My doubts about becoming a group leader

It was a challenging week. The head of our group announced that he would like to retire and pass the leadership to me. I would like to feel like a group leader, but I am not. I feel like a mediocre researcher who tries her best to become better. Things are improving, but they are not where I would like them to be. How could I actually lead any group to greatness? And will I have time to improve myself alongside new managerial and administrative tasks? To work on my own research and become a great researcher as well? To do real science?

After the announcement, I already had to deal with several issues that I really didn't know how to solve. I immediately started to feel responsible for everything happening around me—the finances, the relationships between people, collaborations, and research papers—and I could not shake this weird feeling off my shoulders. Do I really want to do this? I know that if it does not go well, I will be overwhelmed with emotions and have terrible years ahead of me. The only option is for everything to go well. But that is rather from fairy tale land, right?

My brain started to burst with ideas, plans, and enthusiasm. I created a great vision for the group, for communication and knowledge sharing, for team building, for everything you can imagine. Within two days, I generated ideas that could cover my entire life. Alongside this, I felt a real urge to become better. To start learning again in a more organized way—more programming, more Bayesian statistics, more deep learning—and I immediately opened Coursera. Because one thing I definitely know is that I have to improve myself if I want to move this group forward. And that is what I truly want.