THE DEATH OF PERFORMATIVE LEADERSHIP
Why polished leadership is losing its power and what people are learning to trust instead
There is a particular kind of meeting that almost everyone has experienced.
A leader stands in front of the room and talks about openness. They encourage people to challenge ideas, raise concerns and contribute honestly. The language is warm and progressive, and there may even be a slide about psychological safety, shared values or bringing your whole self to work. Then someone does exactly what they have been invited to do. They question the decision, point out a problem or introduce information that makes the conversation less comfortable.
The atmosphere changes almost immediately. The leader becomes defensive. The concern is reframed as negativity, the person is interrupted or the conversation is quickly moved on. Nothing openly hostile may happen, but the room notices the difference between the invitation and the response. By the end of the meeting, everyone has received a much clearer message than the one written on the slide: openness is encouraged, provided it does not challenge the person with the most power.
I feel this is why performative leadership has become so exhausting. It is not simply that people dislike polished speeches or corporate language and it is that they are constantly being asked to accept the performance of a value while living with evidence that contradicts it.
For the purpose of this discussion, I am not using performative leadership as a formal psychological diagnosis by the way. I am not a doctor. I am using it to describe leadership that places greater emphasis on displaying the recognised signals of good leadership than on accepting the discipline, discomfort and consequences required to practise it. Sometimes that performance is cynical. Just as often, I suspect the leader genuinely believes their own language. The problem is not always dishonesty. It is that the image they hold of their leadership has become more influential than the experience of the people being led.
For a long time, that distinction was difficult to see from the outside. Now, it is becoming almost impossible to ignore.
PERFORMATIVE LEADERSHIP WAS BUILT FOR A DIFFERENT ERA
There was a time when looking like a leader and being a leader were often treated as roughly the same thing. Confidence was mistaken for competence, polished communication was interpreted as conviction and a strong public image could carry authority for years without being meaningfully tested against everyday behaviour. Scary thought, really.
That was partly because most people experienced leaders from a distance. Customers saw advertising, interviews and official statements. Employees saw the version of senior leadership presented at conferences, town halls or annual events, while many of the decisions that shaped the organisation remained behind closed doors. Reputation was largely constructed from the top down, and the people closest to a leader’s behaviour had relatively few public ways to challenge the official story.
That distance has narrowed dramatically. Employees can compare experiences across workplaces, former staff can speak publicly, internal messages can travel beyond the room in which they were written and leaders now publish their beliefs in searchable, permanent form. Social media has blurred the boundary between internal and external organisational life, making workplace experiences more visible and allowing audiences to examine the relationship between what an organisation claims and what its people describe.
This does not mean every public criticism is accurate, or that every contradiction proves a leader is fraudulent by any means. Organisations are complicated, accounts can conflict and even principled people behave inconsistently at times. What has changed is the volume of evidence available. A leader’s keynote is no longer assessed only as a keynote. It can be compared with employee testimony, past decisions, public records and the leader’s response when their authority is most likely, going to be challenged.
I do not think people have necessarily become more cynical. I think they have become better investigators and have a new expectation towards transparency in 2026.
The old model of leadership relied on controlling the story whilst the emerging model is being judged by whether the story survives contact with the receipts.
WE HAVE ALWAYS CONFUSED THE APPEARANCE OF LEADERSHIP WITH LEADERSHIP ITSELF
It would be easy to blame social media for making performative leaders more visible, but that would ignore something more uncomfortable - we have always been vulnerable to the leadership cues that are easiest to observe.
Confidence is visible. Competence often takes time to establish. Certainty sounds decisive in a meeting, while intellectual honesty may initially sound less impressive because it generally includes doubt, complexity and the possibility of being wrong. Charisma can be experienced immediately. Now, judgement usually becomes visible only after a series of decisions and their consequences.
After going down this rabbit hole, I found something that helped explain the gap. Research into narcissism and leadership suggests that narcissistic people can be more likely to be seen as leadership material, but that does not necessarily mean they are more effective once they are in the role. They also tend to rate their own leadership more highly than the people around them do. That does not mean every confident or charismatic leader is a narcissist. It simply suggests that the qualities that help someone look like a leader are not always the same qualities that help them lead well.
