The Depth Dilemma: Why Skimming Leadership Development Creates Faux Leaders

There are tens of thousands of books … millions of pages …thousands of hours of content... billions of dollars spent on leadership development. 

And yet, there are still so many sources pointing to a leadership skills gap across organizations of all sizes and industries.  

I was recently reading Arthur Brooks’ latest book, “The Happiness Files,” and he suggested that there comes a time when you need to shift your mindset from addition to subtraction or from your life being a canvas to being a sculpture.  In the space of leadership development, I suggest you move from collector to curator, because collecting alone lacks depth, which creates the conditions for an individual to become a faux leader.

Faux leaders are individuals who adopt the appearance of leadership without embodying its substance. They often rely on polished language, positional authority, or curated optics; however, these leaders avoid the deeper work of self-awareness, accountability, and adaptive growth.

Faux leaders may look impressive on paper, but they lack the integrity, relational depth, and strategic clarity needed to build trust and drive meaningful change.

The lack of depth results in short-term results and often creates chaos and confusion during times of uncertainty or change. Becoming a faux leader often starts with how they approach leadership development: as a collector of information or a curator who carefully chooses and deepens their knowledge to deepen their competence and connection with others.

Collector: A collector is someone who gathers and keeps items of interest, sometimes based on personal taste, value, or significance.

Curator: A curator is someone who selects, organizes, and oversees with care; someone who carefully chooses

Whereas a curator organizes and interprets what they gather, a collector’s focus is primarily on acquisition and possession, assembling things that hold meaning, rarity, or beauty. In terms of faux leadership, a collector cares more about appearing to have learned something, instead of the actual learning and growing needed to deepen leadership skills.

The Collector Leader

A collector leader gathers information, frameworks, credentials, or leadership “tools," but often without integration or discernment. I will say that I love new frameworks and tools; they can often be the building blocks of strong leadership practice. But, if they sit on shelves or are only recited from memory instead of being embraced, the collector is breeding grounds to be and to stay a faux leader.

• Focus: accumulation; may be of content, techniques, or achievements.

• Motivation: to have or display knowledge and capability.

• Behavioral markers: attends many trainings, quotes many thought leaders, uses popular jargon, but may not translate it into meaningful leadership practice.

• Risk: surface-level understanding; a sense of leadership built on quantity rather than depth, which is a hallmark of Faux Leadership™.

Collectors possess knowledge; curators apply wisdom.

The Curator Leader

A curator leader deliberately selects, synthesizes, and contextualizes what they encounter, whether it be ideas, feedback, or lessons. The curator turns knowledge and information into something coherent and useful for others.

• Focus: curation; discerning what matters and shaping it into insight. Curator leaders also look for gaps in their skills and seek to fill them with depth of knowledge.

• Motivation: to make meaning and create value for their teams or organizations. These leaders are learning for more than performance reasons or to put a degree or credential on the wall behind them; they learn to grow and to bring others on the learning journey.

• Behavioral markers: connect ideas across domains, translate experience into learning, and discard what doesn’t serve growth. These leaders can place knowledge into context and help others to apply and see the relevance, advancing collective efforts and adding clarity during times of uncertainty and change.

• Outcome: depth, relevance, and originality, which are the opposite of performative leadership. These are the leaders who can solve their way through tough problems and face challenges, not hiding behind position or jargon when important work needs to be done.

Curators don’t just consume leadership content; they cultivate leadership capability.

Collectors vs. Curators: The Divide Between Imitation and Integration

In the leadership development world, it’s easy to become a collector. In fact, we all start off as collectors because we don't yet know what we are working to curate. Collectors gather; they attend conferences, stack certificates, quote bestsellers, and accumulate frameworks. Their libraries are full (often with unread books), and their notebooks may be impressive. But collection is not the same as comprehension or application.

Collector leaders are driven by the optics of growth rather than its substance. They accumulate concepts the way some people collect art, prized for display rather than transformation. Their leadership language may be fluent but not embodied. They sound evolved but act unchanged. These behaviors can be the quiet engines of Faux Leadership™, a leadership style that mimics wisdom without integrating it.

By contrast, curator leaders are meaning-makers. They discern what is essential, discard what is redundant, and weave what remains into a coherent understanding. Curators are less concerned with volume and more with value; they focus on how ideas connect, deepen, and serve others. While they may be voracious in their learning, these leaders are able to distill and bring forward important aspects to point a team and organization toward the solution to a problem and hope for a better future.

A curator leader transforms information into insight and insight into practice. Their development is visible not in how much they know, but in how well they apply, contextualize, and share it. They cultivate depth rather than display, turning leadership from performance into stewardship.

Collectors accumulate knowledge; curators activate it.

From Collection to Curation: Practicing Depth in Leadership Development

Breaking the Collector habit starts with reorienting how we engage with learning itself. Most leadership development systems reward accumulation, such as hours logged, modules completed, and certificates earned. But genuine growth requires discernment, integration, and application.

To shift from Collector to Curator, leaders must change their learning posture.

1. Audit Your Leadership Inventory

Pause and look at what you’ve already collected: books, podcasts, assessments, frameworks. How much of it has actually shaped your leadership behavior? Curation begins with recognition of excess. Identify what adds depth versus what feeds display.

2. Practice Selective Consumption

Curators don’t absorb everything. Instead, they choose with intention. Before engaging in another leadership program or reading the next bestseller, ask yourself:

• What question am I trying to answer?

• What problem am I trying to solve?

• How am I committed to using what I am learning to deepen my learning practice?

  
  

  If you don't have answers to these questions, you’re probably collecting, not curating.

3. Translate Knowledge into Context

Collectors quote. Curators apply. After encountering a new concept, spend time translating it into your world. Ask yourself: what does this look like in your team, your culture, your decisions?

Depth comes from contextualization, not citation.

4. Create a Learning Artifact

Curators leave a trail, not of consumption, but of synthesis. Write a reflection, teach a team, build a model, or start a conversation. Turning learning outward forces coherence. It converts theory into shared value.

5. Let Go of Outdated “Pieces”

Curation is as much about editing as it is about adding. Periodically let go of leadership ideas that no longer fit who you are or where your organization is headed. True leaders evolve their frameworks, not just expand them.

Leadership development should not be a museum of borrowed ideas. It should be a living gallery that is shaped, edited, and reinterpreted through your lived experience.

Leadership isn’t about how much you collect; it’s about what you curate. Collectors perform growth; Curators embody it. The leaders who will matter next aren’t the ones fluent in frameworks, but the ones who can make meaning from them. Leadership development doesn’t need more content; it needs more depth.

Stop collecting leadership. Start curating it.

Leadership development is not a scavenger hunt; it’s a sculpting process (to bring this all back to the thought that triggered my thinking - writing by Arthur Brooks). The future of leadership won’t be shaped by those who accumulate the most content, but by those who commit to carving clarity, courage, and connection from within.

If you want to lead with integrity, especially in mission-driven spaces where trust is currency and complexity is constant, depth is not optional. Depth is the differentiator.

So the question isn’t how much you’ve gathered; it’s how much you’ve grown. The shift from collector to curator starts now, and it starts with you.

Next, we’ll examine how organizational leadership development systems, too often designed for scale and optics, may unintentionally cultivate faux leaders by rewarding consumption over integration and performance over transformation.

© 2025 Dr. Sara Reed. All rights reserved.

To learn more about faux leadership, read here: Faux Leadership: The Performance of Leadership vs. The Practice of It

To read Arthur Brooks' book, get a copy here: https://a.co/d/i4FllPR