The Leadership Wash

A close-up photograph of a classic “Hello, My Name Is” name tag sticker with “LEADER” handwritten in bold marker on the white space. The name tag is partially peeling off from a professional business suit lapel, one corner visibly lifting and curling away from the fabric. The suit is dark charcoal or navy, high quality wool.

A friend on LinkedIn recently shared something that deserves more than a surface-level response:

“The word ’leadership’ is getting misused. When companies slap it on management teams, it creates a halo they often haven’t earned. A leadership team should enable you before the work happens, not only show up afterward to congratulate or criticize.” -A Friend

This observation cuts to something systemic. Let’s unpack it properly.

First, Let’s Acknowledge the Complexity

The management-versus-leadership dichotomy has been done to death, and frankly, it’s reductive. Kotter’s (1990) distinction, managers handle complexity, leaders handle change, was useful for its time but has been weaponized into a false binary where “leader” is aspirational and “manager” is somehow lesser. Reality is messier. Effective managers lead. Effective leaders manage. The functions overlap constantly. Mintzberg (2004) has rightly criticized the fetishization of “leadership” as if it exists in some pure form separate from the operational realities of running organizations.

So the problem isn’t that organizations need to choose between management and leadership. The problem is that we’ve turned “leadership” into a linguistic status symbol disconnected from observable behavior.

Welcome Leadership Wash

What my friend identified is a pattern I’ve seen repeatedly, in the corporations where I led teams across continents, and in the organizations where I’ve consulted on organizational development. The pattern looks like this:

  1. “Management team” becomes “leadership team” with no change in function. The same people make the same decisions the same way. But now there’s an implied nobility to it.

  2. French and Raven’s (1959) power bases remain relevant here. Legitimate power (your position), coercive power (your ability to punish), and reward power (your ability to compensate) are positional. They come with the org chart. Expert power and referent power are earned through demonstrated competence and relational trust. Leadership wash occurs when we assume positional power automatically confers the personal power that actual leadership requires.

  3. Downstream accountability without upstream enablement… This is the heart of the critique. Many “leadership teams” are structured as review bodies, they evaluate outcomes, approve decisions, allocate blame or praise. But genuine leadership operates upstream: clarifying purpose, removing obstacles, developing capability, creating conditions for others to succeed before the work is judged.

Argyris and Schön’s (1974) distinction between espoused theory and theory-in-use applies here. Organizations espouse leadership values such as empowerment, development, vision, while their actual practices remain evaluative and transactional.

The Follower Equation Is More Complicated Than It Appears

Leadership, by definition, implies followers. But this gets distorted in two directions.

The social media economy has made “followers” a metric of influence, which creates a perverse incentive to accumulate audience rather than develop capacity. You can have millions of followers and lead no one. You’re broadcasting, not leading. But the deeper issue is how we think about followership itself. Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs) research shows that “leadership” is partly constructed in the minds of followers, we pattern-match against mental prototypes of what leaders look like, sound like, act like. This means someone can be perceived as a leader based on superficial signals (confidence, eloquence, physical presence) without actually producing leadership outcomes.

Kellerman’s (2008) work on followership reminds us that followers are not passive recipients. They choose to follow, resist, or remain indifferent. A title compels compliance; leadership earns commitment. The difference matters enormously for organizational outcomes.

And The Type of Leadership Matters Immensely

Here’s what often gets lost in the leadership wash: being called a leader isn’t inherently good. The literature on destructive leadership, toxic leadership, and dark triad personalities in leadership positions is substantial and sobering. You can be influential and harmful. You can have followers and damage them. You can hold a leadership title while practicing leadership behaviors that diminish rather than develop the people around you.

This is why I care about leadership type. Here are some to highlight:

These frameworks aren’t academic abstractions. They have practical implications for how you structure teams, run meetings, give feedback, and develop people.

My Operating Thesis

After building engineering teams from zero, leading organizations through transformation, consulting on organizational development, and yes, completing doctoral research on leadership dynamics in technical organizations, I’ve arrived at a conviction:

“True leadership is measured by the leaders you create, not the followers you accumulate.”

This isn’t soft idealism. It’s a practical philosophy with hard implications:

The goal is to make yourself progressively less necessary to operational success while remaining valuable for strategic direction, capability development, and cultural stewardship. Distributed leadership theory supports this: leadership is not a property of individuals but a phenomenon distributed across organizational contexts. The “heroic leader” model, where one person at the top provides vision and direction, doesn’t scale and doesn’t develop organizational resilience.

Ok, What Do We Do About Leadership Wash?

I don’t think the solution is to abandon the language of leadership. The concepts are valuable. But we need more rigor:

  1. You can call any group a “leadership team.” The question is: what do they actually do? Do they enable or evaluate? Develop or judge? Clarify or complicate?

  2. Leadership isn’t a state of being, it’s a pattern of action. Does this person articulate direction that others find meaningful? Do they develop the capabilities of those around them? Do they create conditions for success beyond their own contributions?

  3. Servant leadership’s test is useful: are the people being “led” growing? Are they becoming more capable, more autonomous, more able to lead themselves?

  4. Is the organization becoming more capable over time, or more dependent on specific individuals? Genuine leadership builds systems and capabilities that persist.

  5. The clearest sign of leadership development: have you prepared others to take your role? Can you point to people whose leadership trajectory you’ve materially influenced?

“Everyone Talks Leadership” Critique

Someone recently commented on one of my posts:

“Everyone talks leadership nowadays. I can’t see a single post on LinkedIn that isn’t about leadership.” -LinkedIn User

It’s a fair observation. Leadership content is oversaturated and often shallow. The temptation is to dismiss all of it.

But my response is this: the problem isn’t that people are discussing leadership, it’s that much of the conversation lacks depth, rigor, or grounding in either scholarship or sustained practice. Leadership wash isn’t just about corporate titles; it’s about thought leadership too. The solution isn’t silence. It’s better conversation. More willingness to engage the complexity. More intellectual honesty about what we know, what we don’t, and what we’ve actually learned through doing the work, not just reading about it or posting about it.

Leadership isn’t a title you receive. It isn’t a personal brand you cultivate. It isn’t followers you accumulate.

Leadership is a transformation you facilitate, primarily in others, and in yourself as a consequence of serving them well.

When we use the word “leadership” as a status marker rather than a description of developmental impact, we dilute its meaning and obscure its purpose. We create halos that haven’t been earned.

The people doing the real work of leadership often don’t call it that. They’re too busy developing others to worry about the label.

References

#Leadership #LeadershipDevelopment #Management #OrganizationalDevelopment #OrganizationalCulture