The Leadership Theater 🎭: Everyone’s a Leader, Nobody’s in Charge
The end of performative leadership in the age of AI.
A few months ago, while attending an IT Career Fair at my daughter’s high school, I came across a senior leader who was part of the Technology Panel. He sounded very impressive on stage - articulate, confident, and full of “corporate energy” - if you know what I mean. So, I decided to speak with him afterward.
He had a lanyard around his neck with a six-word title: “Head of Strategic Initiatives and Transformation.” That was quite a mouthful, and it further piqued my curiosity. After introducing myself, I asked him what he did in his role.
He smiled and said he was responsible for “stakeholder alignment, cross-functional orchestration, and driving strategic enablement.”
At this point, my head was starting to spin with all the fluent corporate buzzwords, but the inquisitive part of me couldn’t help it.
I leaned in and asked him directly:
“Sir, what exactly are you responsible for?”
He froze. The confident rhythm in his voice, so polished just moments ago, suddenly disappeared. His smile tightened, and for a few seconds, he just looked at me, as if hoping I’d clarify or change the question.
But I didn’t.
The silence hung there, heavy and uncomfortable. And then, without saying a word, he glanced over my shoulder, muttered something about needing to meet someone waiting nearby, and walked away, pretending not to have heard me at all.
That experience shook me in the moment, and has stuck with me ever since because… let’s face it, he’s not alone.
As a corporate society, we’ve quietly entered an era of leadership where everyone’s a leader, yet nobody’s in charge.
In this piece, I want to explore why this is happening: why leadership roles today often feel hollow, performative, or disconnected from real impact.
I’ll share what I’ve observed (and sometimes done myself) over the past two decades in tech leadership. But more importantly, I want to talk about what this says about the state of leadership today, and what we can do to bring back the “real thing.”
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Act I: The Theater of Titles - where leadership is an identity, not a responsibility.
Act II: The Theater of Work - where busyness has replaced real value and impact.
Act III: The End of the Performance - where leadership becomes real again.
So take your seat. The lights are dimming, and the curtain’s about to rise.
Let’s step inside The Leadership Theater 🎬.
Act I: The Theater of Titles
(Where leadership is an identity, not a responsibility)
Walk into any large organization and glance at the org chart.
You’ll find a small army of people with titles like:
“Head of Transformation”
“Director of Enablement”
“Lead of Innovation”
“Strategic Programs Manager”
and so on…
These titles sound impressive. Futuristic, even. But scratch the surface, and you’ll often find that no one can quite explain what these roles actually do.
This is the first act of the Leadership Theater: the Theater of Titles.
As a corporate community, we have built entire ecosystems of leadership without ownership.
💡 Everyone’s leading something, but no one’s really accountable for anything.
The Org Chart Illusion
Over time, titles have become a proxy for progress. Fancy titles signal importance, seniority, and credibility, even when the underlying role is fuzzy.
I’ve seen this firsthand. During one reorg, in an effort to “flatten the hierarchy,” we created a flood of new leadership titles: Tech Leads, Program Leads, Functional Owners…
It sounded empowering at the time. After all, everyone was a leader!
But soon enough, it backfired.
People started stepping on each other’s toes. The fine lines of accountability blurred into thin air. I still remember a sprint planning meeting where three “leads” were in the room, yet no one wanted to own the roadmap.
And it’s not always about the title itself. I’ve noticed people with fairly ordinary designations who carry themselves like executives simply because they report directly to the VP.
In many organizations, proximity to power becomes its own kind of badge of honor - a quiet hierarchy that has little to do with real impact.
Whether it’s a fancy title or a powerful reporting line, the effect is the same:
People start measuring their worth by their place on the org chart, not by the value they create.
The illusion of distributed leadership quickly turned into the reality of collective confusion.
💡 Fancy titles and positioning in the org chart don’t create ownership. They often hide its absence.
The Performance of Leadership
Many leaders today have mastered the art of sounding like leaders.
They speak fluent strategy buzzwords:
“Driving transformation”
“Enabling alignment”
“Accelerating outcomes”
and so on…
It’s polished, articulate, and vague enough to sound “visionary.”
I’ll be honest, when I hear these words in quick succession, I feel like puking.
We’ve made leadership “sound sophisticated” when it should be simple:
See the problem
Make a decision
Take responsibility
That’s it.
The problem is: when you are decisive, it carries the risk of making you unpopular. It introduces friction and conflicts.
And so what do we do? We hide behind buzzwords, compromises, and committees.
💡 It feels safer to sound important than to do something risky.
The Hidden Costs
But all this performance comes with a hidden cost. Or should I say, several hidden costs. Let’s look at some of these.
Decision Paralysis
I once watched a team debate for two weeks on whether a button should be on the top right or bottom left of a screen.
Everyone had opinions, but no one had ownership.
The feature was scrapped before the debate ended. The real issue wasn’t the button, it was fear.
