The fact that it's just sort of taken as granted is a frustrating thing for those of us who have wanted, but never been offered, such a position.
1. Leadership = Ownership
2. Organizational priorities > engineering purity
3. Tact > undiluted truth
In order to be able to lead more than one person, you need to be able to first lead one person: yourself. Ownership means taking a responsibility assigned to you, understanding why it's important to the organization objectives (rather than blinding executing), driving it to completion and reporting progress without your manager ever having to poll or prod you.
As engineers, our first instinct is to engineer things the best possible way with the best possible technologies. As managers, we'll need to understand that in a non-ideal world, there are tradeoffs. Sometimes you need to be able to prioritize organizational goals ahead of your engineering preferences. E.g. sometimes you'll need to maintain a legacy codebase a little longer even though you know you want to rewrite using the latest tech; sometimes you'll have to prioritize new features over tech debt etc.
As right-brained/logical individuals, we tend to hold objective reality over all else and tend to communicate it in concentrated form. We may want to be efficient in communications, but sometimes in doing so, we end up making the team inefficient by unnecessarily generating negative emotions within the team members. Communication is a local maximum. The global maximum is the team. In other words, sometimes you must suffer fools gladly, you'll need to learn to tell people no without hurting their egos.
If you exhibit these qualities as an engineer, any good manager will mark you as a lead candidate.
This is correct, but it's important that you never dilute the truth so much that you end up not delivering the whole truth. Obviously, you should avoid ever being in such a situation, but if circumstances are such that you have to choose between delivering the whole truth or tact, choose the truth and clean up afterwards. Hurt pride can be mended, broken trust and untruths left to fester generally can't.
This can be as simple as taking one story end-to-end to production from requirement analysis to deployment and experiment analysis while interacting with different roles (product, engineering, devops) and even explicitly asking your manager(s) for such possibilities. Being the person that knows the progress and owning success is key here, plus you will score some points for being someone that work can be delegated to.
Organising learning groups, guilds is also of help to get visibility within an organisation while still being fairly close to tech as you form a group of people around a topic you're passionate about.
Another important aspect is cross-team collaboration. For example, bringing key people together to solve a problem for the organisation (i.e. spending too much time on deployments, production incidents, repeating the same problems). Calling such situations out and suggesting ways to solve it or collaborating on a solution is another great way to try out leadership skills.
I don't there's a single answer. The "right" path is usually some combination of soft and hard skills, persistence, and dumb luck. Skill and persistence come into play because to a large extent, you are the master of your destiny, corporate or otherwise: you can settle for what's expected of you in a role, or you can go above and beyond, trying to find and fix pressing problems that others didn't even know they have, trying to help others grow, persuading other groups to give you the tools you need, and balancing it all with the reality of the business... Rinse and repeat enough times and you will probably be noticed for good judgment and the ability to get stuff done.
Now, dumb luck comes into play because to some extent, it's also a matter of being at the right stage of your career at the right time and in the right place. In some companies, especially smaller ones, there might be no way to become a manager or a director until somebody retires or is forced out. And if you miss that window, it might be several years until another opportunity to advance presents itself.
As with any other role, there are also many "wrong" paths, depending on the culture of the company; favoritism, cronyism, political horse-trading, bamboozling people, and so forth. But realistically, such things are less common than most people think. It's just easier to be cynical about others than to acknowledge our own personality flaws. We all have some, they weigh us all down; we just need to find a way to work around them and hope for the best.
It also means when you offer solutions and it’s accepted you will become the go to guy / girl for everyone, that’s how people around you will see you as a leader. You took that risk to stick your neck out for them.
You will also then have to learn to work with people learn how to motivate people because now they are coming to you. You can’t just shun them away you have to offer a solution to their problem. If you don’t have an answer empower your people to find a solution.
Leadership is an art form in itself, it can be learned, like any other skill. It takes a shift in mindset from being a worker to a leader.
Another key thing to remember you don’t have to have the “label” before you become a leader. If you act like one the label will come on its own.
I suggest you read / watch “Great Leaders Eat Last” by Simon Sinek. Was an eye opener for me.
What do you do if they then steal your idea?
On that topic, I'm a huge believer in a degree of financial independence, a rainy-day fund [1]. When you don't have to worry about having money for next month's rent, it really changes your outlook on things and makes it easier to make decisions that are just or right for you, without stressing over every possible misstep. And it's pretty easy to build such a fund [2].
[1] https://www.thebillfold.com/2016/01/a-story-of-a-fuck-off-fu...
Execution is the hard part. Demonstrating a knack for it is a good path to leadership.
You pat yourself on the back for a job well done! Your idea got implemented, congratulations.
This is convenient for others, but not for you. They will take advantage of you if you think like that and you not be seen as leadership material.
Either challenge it, leave or find a way to prevent that next time. If you truly have no choice but to put up, then you have no choice. But don't be naive doormat.
If your goal is to see how much good stuff you can coerce into existence for the company then it doesn’t matter who does the work, who takes credit, or even whether anyone realizes anything happened. All that matters for you to hit that goal is the stuff getting done.
Also, leader needs to be able to protect team or company from under-the-belt attempts of customers, suppliers, competitors and such. Some of them will try that for sure and it is leaders job to deal with it.
Or that leaders are not responsible for shaping culture?
Or that leaders are not responsible for protecting/ensuring that company looks capable, creative etc to outside?
If you're brand new, offer to mentor a co-op.
If you've been there for a while, take an active role in helping the newer people get up to speed.
If you're enjoying doing that, tell your boss you'd like to have more opportunities to learn leadership skills.