For twenty years, I introduced myself with a title that implied scale, accountability, a team, a budget, a place in a hierarchy that confirmed — to me and to everyone else — that leading was happening. With every promotion, the scale grew — and so did the confirmation that I was progressing.
I knew what leadership looked like. I had lived inside its architecture long enough that the shape of it felt natural: the room you were responsible for, the people who reported to you, the decisions that required your sign-off, the organisation that conferred legitimacy on everything you did.
Take the badge away, as I wrote in the first post of this series, and the question that follows is not just who are you — the question is, can you still lead without the structure that made it legible?
Seven months into a portfolio transition, I am still working out my answer.
Unlearning Status quo Leadership
Most of what has been written about leadership assumes the presence of a formal role. The majority of leadership research has been developed based on studies of people in formal managerial positions, people who were appointed, confirmed, and accountable within an organisation. The definition that flows from this is that leadership means positional power. A title. People below you in a structure. Authority that flows downward.
This is not just an academic frame. It is a wiring. Spend twenty years in the corporate world and you shape a mental model of what leadership looks, feels, and sounds like.
When I decided to build a portfolio career rather than move to another organisation, that wiring became visible in a new way. The questions were practical at first — how do I structure my time? How do I position myself? How do I build across different work streams? But underneath them was a harder question that took longer to surface: what does leading mean when there is no institution to confer it?
The Shift from “Leader” to Leading
A frame I found useful came from an unexpected place. Julia Middleton’s book If That’s Leading, I’m In makes one move that most leadership writing doesn’t: she insists on leading as a verb rather than leader as a noun. The distinction matters more than it first appears. Leader suggests something rigid — a position to which you are appointed, a role that rapidly becomes a status. Leading is different: full of Energy, ever-changing, personal. It does not require appointment. It requires direction, the willingness to catalyse others, and enough connection to your own Essence to generate something real. And leading sits between the two.
Julia’s First expedition which shaped the book proposes a new definition for leading: catalysing people’s ideas and actions with purpose, motivation and momentum to reach a goal and a shared vision.
This definition and my own career transition open the question whether what most of my corporate leading experience was leading in this sense — or a version shaped by what the institution required of me, which is not quite the same thing?
Leading Without a Title
The honest way to test that question is to remove the institution and see what remains. In the months after I left, I noticed what I kept doing without being required to. The curiosity persisted — reading, deepening my understanding, reaching out to a wide range of people to test my views. The drive to connect contradictory threads until something clarified. The need to contribute to a debate rather than simply observe it. None of that needed a calendar invite or a performance framework to keep happening. It just did.
And equally telling was what stopped. Presenting myself without a large organisation behind my name felt awkward at first and then, gradually, liberating. Without the corporate guardrails, my views could be more original, less moderated for institutional fit. And the informal leading continued: although I no longer had a say on people’s careers, many continue to reach out for advice and guidance.
Here is what leading has actually looked like since my transition.
My professional title now reads: Advisor and Researcher, Education-Workforce Coordination. Not Managing Director. Not Leader of anything. No hierarchy implied anywhere in it. Just the work, named plainly. That title is itself a small statement about what this chapter is — and what kind of leading it requires.
The intellectual and civic work is one register. Researching the infrastructure of education-workforce coordination — why good partnerships between learning institutions and employers fail to scale, what the missing connective tissue actually is. Contributing that thinking to conferences, to policy conversations, to academic partnerships still forming. Writing publicly about it. This is leading in the sense Julia means: catalysing a conversation, shaping how a question gets asked, bringing a voice to a problem that is under-examined. No organisation required. No team required. The influence, where it exists, is earned each time.
The Women Emerging expedition is another register. I am a participant and an Explorer, not a leader by any formal designation. But I interviewed many of the 29 Explorers before the group first met and wrote their profiles — the documents that introduced them to each other. Julia said they were beautiful. One Explorer wrote to the group: I will work hard to become that woman described there.Being confirmed as leading — without a title, without a role, simply through the quality of attention I had brought to each person — felt different from institutional confirmation. Quieter. More enduring. More mine.
And then there is the community aspect. In Albanian, valle means circle dance. When I chose it last year as my word to signify leading, I described it as everyone in the circle mattering, each person’s presence fuelling the collective movement. My transition is showing that a portfolio career depends building the circle — finding the people, creating the conditions, making the space — is itself a form of leading. You don’t need to be appointed to the centre of it.
Leading Self
The hardest register to name is also the most unfamiliar: leading self.
Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, in Immunity to Change, argue that adult development requires us to become the authors of our own meaning rather than having meaning written for us by our environment. For most of my career, the institution was doing a significant share of that authorship — confirming direction, providing structure, reflecting back a version of who I was. Without it, the authorship falls entirely to me. The daily work of directing my own attention. Choosing which thread to follow. Staying oriented when the external compass is gone and no one is watching to see if you stay on course.
This turns out to be its own form of leading. Not the most visible kind, but perhaps the most foundational.
A Women Emerging interview last year asked when I first realised I was leading. My answer surprised me when I read it back: as a Fulbright Scholar from Albania in the United States. No formal role. A sense of responsibility to represent, build bridges, open doors. That was leading before any institution confirmed it. The portfolio transition is, in some ways, a return to that condition — before the structure, before the title made it legible to everyone else.
Rethinking Leading Beyond Roles, Titles & Hierarchies
So is this still leadership? By the conventional definition, probably not. There is no team in the traditional sense. No budget I am accountable for. No hierarchy placing me at a particular point on an organisational chart.
By Julia’s definition — leading as a verb, catalysing people’s ideas and actions toward a shared goal — it looks more like yes. The conversation being shaped around education and workforce. The conditions being created for 29 women to reflect more honestly on how they lead. The daily work of not losing the thread of who I am while everything else is being rebuilt.
The transition has not resolved the question so much as forced me to take it seriously. Which, I am beginning to think, might be the point.
About the Author
Anila DeHart is an Advisor, Researcher, and Executive Educator on education-workforce coordination and future-of-work. She examines coordination mechanisms that enable sustainable education-workforce partnerships and equitable pathways from learning to meaningful work. Current collaborations include Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) on university-employer partnership infrastructure and the University of Oxford’s AI in Education (AIEOU) 2026 Shared Research Agenda on Future of Education, Work and Institutions.
With twenty years at Deloitte, most recently as Global Managing Director leading talent strategy and workforce transformations for 500,000+ professionals globally, Anila brings deep expertise in future-ready skills systems and organisational change at scale. Her career began in higher education, teaching at universities in Central Europe and as a Fulbright scholar in US, and leading organisational development and strategic recruitment at the University of Arizona.
Anila serves as Executive Coach and Leadership Facilitator at Headspring Executive (Financial Times-IE Business School joint venture). She regularly briefs industry forums on transformation and skills development, and advocates for societal equity through initiatives supporting career advancement for youth and underprivileged groups.
