I am scared of talking about being a leader and I need to get over it.

There's something inside me that says, when I talk about leadership, that I am getting too big for my boots. That I'm putting myself above other people. That this is not the kind of behaviour that is appropriate for a proper human being.

The thing is, I know that good leadership is essential. I deeply value good leadership. The places where I have enjoyed working the most have been those with brilliant leaders. It transforms the feeling of what it means to be at work. It makes everything better. It's a brilliant thing to want to do and to want to provide.

Yet there's something inside me that winces at the thought of calling myself a leader.

I love working with groups of people

I started being in bands at 16. Writing and playing music together. I tried to lead those bands. Although I was a good leader in some ways, I was pretty awful in others. At worst I tried to lead by command and control. I didn't listen much to others or work on things as a group. I had some really painful experiences when those bands broke up. I learned some hard lessons about myself.

At 28 I stopped being in bands and moved back to London. Since then I've done a succession of jobs. Recently I've noticed a pattern in these jobs. I keep doing new roles where I expect to be going back to doing solo work. But as soon as I join I end up working with groups of people to do things together.

In 2008 I joined an organisation as a web manager where I thought I'd just be sitting doing solo coding and editing tasks. I ended up working with the whole organisation to redesign and migrate a website.

In 2011 I switched to being a user experience designer where I thought I'd be sitting making self-contained designs. Instead I ended up working with my clients' organisations to design and build digital products.

In 2015 I joined GDS as a user researcher with the intention of focusing on the craft of being a user researcher. I wanted to stop worrying about managing people and leading teams. I was dismayed to find, when I arrived, that Leisa and Tara had marked me out to lead the user research on the Government as a Platform programme. I now lead a team of 9 user researchers working across 4 products. I am even leading a multidisciplinary product team through the discovery phase as a product owner.

Even though I struggle to say the word leadership out loud, I love this work. This is the work that I am drawn to. It is impossible to drop me in a situation - any situation - and expect me to focus on a single bounded task that doesn't involve other people.

It's just not how I work.

Instead, I look up. I work out what is going on that makes the task not quite right. I meet and talk to the people around me. I start to have ideas about the task, and the task behind that, and all the tasks behind that, and all the people working on all the tasks. I start to have ideas about how all that could be better. And then I'm out there, talking about these ideas, building a consensus that lets us make things better.

I’m uncomfortable with the word leader

It might sound to you that all this angst around the word leadership is ridiculous. I agree. This is why I'm trying to move past it. Like I said at the start, I think it's something inside me that is holding me back.

It reminds me of when I became a designer. At one point Andrew Travers took me aside and told me that I was a designer, that I should call myself a designer, and that I would easily get a job as a designer (he was right on all three counts). Up until that point I would have never, ever used the word designer to describe myself. There was something in him saying it that switched what I thought about myself. It made it OK.

I wish someone could just flick the switch for the word leadership like Andrew did with the word designer.

People are trying. I was talking about how I feel about this to my colleague Holly. I was saying that my fear is that if I start writing about leadership then people will think I'm arrogant and too big for my boots, and she laughed and said Will, literally no one will think that. And it’s not just her. Leisa and Tara expected me to lead a group of user researchers when I joined GDS. My programme have trusted me with a product team to lead. Close, honest friends are encouraging me to get out there and do it.

The signals are there. But for some reason that's not been enough for me.

Honestly, and slightly weirdly, it goes deeper than that. I've been talking about it on and off in counselling. I've had some 1:1 coaching from someone that I trust where this was pretty much all we talked about over two sessions. It's definitely a hangup.

But...I am a leader

It's come to the point where I am spending too much energy on this hangup. I could be spending this on more useful things. So I'm making a choice to move past this.

I am a leader. My job is to lead groups of people to make great things together.

There. I said it. Now perhaps I can stop agonising over the bloody word and start sharing some of the interesting and painful lessons that I’m learning about this new part of my life. Because, believe me, I have plenty to say...

Let me know what you think on @myddelton