We study the fixation time of the identity of the leader, i.e., the most massive component, in the general setting of Aldous's multiplicative coalescent [4, 5], which in an asymptotic sense describes the evolution of the component sizes of a wide array of near-critical coalescent processes, including the classical Erdős-Rényi process. We show tightness of the fixation time in the "Brownian" regime, explicitly determining the median value of the fixation time to within an optimal $O(1)$ window. This generalizes Łuczak's result [31] for the Erdős-Rényi random graph using completely different techniques. In the heavy-tailed case, in which the limit of the component sizes can be encoded using a thinned pure-jump Lévy process, we prove that only one-sided tightness holds. This shows a genuine difference in the possible behavior in the two regimes. The solution to the leader problem in the setting of the Erdős-Rényi random graph played an important role in the study of the scaling limit of the minimal spanning tree on the complete graph [2]. We believe that analogous results, such as those proved herein, will be useful in establishing universality of the intrinsic geometry of the minimal spanning tree across a large class of models.