I want to set down what I have come to believe about leading people. I have been doing it for a while, and I have watched plenty of people do it badly, myself among them.
Most of it comes down to one thing. It is not about being in charge. It is about taking care of the people in your charge.
That word, charge, is doing a lot of work, and I keep coming back to it. To be in charge sounds like a position. To have someone in your charge sounds like a responsibility, and it is the second meaning that feels true to me. You have not been handed authority over people. You have been made accountable for them, which is a different and much heavier thing.
In practice it is unglamorous. You fight for their pay when they cannot fight for it themselves, in rooms they are not in, and you never mention that you did. You take the blame in public and hand out the credit in public, in that order, especially when it is unfair.
You make sure they have what they need, which is usually not motivation. Nobody needs a speech. They need the blocker cleared, the decision made, the ambiguity resolved, so they can go and do work they are perfectly capable of doing without you standing over them.
And when something goes wrong, the first question I try to ask is what I failed to give them, before what they failed to do. I do not always manage it. But asking it honestly has taught me more than anything I have read.
A designer's job is to serve the person on the other side of the screen. Leading is the same instinct turned inward. Take care of the people in your charge, get out of their way, and most of the time the work looks after itself.