Leaderly Quote: See a gap, fill a gap!
By Jo Miller
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!”
Jo Miller
Jo Miller is a globally renowned authority on women’s leadership. She’s dedicated two decades to helping women advance into positions of influence by leveraging their leadership strengths. Based on her work with hundreds of thousands of women, she developed a pragmatic and powerful roadmap that guides women to become the leaders they aspire to be. Jo shares this proven process in her book Woman of Influence: 9 Steps to Build Your Brand, Establish Your Legacy, and Thrive (McGraw Hill, 2019.)
Jo is CEO of leadership development, consulting and research firm Be Leaderly. Learn more about her speaking engagements at www.JoMiller.com and follow @Jo_Miller on Twitter.

By Jo Miller
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!”

Jo Miller
Jo Miller is a globally renowned authority on women’s leadership. She’s dedicated two decades to helping women advance into positions of influence by leveraging their leadership strengths. Based on her work with hundreds of thousands of women, she developed a pragmatic and powerful roadmap that guides women to become the leaders they aspire to be. Jo shares this proven process in her book Woman of Influence: 9 Steps to Build Your Brand, Establish Your Legacy, and Thrive (McGraw Hill, 2019.)
Jo is CEO of leadership development, consulting and research firm Be Leaderly. Learn more about her speaking engagements at www.JoMiller.com and follow @Jo_Miller on Twitter.