Nobody wanted to make a call and be “wrong.” So they performed collaboration instead of making real decisions.
Complexity Theater
At one point in my career, I realized we had more people managing communication between teams than people building the product itself.
I bet you’ve found yourself in similar situations, too.
It looked like coordination, but it was really confusion in disguise. I helped create those roles, thinking they would bring structure and help us improve our delivery.
But in reality, I was designing a maze that people couldn’t find their way out of.
Cognitive Fatigue
There was a phase in my career where I would end the day exhausted, yet I couldn’t point to a single tangible thing I had accomplished.
My calendar was full, my inbox was overflowing, and yet my team was far behind on their deliverables.
I was constantly “enabling,” “facilitating,” “reviewing”- the verbs of leadership that sound productive.
Every meeting felt important in the moment, but by the end of the day, they blurred together into a haze of alignment and recap. I would log off mentally drained, but with nothing to show for it except a list of new meetings for the next day.
It felt like leading as all the “signals” were there:
The decisions had been discussed
The slides had been reviewed, and
The strategies had been refined.
But underneath it, nothing was actually moving.
The Realization
Leadership has slowly drifted from being a responsibility to being a title.
We perform confidence and control, while often feeling powerless beneath the surface.
We think the title gives us authority. But titles only grant permission, not power.
Real authority doesn’t come from what’s printed on an org chart. It comes from making decisions where they matter, owning, and being accountable when things go wrong.
I’ve seen leaders hold impressive titles, yet struggle to move a single decision forward. And I’ve seen people without any title quietly lead teams, fix problems, and take responsibility because no one else would.
💡 That’s the paradox of modern leadership: the stage is full of people with titles, but the real leaders are often the ones who’ve stopped performing.
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Act II: The Theater of Work
(Where busyness has replaced real value and impact)
The second act of the Leadership Theater is subtler, but even more widespread.
It’s the Theater of Work - the belief that “motion equals progress.”
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed this illusion brutally. When most corporate offices shut down globally, people discovered that much of their “full-time” job could be done in three to four hours.
And guess what: the rest of the day was spent signaling that they were working: “green dots” on Slack and Outlook, back-to-back virtual meetings, and “status updates” that “updated” nothing.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: WE as leaders are the ones directing this play.
💡 We schedule the meetings, we demand the updates, and we reward visibility over value.
The Performance of Busyness
Let’s face it: there’s a certain “comfort” in busyness.
If your calendar is packed, you feel important. If your inbox is overflowing, you feel in demand.
Busyness has become the modern badge of leadership.
I’ve caught myself falling into this trap too: staying “in the loop,” jumping from call to call, managing conversations rather than outcomes. It felt like I was leading, but in retrospect, I was just staying visible.
I’ve realized that there’s a strange safety in perpetual motion (apparently Newton’s First Law of Motion applies here as well!)
Consider this:
As long as you’re “in a meeting,” you don’t have to make a decision.
As long as you’re “aligning,” you’re not accountable.
💡 It “feels” active but is often avoidance in disguise.
The Hidden Costs
The Theater of Work doesn’t just waste time, it quietly drains meaning from it.
At first, the endless meetings and updates feel like part of the job, the necessary rhythm of corporate life. But over time, that rhythm becomes a loop, and the loop starts to wear people down.
Empty Grind
I’ve seen high-performing teams grind through 12-hour days, constantly “on,” constantly meeting deadlines, yet end every week feeling empty.
The problem wasn’t overwork. It was undermeaning (if that’s a word).
People can push through long days when they believe in what they’re doing. What breaks them is the feeling that all their effort is going into motion, not real movement.
I’ve lived that feeling myself. I would work long hours, log off late in the night, but sometimes with a nagging thought: “Did any of this actually matter?”
It’s a uniquely modern kind of burnout: You feel exhausted, yet you don’t know what you’ve delivered.
Erosion of Trust
Our team members aren’t dumb. They see through “performance” faster than leaders realize.
They know when a meeting is theater: when words like “momentum” or “alignment” are covering the lack of courage to make a decision. At first, they may play along. But after a while, I guarantee you, they will stop believing the story.
I’ve watched that “erosion” happen in real time with my teams, and the signs are subtle:
Your smart, once-engaged people start holding back.
They do what’s asked, but no more.
They stop challenging ideas or pushing boundaries because they know nothing will change anyway.
They’ve mentally checked out.
What’s ironic is that many leaders who “perform” confidence are doing it to build trust. But it has the exact opposite effect.
When your team senses that you’re performing rather than deciding, trust doesn’t just fade, it collapses instantly.
Creative Suffocation
And then there’s the quietest cost of all, the one that rarely makes it into postmortems.
When everyone’s calendar is full, there’s no space left for “thinking.”
I’ve seen brilliant engineers and designers spend more time preparing slides about innovation than actually innovating.
