Creating the Illusion of Leadership: How Organizations Develop Faux Leaders

Dr. Sara Reed
Nov 25
5 min read

Leadership development programs are often seen as essential tools for building strong leaders within organizations. Yet, many companies find themselves facing a troubling reality: despite investing heavily in leadership training, the quality of leadership does not improve as expected. Instead, organizations may discover that leadership development is creating polished, jargon-fluent, performing leaders instead of depth-driven, competence-anchored, impact-seeking leaders.

What emerges is Faux Leadership™: behaviors that imitate or mimic leadership but deliberately lack the depth of expertise, competence, and connection. These choices and behaviors result in shallow or surface leadership that may look impressive but eventually erode trust and performance.

Leadership development that rewards optics over impact risks producing faux leaders, resulting in charisma without competence, performed empathy without curiosity, and narratives without knowledge.

This post explores how faux leadership is created through organizational leadership development, why it persists, and what organizations can do to foster genuine leadership that delivers lasting impact.

Eye-level view of a blurred figure standing at a podium in an empty conference room — A blurred figure at a podium in an empty conference room, symbolizing unclear leadership

What Faux Leadership™ Looks Like

Faux Leadership™ often masquerades as effective leadership but falls short in critical ways. It typically features:

Focus on appearance and presentation rather than meaningful results; shallow expertise and shallow connections.
Avoidance of difficult conversations or challenging the status quo because of a competence or connection gap (or both).
Inability to inspire or motivate teams beyond surface-level compliance because of lack of connection.

This kind of leadership creates an illusion of progress but leaves organizations vulnerable to stagnation, low morale, and missed opportunities. Faux leaders are not equipped to lead through challenging, ambiguous, and uncertain circumstances - which is what many organizations face on a regular basis. Read more here: Faux Leadership: The Performance of Leadership vs. The Practice of It

How Organizational Leadership Development Contributes to Faux Leadership

Leadership development programs are designed to build skills and competencies. However, several factors within these programs can unintentionally foster faux leadership:

Over-indexing on Performing Communication

When organizational training focuses on performing key actions like polish and presence without also focusing on judgment, execution, and learning agility, organizations end up with leaders who are competence-light but charisma-heavy.

Presence should represent substance, not be a substitute for it.

Rewarding Jargon Monoxide over Clarity

As part of assimilation, leadership development curricula can teach or reinforce an emphasis on internal or external buzzwords. I came across "jargon monoxide" in a book by Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao, though the original credit goes to Polly LaBarre, and it directly connects to both faux leaders and environments that create them. This leadership development practice inflates language fluency rather than capability, rewarding leaders for signaling competence rather than demonstrating it. When leaders aren't able to demonstrate a clear, plain-language understanding of core concepts, organizations should be on the lookout for faux leaders.

True leadership is measured in clarity, not catchphrases.

Promoting Emotion Imitation instead of Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman has helped with expanding awareness of emotional intelligence, which is not something that can simply be performed. Emotional intelligence entails four key elements: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and social management (often including empathy). Empathy is an essential leadership skill, but when leadership development programs train people to perform empathy, they create a gap by not developing curiosity and other important interpersonal skills that help leaders lead teams through adaptive and complex challenges. When organizations build leaders who appear caring but lack relational depth or connection, they miss the opportunity to deepen the connections needed to solve tough problems or innovate together.

Emotional intelligence isn’t a performance; it’s the practice of curiosity, connection, and depth.

Selecting High Potentials Based on Optics

When optics become the focus, competence becomes secondary to performing or being "seen" as a leader. Instead, organizations need to explore how leaders collaborate across boundaries within the organization, review their record of execution, and consider decision quality under uncertainty -- on their own. Remember, faux leaders love to take the work of others, including consultants, to solve problems. Organizations need to actively consider impact over impressions.

Faux leaders borrow brilliance; genuine leaders deliver it.

Under Developing Competence Depth

While leaders cannot know everything, they need to have (1) self-awareness of their level of expertise, and (2) domain expertise enough to problem-solve beyond a narrative. Faux leaders with shallow domain expertise rely on narrative rather than knowledge, leaving them ill-equipped to lead through challenges and change.

Shallow expertise builds shallow leadership; depth equips leaders for real change.

How to Avoid Creating Faux Leadership

Organizations can take deliberate steps to ensure leadership development produces genuine, effective leaders:

Align Leadership Development with Organizational Strategy

Tailor leadership development programs to reflect the organization's mission, values, and challenges. Leaders should learn skills that directly support strategic priorities and real-world problems. These training programs must go beyond surface level or you will have a room of people who can speak the jargon but won't delivery on the strategy.

Emphasize Practical Application and Reflection

Incorporate hands-on projects, role-playing, and real-time feedback. Encourage leaders to reflect on their experiences and continuously adapt their approach. Build leadership development curricula that emphasize conceptual mastery rather than buzzword fluency, using case studies that require clear articulation of connection to strategy.

Develop authentic emotional intelligence

Leadership development needs to go beyond empathy “performance” by cultivating curiosity, active listening, and perspective‑taking. Organizations can consider how to incorporate experiential learning that requires leaders to navigate ambiguity and relational complexity, not just rehearse caring gestures. (While not directly leadership development, organizations can also ensure they have processes to assess results and collaboration that can mitigate the fumes of charisma and jargon-enabled leaders.)

Evaluate impact, not optics

Organizations can redefine “high potential” criteria to include collaboration across boundaries, execution track record, and decision‑making under uncertainty. There are also opportunities to use evidence‑based assessments rather than visibility or charisma as drivers of promotion.

Deepen competence with domain awareness

When organizations require leaders to demonstrate both self‑awareness of expertise limits and sufficient domain knowledge to problem‑solve beyond narrative, they avoid creating the conditions for creating faux leaders. One way to do this is to pair leadership development with technical or contextual learning modules to ensure depth accompanies breadth.

Conclusion

Faux leadership thrives when organizations mistake optics for impact, polish for judgment, and imitation for depth. The cost is not just ineffective leaders; it’s stalled innovation, shallow culture, and missed opportunities to solve complex problems. To build genuine leadership, organizations must resist the allure of charisma without competence and instead invest in clarity, curiosity, execution, and domain depth. Organizations must ensure that presence is only an amplification of substance, not a substitute for it; empathy should be lived, not performed; and promotions should be earned through demonstrated impact, not appearances. When leadership development programs prioritize these principles, they create leaders who are not only seen but truly felt; they build leaders capable of guiding teams through uncertainty, fostering trust, and driving meaningful change.

In the next blog, I'll explore how faux leadership starts as a coping mechanism and becomes a choice.