Plenty of people with the title "manager" aren't actually leading anyone. Plenty of people with no title at all are the person a whole team quietly orients around. The title and the leadership are two different things, and mixing them up is what makes people wait for permission they don't actually need.
Watch any team closely enough and you'll notice this pattern: when something goes wrong, or something needs deciding, people don't necessarily turn to whoever has the most senior job title. They turn to whoever has consistently been the calmest, most competent, most honest presence in the room over time. That person accumulated something no org chart grants automatically, a kind of standing trust that gets built one interaction at a time, long before any promotion shows up.
You don't become a leader when someone gives you a title. You become one when people start looking to you for direction.
This is genuinely good news if you don't have a title yet, because it means you're not actually waiting on anything external to start building it. The behaviors that create this kind of informal leadership are available to you right now, in your current role, regardless of what's on your business card.
A few of those behaviors, specifically: being the person who says the honest thing in a meeting when it would be easier to stay quiet. Being the person whose word is reliable enough that "I've got it" actually means it's handled. Being the person who makes the people around them better, not just their own output. None of these require authority over anyone. All of them are noticed, even when they're not immediately rewarded.
The mistake to avoid is confusing this with self-promotion. Leading without a title isn't about making sure people notice you're capable, it's about actually being the person others can depend on, often quietly, without needing credit attached to every instance of it. The credit tends to arrive on its own, later, as a reputation rather than a single moment. People remember who showed up consistently far more clearly than they remember any individual thing that person said.
It's also worth being honest about the limits of this. Influence without authority can shape decisions, but it can't replace the actual authority to make final calls, allocate resources, or set direction for a team. At some point, if you're carrying real leadership weight without the title to match, that gap is worth naming directly, to yourself, and eventually to whoever can actually change your title. But that conversation goes far better once you've already built the track record than if you try to have it first.