That distinction may explain why performative leadership can survive for so long. Organisations often select leaders through moments in which presentation carries disproportionate weight: interviews, pitches, board presentations, networking, public speaking and high-stakes meetings. The person who projects the clearest certainty can appear more capable than the person who is quietly processing risk, inviting expertise or recognising what they do not yet know.
The system can therefore reward the performance before it has enough evidence of the practice.
Once appointed, leaders are often rewarded again for visibility. They become the spokesperson for collective work, the face attached to results and the person expected to produce an immediate answer. Over time, the pressure to look decisive can become stronger than the obligation to remain curious. The leader learns that confidence creates reassurance, polished language creates approval and admitting uncertainty can be interpreted as weakness.
I want to make something clear here. Performative leadership is not always the work of a terrible person. Sometimes it is the predictable result of a culture that repeatedly promotes what leadership looks like, then fails to examine what it feels like to be led by it.
PEOPLE DO NOT DISTRUST IMPERFECTION. THEY DISTRUST INCONSISTENCY
One of the assumptions behind performative leadership is that people need leaders to appear almost faultless. I am not convinced.
Most people who have worked inside an organisation understand that leadership involves incomplete information, competing interests and decisions that will not satisfy everyone. They know leaders will occasionally misjudge a situation, communicate badly or change direction. What becomes difficult to tolerate is not ordinary imperfection, but the repeated contradiction between the standards leaders announce to the world/team and the standards they appear willing to live by.
Organisational researcher Tony Simons described this as behavioural integrity: Essentially, the perceived alignment between a manager’s words and deeds, including whether promises are kept and whether stated values resemble enacted ones. The key word is perceived. Employees cannot directly inspect a leader’s intentions, private reasoning or moral character. They make sense of leadership through patterns they can observe.
They notice whether accountability reaches the person in charge. They remember who was protected when something went wrong. They compare the promise of transparency with the information that is withheld when transparency becomes embarrassing. They watch whether the leader who publicly champions kindness also does not treat people well around them, or whether the leader who claims to welcome challenge becomes cold towards anyone who disagrees.
This is why a leader can make an unpopular decision and retain trust. If the reasoning is clear, the process is consistent and the decision reflects principles that have been visible over time, people may dislike the outcome without concluding that the leadership itself is questionable. Equally, a relatively small incident can damage trust when it reveals that a heavily promoted value disappears the moment it becomes inconvenient.
The mistake is rarely the whole story. What matters is what the mistake appears to expose.
Performative leadership attempts to repair this problem by increasing the volume of the message. Another values workshop is held. A new statement is released. The leader speaks more openly about accountability. Yet behavioural integrity cannot be restored through language alone, because the original damage was created by the distance between language and action.
Once words and behaviour begin competing with each other, behaviour usually wins.
A VALUE ONLY BECOMES BELIEVABLE WHEN IT COSTS SOMETHING
Most leadership values are easy to support in ideal conditions. Fairness is straightforward when everyone agrees. Transparency feels admirable when the information is flattering. Courage is an attractive idea when nothing important is at risk, and listening is easy when the feedback confirms the decision already made.
The real test comes when the value demands a cost.
Fairness becomes meaningful when it requires a leader to confront a high performer everyone else is afraid to lose. Transparency becomes believable when the truth may cause embarrassment. Accountability becomes real when the consequence reaches upwards rather than being redirected towards the person with the least power. Openness becomes credible when another person’s contribution is allowed to alter the outcome.
This resembles a principle studied across economics, communication and behavioural science: signals tend to become more credible when they are difficult to imitate without genuine commitment. Researchers examining costly signalling have argued that listeners use perceived costs—including time, effort, reputation and personal risk—as information when deciding whether a message is honest. The theory is more nuanced than the simplistic claim that every expensive gesture is automatically sincere, but it offers a useful explanation for why action carries a different weight from declaration.
