You don’t need a title or a team to be a leader. You can lead others, regardless of whether they directly report to you.

To learn more about this vital skill, I spoke to Leila Pourhashemi about the top skills that set apart the individual contributors and first-line managers who successfully lead people without formal authority. “They are fearless, can paint the vision, explain why it matters to me, and drive to resolution,” said Pourhashemi, who is Vice President of Business Operations with Ancestry.

Five years into her career, Pourhashemi was working as a Customer Technical Escalations Lead for the printer division at Sun Microsystems, a role that required her to take items escalated by top customers and drive them to resolution. “When I started the average time taken to resolve an item was 60 days,” she recalls.

Convinced that working on these escalations was their highest priority, she made her case, and sought agreement and alignment from others. “I built relationships with the engineering and product leaders and creating a dashboard to hold them accountable to their resolution times.” Within a couple months, that average had dropped to two days.

So where might an aspiring leader find opportunities to lead without authority and demonstrate this type of impact? “Program management is a great opportunity to lead without authority,” says Pourhashemi. “Or just see a gap, fill a gap!”