Been a team lead in title at my company (small software company, out of the start up phase, but was a startup when I joined)) for over a decade. Only figured out how to be a leader in reality over the last 5ish years.

Do you want the title of team lead, or to actually be a leader on your team? Those are often two different things.

Getting the title depends a lot on the politics of your employer. A good place will promote based on merit, others won’t.

Being an actual leader is actually a lot more straightforward: serve the team. Be the driving force behind improving their work lives. That means communicating with them regularly both about what they are finding difficult (and then being a driver in finding a solution) and celebrating them when things go well. It means being a champion for the good ideas others have. It also means asking for help from the team when it’s needed; stay humble.

Through this constant communication a couple of things should start to happen:

• you’ll be able to piece things (solutions, product improvements, bug fixes, etc) more quickly, because your domain and contextual knowledge will be greater than those not serving the team.
• other team members will start coming to you for things, people will naturally gravitate toward those that have proven to be helpful
• the team will start outputting higher quality product
• life for the team will get more enjoyable

Do all that and people will start naturally looking to you.

Judge didn’t bar executing them tho. Didn’t take em long to figure that loophole out. I hate this timeline.