Saying that people matter is a low-cost signal. Protecting them when doing so is politically inconvenient is a higher-cost one. Announcing a commitment to honest feedback requires very little. Thanking someone whose feedback publicly exposed a weakness, then changing the process because they were right, asks much more of the leader’s ego and status.
This may be why audiences have become suspicious of symbolic leadership. They have seen organisations celebrate values that appear to place no meaningful restriction on the behaviour of the powerful. The statement creates reputational benefit, while the people below it continue carrying the cost.
If a value disappears the moment it costs the leader something, it was never a value. It was part of the performance.
THE PERFORMANCE CREATES A SECOND JOB FOR EVERYONE ELSE
When leaders say one thing and reward another, employees are forced to understand two organisations at once.
The first is the official organisation. It exists in onboarding documents, strategy presentations, staff emails and public statements. It says initiative is encouraged, ideas can come from anywhere and people should speak candidly. The second is the operational organisation. It exists in consequences. It teaches people which questions are safe, which personalities are protected, how much honesty is genuinely tolerated and whether a mistake will be treated as information or evidence of personal failure.
The distance between those two organisations creates a hidden workload. People begin translating every message. When the leader asks for feedback, they calculate whether feedback is truly being requested or whether agreement is expected. When the organisation announces change, they search for the decision that has probably already been made. When someone says, “My door is always open,” they remember what happened to the last person who walked through it.
This goes beyond frustration but it also redirects attention and intelligence away from the work itself. Employees spend energy managing impressions, softening information, documenting interactions and anticipating emotional reactions. They learn how to present an idea so the leader can experience it as their own. They decide which facts can be shared immediately and which must wait until the person in charge is in the right mood.
In my journey down this rabbit hole, it lead me towards Sigal Barsade’s research into emotional contagion. It helped explain why those moods matter. In a laboratory study of group decision-making, the emotions expressed by one person spread through the group and influenced cooperation, conflict and perceived task performance. A leader’s emotional behaviour is especially visible because people naturally look towards power for clues about what is safe, rewarded or dangerous.
This is where performative leadership becomes far more consequential than an irritating LinkedIn post or an empty values statement. A leader may speak about calm while transmitting panic. They may promote innovation while reacting to failed experiments with blame. They may tell people to challenge the status quo while treating disagreement as a challenge to their identity.
The official message is only one layer of communication. The room is also watching the tightened expression, the sudden silence and the change in warmth towards the person who said the difficult thing. Those details become the practical handbook for how to survive inside the culture.
Eventually, people stop using their full capacity to advance the mission because too much of that capacity is being used to navigate the leadership.
SILENCE IS NOT AGREEMENT. IT IS OFTEN EVIDENCE THAT THE ROOM HAS LEARNT THE RULES
Performative leaders can become trapped inside a remarkably convincing feedback loop, a circuit if you will.
They tell people they welcome honesty. Someone tests that claim by raising a concern. The leader dismisses the issue, explains why the person has misunderstood or quietly makes the interaction unpleasant enough that others take notice. The next meeting is smoother. Fewer objections are raised, questions become safer and difficult information arrives later—if it arrives at all.
From the leader’s position, the culture may appear to be improving. There is less conflict, greater apparent alignment and fewer people “bringing problems without solutions”. What the leader may actually be observing is not agreement, but adaptation.
Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety offers a useful explanation for what is happening here. In simple terms, people are more likely to speak honestly, admit mistakes and test new ideas when they believe doing so will not come back to punish them. That does not mean avoiding standards, difficult conversations or accountability. It means people need to feel that raising a concern will not immediately become a problem for them personally.
The same pattern appears in research around employee voice and silence. People do not speak up simply because they have something useful to say. They also weigh up whether it feels safe and whether anyone is likely to listen. When the personal risk feels high, or when experience has taught them that speaking will change nothing, silence can become the most rational response.
This creates one of the most dangerous outcomes of performative leadership: the leader continues receiving the emotional benefits of appearing open while losing access to the information openness was supposed to provide.
Problems become surprises. Risks appear to emerge from nowhere. The leader asks why nobody said anything earlier, unaware that the organisation has spent months carefully teaching people not to.
