Transcript
If you spend any time on LinkedIn — and I know most of you do, because apparently that’s just what we do now — you will have seen the leadership content. God, you will have seen so much of it.
“Great leaders listen.” “Vulnerability is a superpower.” “The best managers ask questions, not give answers.” Accompanied, of course, by a stock photo of someone looking thoughtfully out of a window, or a sunrise, or both.
It reminds me of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in Jumanji: The Next Level. His character has a special skill called Smoldering Intensity. Which sounds formidable — until you see what it actually is. It’s making a face. A very serious, very committed face. That’s it. That’s the power. It looks like something profound is happening. Nothing is happening. I’ll come back to why that matters.
And here’s the thing. None of it is wrong, exactly. That’s what makes it so useless. It’s the kind of advice that’s been pre-processed to be inoffensive. Sanded down until there are no edges left. Nothing that could possibly make anyone uncomfortable, nothing that requires you to actually *do* something specific, nothing that challenges a real decision made by a real person in a real organisation.
It’s advice designed to perform wisdom, not produce it.
And I find that genuinely interesting — because it tells you something important about the leadership development industry as a whole. Because this content doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in the same ecosystem as the corporate training programmes, the consultants, the workshops, the retreats. And it’s all shaped by the same unspoken rule: don’t say anything so specific that someone powerful might disagree with it.
That’s what I want to dig into today. Because behind the platitudes, there is a real and serious problem. And nobody in a position to fix it is talking about it clearly enough to actually fix anything.
Here it is plainly: most organisations are not developing leaders. They are promoting people and hoping for the best.
That’s not a cynical take. That’s what I observe, consistently, across organisations of different sizes, different sectors, different geographies. The pattern is almost identical everywhere. Someone performs well as an individual contributor. They’re smart, they’re reliable, they get results. So the organisation does what feels logical — it promotes them. Gives them a team. Gives them a title. And then largely leaves them to work out the rest.
There’s actually a name for this pattern. Laurence Peter identified it in 1969 — the Peter Principle: people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their level of incompetence. Promoted based on what they did well, until they reach the role where they don’t. And there they stay. What’s remarkable is that we’ve known this for over fifty years, and organisations are still running the same play. The principle didn’t change behaviour — it just gave the behaviour a name.
No real development plan. No deliberate mentoring. No structured support for the transition from doing to leading. Just expectation. And pressure.
And here’s where I want to be precise, because this is the part that usually gets softened: that is not a resourcing problem. It is not primarily a budget problem. It is a thinking problem. It is what happens when organisations don’t actually examine the assumption underneath the promotion — which is that performance in one role predicts capability in a fundamentally different one.
It doesn’t. The skills that make someone an excellent individual contributor are often the exact skills that get in their way as a leader. The person who was brilliant because they could solve problems faster than anyone else now needs to slow down and let others solve them. The person who succeeded through personal output now needs to multiply output through people who think and work differently than they do. That is not a natural extension of what they were already doing. It is a different job. And treating it as though it isn’t — that’s where the damage starts.
Now, the leadership development industry exists, ostensibly, to fix this. There are programmes and frameworks and certifications and coaches and consultants — an enormous, well-funded machine oriented around the idea that organisations can build better leaders. But I want to challenge how much of that machine is actually producing capability, and how much of it is producing the *appearance* of capability-building.
Remember Smoldering Intensity? That’s what I mean by development theatre. It has the shape of something serious and purposeful happening. It produces artefacts — reports, certificates, action plans, laminated cards. It can be pointed to. But it doesn’t reliably produce leaders who make better decisions, build stronger teams, or create environments where people can actually do their best work. It’s the face, not the power.
Take the off-site leadership retreat. You know the one. Two days at a hotel somewhere. A facilitator with a lot of energy and some laminated cards. Team-building exercises that everyone endures politely. A session on “communication styles.” Dinner with the executives on the second night. And then everyone goes back to the office on Monday and nothing changes. Not because the people who attended weren’t smart. Not because the facilitator wasn’t competent. But because two days of exposure to ideas is not the same thing as behaviour change. And behaviour change is the only thing that actually moves an organisation.
