Leaders lead no matter what their job title is. If you think being a manager is what is needed to command respect then I think your view of leadership is skewed and you are only going to be authoritarian. If you want to grow focus on the outcomes you are achieving, engaging directly with the outcomes of the business and accelerating those is the way to get ahead. Frequently I see engineers who believe their work is to write code, this is not the right mental model, great engineers solve business problems through engineering, process design and at times simply through leadership and saying no. Ticket monkeys whose job is to code what is on a jira ticket and nothing but that, are limited in their use.