Leadership Can't Be Forced

My work Philosophy, as a team lead, is to close the knowledge gap between myself and those working with me. I do this in order to not be the bottleneck on the project. If, for whatever reason, I'm not there then the project can keep going uninterrupted. 

To achieve this goal, there's a lot of training in the form of mentorship, meetings, documentation... 

Recently, I realized that not everyone is comfortable in the "spotlight" of leadership which made me re-think my approach entirely. To be a leader is something you choose to be and not everyone makes that decision. Looking back, I can see that I've lost a lot of time and effort into someone that just didn't want to take on any sort of leadership position within the team. 

Maybe in the future he'll want to but for now he's comfortable doing the necessities and having someone he can turn to for questions when ever he needs.

What I learn from this ordeal is simply this: you can't force someone to do something they don't want to and trying to convince them is a waste of time.

Leaders aren't born - leadership is a skill that can be learned by whoever has the desire for it. It would be great if everyone would be leaders, as it's easier to work with people that can think for themselves, but the reality is that you'll always have people that prefer non-leadership roles and you simply have to learn to work with them.