The energy that should fuel creativity gets consumed by choreography. There’s always another sync, another deck, another review, and by the time the “real work” starts, the spark is gone.
You can’t force innovation by scheduling it on your calendar. You need some quiet time, a free calendar, and an environment that is less “busy”.
But in the Theater of Work, stillness looks like “slacking,” and thinking feels like “inactivity.”
So what do we leaders do to fix this “problem”? We fill every gap, and in doing so, we suffocate the oxygen that creativity needs to breathe.
The Reflection
The Theater of Work thrives on one simple confusion: mistaking “being seen” for “being valuable.”
We’ve created cultures where activity is mistaken for impact, where being busy is a badge of honor, and silence in a meeting is seen as disengagement.
We’ve taught our teams, often unintentionally, that the person who talks the most in meetings is the one who “leads.” We have built the impression that the one who has the most updates must be the most valuable.
In fact, our obsession with visibility often robs us of the one thing that makes leadership possible - perspective. When every minute is filled with meetings, updates, and check-ins, we have no time left to think.
💡 As a result, our leadership becomes reactive, not reflective. We respond to what’s loudest, not what matters most.
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Act III: The End of the Performance
(Where leadership becomes real again)
Here’s the good news: after all the noise, all the motion, and all the pretending, something is starting to shift.
Today, we find ourselves standing between two eras of leadership, one defined by performance, and the other that demands authenticity.
💡 The question is no longer how to look like a leader, but how to be one.
The Curtain Is Lifting
For years, leadership has relied on ritual: the meetings, the updates, the carefully worded summaries that signal control and authority.
We built entire ecosystems around the appearance of leadership.
But now, AI and automation are quietly exposing what’s real and what’s just performance.
Thanks to AI, emails and decks that used to take days can be generated in minutes. Reports that once justified entire roles can be written by a simple prompt.
The so-called “props” of leadership - the slides, the summaries, the polished emails - can now be produced instantly, often better than before.
Needless to say, that should be terrifying for anyone whose role depends on performing leadership. Because the curtain has been pulled back, and the audience can finally see the stagehands.
For the first time in decades, technology is forcing leaders to confront a simple truth:
What can be automated was probably never the essence of leadership to begin with.
What’s left, once the theater fades, is the part that cannot be coded by AI, outsourced, or replaced: judgment, courage, clarity, and accountability.
But for those who actually want to lead, this moment is nothing short of liberating.
💡 This isn’t the end of leadership. It’s the end of pretending to lead.
The Unlearning
Despite AI playing a big part in this shift, the hardest shift is not technological. It’s behavioral.
Leaders don’t need to learn new tools. They need to unlearn old habits.
I’ve caught myself many times slipping back into performance: adding layers of buzzwords to sound strategic, delaying decisions until there was “alignment,” or framing a simple problem in complex terms so it appeared more sophisticated.
But real leadership feels different. It’s simpler and far more human.
It’s saying, “I’ll make the call.”
It’s admitting, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.”
It’s owning the outcome even when it’s uncomfortable.
💡 Unlearning performance means embracing vulnerability. It is about accepting that leadership isn’t about being impressive, it’s about being clear.
The Curtain Call
The leaders who will matter most in this new world aren’t the ones with the fanciest titles or the fullest calendars.
They’re the ones who bring clarity where there’s chaos and direction where there’s uncertainty.
They’ll stop hiding behind buzzwords, and instead, ask the simplest, hardest questions:
What are we trying to achieve?
What’s in the way?
Who’s accountable?
They will make a subtle, and powerful, shift in their leadership:
They won’t perform confidence, they’ll practice courage.
They won’t seek alignment, they’ll make decisions.
And when things go wrong, they won’t write a post-mortem, they’ll take responsibility.
The theater is ending, and the stage lights are fading. And that’s not a crisis, it’s the curtain call for real leadership.
It’s time to exit the Theater of Leadership and step into what real leadership is about. Because in the end, everyone’s a leader, but someone still has to be in charge.
👉🏼 Why not you?
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Don't get me started on management speak. The worst managers I've ever worked with spouted a multitude of fancy words and models, but couldn't manage the simplest real world task to save their lives.
A friend of mine has been working in data analysis for 40 years. He went to an interview this week and the interviewers were more concerned about what model he'd use to solve a problem than whether he could solve it. He doesn't need a model. He's go so much experience he just knows what to do.
I'm sure most of this corporate b*llshit speak is to cover up that people don't know what they're talking about and that they can't do their jobs.
I could go on, but I'd be here all day.
Your writing on -The human engagement at work… like little windows of reality in life of people at the vast tech product innovation factory… the order& chaos, the tasks& management to enable multilevel jobs, people& titles…. The human component, the messy egos, deadlines, meetings, decisions& authority into the everyday ever changing, growing work space. Tech isnt a single product, the uncertainty of the digitalscape & the innovation& business… of machines among the human … always find it interesting to read…