Performative Leadership and the Cost of Looking in Control

Many organisations speak confidently about empowerment. Decision-making is said to be decentralised. Managers are encouraged to “own” their scope. Leadership frameworks emphasise autonomy, trust, and accountability.

Yet inside many teams, the lived experience feels very different.

Managers look active, present, and professional. They run meetings, deliver messages, reassure their teams, and signal confidence. From the outside, leadership appears intact.

From the inside, some quietly feel like they are acting a part.

One manager once described it plainly: “I look like a leader, but I feel like a clown.”

That sentence captures something many leaders recognise immediately. Not incompetence. Not cynicism. But a painful gap between how leadership appears and how it is actually experienced.

This piece explores how that gap emerges, why it is so corrosive, and what organisations often misunderstand when they label it “passive leadership”.

When leadership becomes performance

Performative leadership is not about pretending to care. Most managers caught in it care deeply.

It emerges when leaders are expected to project certainty and ownership while operating inside constraints that quietly remove their ability to lead with judgement.

They are visible, but not fully empowered. Accountable, but not trusted. Responsible, but structurally limited.

Over time, leadership becomes something to deliver rather than something to exercise.

To teams, this can look like hesitation, avoidance, or lack of support. Decisions are delayed. Feedback becomes vague. Direction feels unstable.

To the manager, it often feels like a constant internal negotiation: how to protect the team, stay aligned with senior expectations, and avoid overstepping invisible boundaries.

The suit stays on. The smile stays professional. Inside, doubt accumulates.

How systems quietly create passivity

Passive leadership is often treated as an individual flaw. In practice, it is frequently produced by system dynamics.

A common pattern looks like this:

Decision-making gradually moves upward, often in response to risk, pressure, or external scrutiny. Senior leaders become more involved, sometimes with good reason. The organisation values consistency and control.

Middle managers learn, often through subtle correction, that initiative carries a cost. Decisions are revisited, reframed, or overridden. Approval loops multiply. “Alignment” becomes a constant requirement.

Over time, managers adapt. They consult more, decide less, and hedge their language. This is not apathy. It is learning.

Teams experience the result as absence. The manager is present, but not decisive. Support feels thin. People stop bringing nuance because it rarely goes anywhere.

No one intends this outcome. Yet it becomes normalised.

The emotional reality for managers

For managers inside these systems, the emotional load is significant.

They are expected to embody leadership while internally feeling constrained.

They speak with authority they do not fully hold.

They deliver decisions they did not shape.

They absorb frustration they cannot resolve.

This dissonance often shows up as impostor feelings, exhaustion, or quiet disengagement. Some describe it as wearing the costume of leadership without access to its substance.

The image of the clown resonates precisely because it names the humiliation embedded in this experience. Not public ridicule, but private erosion of self-respect.

When managers feel this way, they rarely say it out loud. Instead, they withdraw. They become careful. They perform.

Not all passivity looks the same

It matters to distinguish scenarios, because not all “passive” behaviour comes from the same place.

Some managers are constrained by over-control above them. Others are overwhelmed by workload and emotional labour. Some hesitate because strategy keeps shifting. Others avoid conflict out of care for their team, or fear of backlash in a conflict-averse culture.

There are also managers who operate in environments where peer-level psychological safety is low. Speaking candidly among other leaders feels risky, so caution becomes the default.

Lumping these realities together under the label of “weak leadership” misses the point. The behaviour may look similar. The causes are not.

The cost organisations underestimate

The cost of performative leadership rarely appears immediately in metrics.

It shows up first in tone. Conversations become safer, flatter, more transactional.

People share what is acceptable rather than what is useful.

Decision-making slows, not because people are lazy, but because they are protecting themselves. Innovation drops quietly as dissent disappears. Energy leaks into side conversations, private messaging, or disengagement.

Eventually, turnover appears. Sometimes dramatically, sometimes gradually. Often it is described as a surprise.

Even when people stay, something remains unresolved. Frustration, mistrust, or resignation accumulates beneath the surface. Engagement becomes conditional. Discretionary effort shrinks.

What looks like stability may actually be postponed disengagement.

Why training alone rarely fixes this

When organisations notice passive leadership, the reflex is often to send managers to training. Skill matters. Confidence matters. Yet training alone rarely works if the environment continues to punish initiative.

A manager cannot be coached into decisiveness if every decisive act is later corrected, overridden, or politically risky.

Leadership development that focuses only on the individual risks reinforcing the very performance it seeks to undo. Managers learn the language of empowerment while remaining structurally constrained.

The result is often more polish, not more leadership.

A different starting point: observe before intervening

Before fixing anything, organisations benefit from seeing what is actually happening.

Not through surveys alone, but through careful observation.

Who do people turn to when they need clarity, regardless of title?

How do leaders hedge their language in meetings and emails?

What happens when someone disagrees openly?

Which decisions truly sit at which level, and which are only nominally delegated?

These signals reveal whether authority and trust are aligned, and where leadership energy is really held.

Using metaphors can also surface truth safely. Asking people to describe leadership as a landscape, a weather system, or a piece of music often reveals far more than direct evaluation questions ever could.

These approaches work because they invite description rather than judgement.

Reclaiming real leadership

Leadership systems that drift into performance are not broken beyond repair.

They require clarity around decision rights, tolerance for judgement, and visible support for leaders who act within their remit.

They also require space. Managers need protected moments to reflect, speak honestly, and recalibrate without political cost. Without that, performance fills the vacuum.

External facilitation can help, not because outsiders have answers, but because distance makes patterns visible. It lowers the risk of naming what has quietly become normal.

Most importantly, organisations must decide whether they truly want leadership, or simply the appearance of it.

Because leadership is not the suit, the meeting, or the reassurance. It is the capacity to exercise judgement, hold tension, and act with integrity in real conditions.

When managers no longer feel like they are playing a role, teams notice immediately.

The clown disappears.