Or take the 360 feedback process. In theory, a reasonable idea: gather structured input from the people around someone, give them a picture of how they’re perceived, use it as a development input. In practice, it has metastasised into an industry of its own — lengthy questionnaires, elaborate competency frameworks, reports with so many dimensions that the signal disappears entirely into the noise. And at the end of it, the person being assessed gets a document. Maybe a conversation. And then, typically, not much else. The data is collected. The conversation is had. The document goes in a drawer. And six months later, the same patterns are still there, because the 360 report wasn’t connected to anything that actually changed how the person operated day to day.
This is where the measurement problem becomes critical. Because organisations measure what’s easy to measure. Inputs, not outputs. Hours of training delivered, not the quality of decisions being made. Number of participants in the programme, not whether those participants are leading differently. The money spent, not the performance unlocked.
Executives will pour serious resources into technology implementation, process redesign, system upgrades — and those investments get scrutinised, tracked, debated. ROI is demanded. Progress is reviewed. But leadership development? Leadership development often gets evaluated on whether it happened, not on whether it worked. And that gap — between what gets measured and what actually drives performance — is where a very large amount of organisational performance quietly disappears.
Think about what that actually means at the operational level. A manager who was never taught how to have a direct conversation about underperformance will avoid it — and the underperformance continues, and spreads. A manager who was promoted because they were technically brilliant but hasn’t developed the ability to delegate will become a bottleneck — and the team beneath them will stop growing, because there’s no room to. A manager who doesn’t know how to run a meeting with purpose will run meetings that are theatre — and the hours lost will compound, week after week, across the entire team. None of this shows up cleanly on a dashboard. But it is happening. Constantly. Quietly. At a cost that would be alarming if anyone actually quantified it.
And in the background, the executives sit in their own meetings and ask why execution is slow. Why decisions take so long. Why they can’t seem to hold onto their best people. They commission engagement surveys. They bring in consultants. They look at the strategy, the structure, the systems. They don’t always look at the thing that cuts across all of it — which is the quality of leadership at every level below them.
I want to be careful here, because this is not an argument that leadership can be reduced to a formula. Leading people is genuinely hard. It involves navigating ambiguity, managing relationships under pressure, making decisions with incomplete information, holding people accountable while keeping them engaged. Anyone selling you a simple answer to that is selling you something you should be sceptical of. Including, I’ll say explicitly, me.
What I am arguing is that the absence of real development — deliberate, sustained, connected to actual behaviour change — is not a neutral condition. It has consequences. And those consequences are not distributed evenly. The people who suffer most directly are the ones being managed by leaders who were never given the tools to lead well. The teams that get a brilliant individual contributor who was promoted and left to figure it out. The people who leave — not because the company was bad, but because their manager didn’t know how to create an environment where they could grow.
That matters. Not just commercially, though it matters commercially. It matters because people’s working lives are significantly shaped by the quality of their immediate leadership. A good leader can make a mediocre organisation survivable. A poor leader can make a good organisation toxic. And organisations that don’t take that seriously are making a choice — even if they don’t experience it as one.
Good leadership is not complicated to describe. But it is demanding to build. It requires deliberate investment — not in programmes that produce paperwork, but in the actual thinking patterns, habits and decisions of the people doing the leading. It requires holding the mirror up, repeatedly, without flinching at what you find. It requires connecting development to performance in ways that are specific and traceable, not vague and aspirational.
And the first step is being honest about the distance between where your organisation is and where it needs to be — without reaching for the comfortable answer of pointing to the training hours logged last year as evidence that the problem is being addressed.
So here’s the question I want to leave you with.
If you had to honestly evaluate the leaders in your organisation — not their CVs, not their tenure, not how they perform in the quarterly review meeting — but the actual day-to-day quality of how they lead: how they make decisions, how they handle conflict, how they develop the people beneath them, how they operate under pressure — what would you find?
And if the answer is uncomfortable: are you running a development programme? Or are you just making the face?
Because logging hours is not developing leaders. And if you’ve been doing one while expecting the other, that’s worth sitting with.
I’m André Daus. This is Iconoclast Insights. If this landed for you — or if you think I’m completely wrong — I’d genuinely like to hear it.
