked this for two decades, across millions of work units, using its Q12 engagement survey. The finding: managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in employee engagement between the best and worst teams in an organization. Not pay. Not perks. Not the mission statement on the wall. Who is running the room.
And it is getting worse, not better. Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found manager engagement dropped from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, and this drop is driving most of the recent decline in employee engagement worldwide. The people with the titles are checking out. Somebody still has to run the room.
There's a psychologist named Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic who has spent his career studying who gets promoted into leadership and why. His research, published through McKinsey, found something uncomfortable: we routinely select leaders based on confidence rather than competence. We mistake the person who talks the most in the meeting for the person who should run it. His conclusion, which I have watched play out in three different companies: leaders need to make other people better. This is the job description. Everything else on the org chart is paperwork.
The seven people nobody called leaders
Back to Curve. We had 43 people across seven teams by the time I left, and the promotion path I built was not "wait for a vacancy and hope your manager notices you." It was: find the engineer already answering questions in Slack nobody assigned to them, already pulling a junior teammate aside to explain a design decision without being asked, already the person a struggling teammate went to instead of their actual manager.
Those seven people were leading before they had the word for it. Giving them the title did not change what they did day to day. It changed who had to listen to them.
This is the honest version of what a promotion is supposed to do. It should catch up to reality, not create it.
99.5% of us have worked for a title with no influence
I wrote a book called Bad Bosses Ruin Lives because the numbers are brutal. My own research found 99.5% of the people I surveyed have had one or more bad bosses in their career. Almost everyone who has ever held a job has sat across from someone with real authority over their paycheck and no real ability to lead them anywhere worth going.
You don't need cruelty to end up on this list. A boss who hovers over every decision, who cannot delegate, who needs to be the smartest person in every room, does plenty of damage without raising their voice once. The title gave them the authority to do this damage. It did not give them the skill to avoid it.
Flip it around and the math gets more hopeful. If titles were the same thing as leadership, this 99.5% figure would mean 99.5% of managers are failing at the job description. What's failing is the assumption pairing the title with the job description in the first place.
How to build influence without waiting for the title
If you are the person already doing the work described above and nobody has noticed yet, here is what I would tell the version of me at Curve who was still figuring this out:
Stop waiting for permission to help people think through a hard problem. Nobody promotes potential. They promote a pattern they have already watched you repeat.
Say the hard thing in the room, not after the meeting. Influence gets built in the moment people remember, not in the hallway conversation where you soften it afterward.
Make somebody else better at their job this week. Not your job. Theirs. This is the whole McKinsey finding in one sentence, and it costs nothing but attention.
And if you already have the title and you are reading this feeling uneasy, ask yourself who on your team would follow you into a hard 4pm decision without being told to. If the honest answer is nobody, the title was never the point. It was only the paperwork, waiting for the real thing to show up.
Who taught you the most about leadership without ever having the title for it?