The absence of dissent is not proof that leadership has created alignment. Sometimes it is proof that the room has completed its risk assessment.
AUTHENTICITY HAS BECOME ITS OWN PERFORMANCE
The obvious answer to performative leadership appears to be authenticity. Leaders are encouraged to be more vulnerable, speak personally and show the human being behind the title. In principle, this makes sense. Excessively controlled leadership can create distance, while appropriate honesty can make people feel trusted and understood.
The problem is that authenticity has now developed its own recognisable performance.
A leader can tell a carefully rehearsed story about a past failure while remaining incapable of admitting a current one. They can disclose anxiety, cry in front of a team or write openly about self-doubt while continuing to punish anyone who threatens their preferred self-image.We see this often in the public space on social media. Vulnerability can become highly managed: personal enough to produce warmth and emotive connection with their audience, but not current enough to reduce status or allow another person to change the narrative.
This is why I feel we have reduced authenticity to the wrong question. We ask whether a leader appears real, when we should be asking whether reality is allowed to reach them.
Can the leader take in information that contradicts their judgement? Can they hear that their intentions did not produce the experience they imagined? Can they remain in the conversation when another person’s account makes them uncomfortable? Can they revise a position without experiencing revision as humiliation or a personal attack?
Research on expressed humility describes it through behaviours such as acknowledging limitations and mistakes, recognising the strengths of others and remaining teachable. Across multiple studies, expressed humility was associated with positive team and leadership outcomes, including greater engagement and, in one field study, lower voluntary turnover. Humility in this sense is not softness, passivity or a lack of confidence. It is the capacity to hold authority without requiring infallibility.
That may be the line between genuine and performative vulnerability. Genuine vulnerability creates the possibility that something will change. Performed vulnerability creates the impression of openness while leaving the distribution of power untouched.
The most meaningful sign of authenticity is not how much a leader reveals about themselves. It is how much truth other people are permitted to bring into the room.
AI HAS MADE POLISH CHEAP
There is another reason performative leadership may be reaching the end of its long and robust life.
Until recently, producing impressive leadership communication required at least some combination of time, writing ability, strategic support and money. A polished article, speech or values statement was not proof of substance, but the effort involved gave the final product a certain beacon of value. It suggested preparation, access to expertise or a deliberate investment into whatever the message is.
Generative AI has changed that calculation. A leader can now produce a warm staff email, a thoughtful LinkedIn post, a compassionate redundancy message, a purpose statement or an apparently reflective article in minutes. The communication may be clear, intelligent and emotionally appropriate. It may also tell us almost nothing about the judgement, courage or behaviour of the person publishing it.
Research into AI-generated language shows how complicated this has already become. People are not consistently good at identifying AI-written text, and AI-generated language can be experienced as clear and persuasive. At the same time, trust may decline when people suspect that apparently personal communication has been generated or automated, particularly when emotional sincerity is important. Studies of AI-assisted brand communication have also found that fully automating content can reduce perceived authenticity compared with using AI as an assisting tool.
This does not mean leaders should avoid AI. Used well, it can help people structure ideas, communicate more accessibly and spend less time staring at a blank page. The issue is not the tool. It is what happens when the quality of the wording is mistaken for the quality of the leadership behind it.
AI, in short, has exposed how much leadership authority we were already assigning to polished language and allowing us to see past the veil of performative leadership.
When everyone can manufacture the emotive gestures of thoughtfulness, thoughtfulness must be demonstrated somewhere else. When everyone can publish empathy, people begin looking at who carries the consequences of the decision. When everyone can produce the language of accountability, attention shifts towards whether anyone powerful is actually held accountable.
The cheaper the performance becomes, the more valuable the evidence becomes.
TRUST IS SHIFTING FROM IMAGE TO TRACEABLE CONGRUENCE
I do not believe this means leadership communication no longer matters. Leaders still need to explain decisions, articulate values and give people language for where an organisation is going. Silence from leadership can create its own uncertainty, and poor communication can weaken even principled action.
