Performative Leadership vs. Actually Doing the Work

Many leaders say the right things about trust, empathy, and accountability—then quietly fail to follow through. In this short Relationships at Work episode, Russel Lolacher unpacks the difference between looking like a leader and performing as one.
You’ll learn how performative leadership erodes trust, why optics often get rewarded over impact, and how to audit your own actions to ensure your leadership shows up when it actually matters.

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Transcript

Welcome back to Relationships At Work – A leadership podcast helping you build workplace connection, improve culture, and avoid blind spots. I’m your host Russel Lolacher

I’m a communications and leadership nerd with a couple of decades of experience and a heap of curiosity on how we can make the workplace better.

This mini-episode is a quick and valuable bit of information to help your mindset for the week ahead.

Inspired by our R@W Note Newsletter, I’m passing on to you… 

Are We Performative or Performing?

There’s a fine line between being a leader and looking like one. And in many organizations, it feels like that line gets dangerously blurry.

Have you heard the one about the all-staff meeting where a leader says all the right things about listening, supporting, and “building a culture of trust”—and then does exactly the opposite over the next six months of feedback and accountability. Or their carefully curated LinkedIn posts about vulnerability, immediately followed by their usual closed-door decision-making. Or the leader talks of responsibility to their bosses when receiving low engagement scores only to turn it around and blame their middle management for being the problem and the ones who need to do better.

To them, it's about how to report progress rather than having an impact.

This is the difference between performative leadership and actual performance. And it’s costing organizations trust, engagement, and culture.

Performative leadership isn’t just harmless optics—it’s misleading. It signals safety while quietly reinforcing the status quo. It erodes employee belief in leadership. And worst of all, it teaches teams that showing up matters more than following through.

Performative leadership is about visibility not substance. It checks boxes. It posts updates. It says the right words with just enough emotion to seem real. But when you pull back the curtain? There’s little action, no accountability, and not much change.

• It’s the leader who starts every meeting with “I just want to acknowledge…” but never follows through with meaningful solutions.
• It’s the panel speaker who talks about empathy but never answers emails from their direct reports.
• It’s the department head who champions mental health one day, and micromanages vacation requests the next.

Performative leadership is about being seen doing the work of leadership. But that’s not the same as doing the work.

On the other hand, performing as a leader means actually delivering on what your role demands—not just from a business perspective, but from a human one.

• It’s saying “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.”
• It’s circling back to a hard conversation rather than letting it fade.
• It’s following up on feedback, even when it's uncomfortable.

Performing well as a leader isn’t always polished. It might be messy, it might be vulnerable, and it might not fit in a tidy quote box. But it shows up. It delivers results. It's effective. And it builds trust not through proclamations, but through consistency.

Sadly, many workplace cultures still heavily reward the optics of leadership. Visibility gets mistaken for value. Style for substance. And too often, we mistake charisma for character.

Why? Because performative leadership is easier to digest. It’s simpler. It's less effort to say, than to do. But it’s also fragile. And once employees start noticing the gap between what’s said and what’s done, it all crumbles.

Real leadership takes longer. It’s less shiny. But it sticks. And the people who experience it? They talk about it. They stay for it. They grow because of it.

The Question: How do we know we're providing performative vs performing leadership?

The Action(s):

• Ask for anonymous feedback on your follow-through.Not just “Did I listen?” but “Did I do anything with what I heard?” Listening without action feels performative. Listening with accountability builds trust.
• Audit your last five leadership actions. Were they responsive to real needs… or were they timed to be visible? You might be surprised how much your calendar reveals about your priorities.
• Be consistent when nobody’s watching. Performative leadership craves an audience. Performing well as a leader doesn’t need one. Define your values. Let your actions align—quietly and consistently.
• Measure impact over milestones.It’s easy to fall into the trap of tracking milestones—launched the program, held the meeting, sent the update—as evidence of leadership. Real leadership isn’t about what gets crossed off the list. It’s about what changes because of it.

Your team doesn’t need a perfectly branded version of you. They need a reliable, accountable, and human one. Performing well will always beat being performative. It just might not get as much attention. And that’s OK.