What is changing is the burden of proof.
A statement about inclusion now prompts people to inspect who gets heard, promoted and protected. A commitment to wellbeing is measured against workloads and the treatment of people under pressure. A claim of openness is compared with the leader’s response to inconvenient information. The message is no longer being assessed in isolation. It is being placed beside a growing record of observable decisions.
Research into leader hypocrisy offers a useful explanation for why this matters. When people repeatedly see a gap between what a leader says and what they actually do, trust begins to erode. Once that happens, employees are less likely to speak openly, share concerns or believe that telling the truth will lead anywhere useful. The exact dynamics are complex, but the pattern itself is easy to recognise: when words and behaviour no longer match, speaking up starts to feel both pointless and risky.
This may be the deeper reason performative leadership now feels so dated. It relies on people judging a leader by the symbols of leadership—carefully chosen language, polished statements and visible displays of empathy—at the exact moment those symbols have become easier to manufacture and the behaviour behind them has become easier to examine.
People are no longer asking only, “Does this person sound like a leader?”
They are asking whether the leadership is proven.
Where did the stated value alter a decision? What happened when the leader was wrong? Who was protected when pressure arrived? Did the standard remain stable when applying it became personally expensive? Does the person behave recognisably across audiences, or does the leadership identity change depending on who holds power in the room?
Trust is moving away from the perfectly managed image and towards something less glamorous but far more durable: repeated congruence.
THE FUTURE BELONGS TO LEADERS WHO ARE LEGIBLE
For years, the ideal leader has often been described as charismatic, visionary, inspiring or that magic word and at this point overused word - authentic. Those qualities can matter, but I think the next era of leadership will place greater value on something we discuss far less: legibility.
A legible leader is not completely predictable, because leadership often involves changing information and difficult trade-offs. They are predictable in a more important sense. People understand how they are likely to approach power, responsibility and truth. Their principles remain recognisable when the conditions change.
They do not describe accountability as a shared value and then distribute its consequences only downwards. They do not invite challenge and withdraw warmth when it arrives. They can make a decision others dislike without manufacturing false consensus around it. They can say, “I do not know yet,” without believing their authority has disappeared, and they can say, “You were right,” without needing to regain control of the moment.
Let’s set something straight right now. This is not leadership without performance. Every public role contains some degree of presentation, and leaders will always need to communicate with intention. Nor is it a demand for flawless consistency. Human beings are complicated, values can conflict and circumstances genuinely change.
Legibility is the willingness to make those tensions visible rather than hiding them beneath perfect language. It allows people to see how a decision was reached, what was considered, what changed and where responsibility sits. It gives others enough evidence to understand the leadership, even when they do not agree with every choice.
Most people do not need their leaders to be inspirational every day. They need to know whether telling the truth will make them a target. They need to know whether the rules remain intact when a powerful person breaks them. They need to know whether the values on the wall bear any relationship to life inside the organisation.
Performative leadership will not disappear because leaders stop publishing values, using social media or speaking about vulnerability. It will lose its power when people stop mistaking those things for evidence.
The future will not belong to the leaders who perform humanity most convincingly. It will belong to those whose humanity remains recognisable when holding power becomes uncomfortable.
Research foundation
The central argument is informed by Tony Simons’ work on behavioural integrity, Amy Edmondson’s research into psychological safety, Elizabeth Morrison’s research on employee voice and silence, Sigal Barsade’s study of emotional contagion, Bradley Owens and colleagues’ work on expressed humility, research on leader emergence and narcissism, costly signalling theory and emerging studies of trust and authenticity in AI-mediated communication.
ABOUT SARAH CASSIM
Sarah Cassim is an Australian business leader, writer and public commentator exploring how influence, visibility, leadership and trust are changing. A multi-award-winning founder and community advocate, Sarah works across business, media and leadership, identifying the patterns behind how people build authority, shape culture and create meaningful influence.
Her Insights examine the gap between what we are told about leadership and visibility—and what human behaviour shows us is actually happening.
For speaking, media, partnerships or strategic enquiries, contact Sarah