Stop Performing the Leader They Expect. Start Leading the Way You Actually Know How.

There's a moment I think a lot of us know very well. You walk into a meeting, or you're getting ready for a difficult conversation, and before you even open your mouth, something in you starts adjusting. You're careful about how you show up, and you reach for certainty faster than you actually feel it. You aim for the most polished thing instead of the true thing. It's that somewhere along the way, you learned what leadership is supposed to look like.

Years ago, when I was interviewing for my first leadership position, the woman who would later become my mentor called me after the final round. She told me my answers were good, but they felt a little too polished, a little rehearsed. What they really needed, she said, was to feel more of me in the room.

I was in my early twenties, and honestly, my first reaction was something like pride. I have polished answers? Great. But her feedback stayed with me, and now, as a leadership coach with doctoral research in this exact territory, I understand what she was pointing at. Leaders do what I did in that interview, in meetings, in how they show up, automatically and for so many years that they stop noticing they're doing it at all. They think they're leading. What they're actually doing, a lot of the time, is performing leadership.

Where the Performance Comes From

Nobody wakes up and thinks, how can I be more disconnected from myself today? It starts as adaptation. Protection, even. You're learning the room. You're trying to be credible, to be taken seriously, to stay in the game. Those are reasonable concerns, especially in a culture where you're constantly in survival model. The sociologist Erving Goffman called it impression management, the idea that we're all performing a version of ourselves for an audience. And Herminia Ibarra's work on leadership identity showed that people don't just have a leadership style. They construct one, usually by trying on versions of leadership they've seen rewarded around them.

That's how we learn, and that part is fine. The problem starts when the template is narrow. Leadership culture still over-rewards visibility, certainty on cue, and a kind of polished confidence that reads as competence, whether or not it is. So you adapt. You over-signal conviction. You rush to answers and sand off the parts of yourself that feel too quiet. And if that adaptation goes on long enough, it stops feeling like adaptation. It starts to feel like identity. This is just who I am as a leader now. This is what credibility requires of me here. That's where people get stuck. The version of leadership that got rewarded in one season of their career becomes the version they feel obligated to perform in every season after.

When Confidence Is Actually Compliance

Sometimes what gets called confidence is actually compliance with a cultural script. It teaches us emotional distance with very good lighting. Early in my leadership career, I led from anxiety. In my first leadership role, if I made one small mistake, my higher-ups heard about it. I got very good at reading the emotional temperature of every room so that nothing would go wrong on my watch. A mentee once asked me, how are you so decisive? How do you stay so calm? People told me, do you know how calming you are in the room? And all I could think was, I have anxiety all over my body.

A lot of leaders are performing certainty when what they're actually feeling is pressure. For me, it was the human fear that if I didn't perform a certain way, I'd lose my job. This is where ego steps in and shows up as protection. It's the part of you that says, “If I can just stay composed enough, impressive enough, unshakable enough, maybe I can keep control of how I'm seen.” But control over how you're seen is not the same thing as leadership. And the longer those two stay confused, the more disconnected your leadership becomes from reality.

The Hidden Cost

“But Leili, this type of leadership works in the corporate world.” In the short term, I agree. It can work. But in the long term, it stalls progress. It stalls people. You lose good people, and the wrong people stay.

Performative leadership can look incredibly polished and still leave everyone around it exhausted. Your team feels the distance even when they can't name it. They feel when a leader is speaking from a script instead of from conviction. They feel when the language about values is clean but the behavior underneath it isn't. Intent doesn't erase impact, and performance doesn't create trust just because it's convincing.

In fact, one of the quietest costs of performative leadership is that it breaks trust. Not through one big visible failure, but through repetition. The leader says the right things, but people stop expecting follow-through. The leader projects openness, but disagreement still has consequences. So people adjust. They get more careful, more strategic, more edited. Which means the leader gets less of the truth, less challenge, less reality.

I saw this play out as a change management consultant on a major technology rollout. To the executives, the project looked on track. Inside the project, things were falling apart, but the team had learned that bringing bad news to that executive group came with consequences. Their reactions came from a low EQ place, so the team brought nothing unless it was absolute. When the truth finally surfaced in an update meeting, the executives were upset that they hadn't known sooner. They had taught their own people to keep them in the dark.

Power Over vs. Power With

The difference between performative and authentic leadership is also the difference between power over and power with. The “power over” performs. It needs the room to keep confirming the story the leader tells about themselves. The “power with” is less invested in theater and more invested in contact, in relationships, in connection. It can tolerate not being the smartest sounding person in the room. It can tolerate questions, friction, and not knowing, because we don't know everything, and that's legitimate.

The problem here is that confidence that has fused itself to identity. If your sense of self as a leader depends on always being the composed one, the clear one, the one with the answers, then any moment that threatens that image starts to feel dangerous. And once it feels dangerous, you stop responding to the situation and start responding to the threat to your self-image. That's when listening gets harder. That's when feedback lands as disrespect. A different kind of confidence becomes possible when you let go of the image. This confidence can say, I need more information, I missed that, and I don't want agreement more than I want the truth.

I love that last one because so much performative leadership is built around agreement. The leader says, “Yep, got it.” The agreement the leaders make acts as proof that they still have control. But agreement isn't always a sign of trust. Sometimes it's a sign that people have learned what's unsafe to say.

What the Shift Actually Looks Like

So how do you stop performing the leader they expect and start leading the way you actually know how?

It begins with noticing your stage moments, the places where you can feel yourself putting the costume on. Get curious about places where you perform. What are you protecting? What do you believe will happen if you show up a little more truthfully? What part of you are you hiding because you don't trust the room to read it accurately?

Then come your values, and I mean real values, not the branding language on a website. Values as behavioral anchors. When I'm at my best, what am I actually protecting? What do I want people to experience when I have power? What do I refuse to sacrifice when the pressure rises? Your answer might be fairness. It might be clarity, courage, or repair. Whatever it is, it needs to be specific enough that you can feel when you're aligned and when you're drifting. Once you know your anchors, it gets much easier to spot the counterfeits: the certainty that's really fear, the decisiveness that's really urgency without thought, the calm that's really shutting down.

Then make the practical shift. Start creating conditions where reality has a better chance of entering the room. Ask better questions, and don't worry if they sound dumb. Speak later. Notice who hasn't spoken. Invite challenge before decisions get finalized. And when your reaction teaches people to withhold, repair it quickly.

Nothing in that list is flashy. But it makes you more trustworthy, and I'll take trustworthy over impressive every single time. I know your team will too.

Holding Both the System and the Self

For many people, especially those who've had to work hard to be taken seriously in the first place, the pressure to perform leadership isn't just personal. It's systemic. It's shaped by gender, by race, by class, by organizational culture, by who gets read as authoritative without effort and who has to work twice as hard to be seen as credible at all.

I'm not going to pretend everyone has equal freedom to relax and be themselves at work. I've stood in front of a classroom and been treated dismissively, then watched a male guest speaker receive instant respect from the same students an hour later. As a woman in this profession, with a last name that's hard to pronounce and a background from a very different place, believe me when I tell you I feel it every single day.

Which is exactly why this conversation has to hold both system and self. We don't help leaders by pretending the system doesn't shape performance, and we don't help them by surrendering all their agency either. So if you're reading this and thinking, yes, but there are reasons I learned to perform this way, I want you to know you're right. I believe you. The question isn't whether the adaptation made sense. The question is whether it's still costing you more than it's protecting you.

The strategy that got you into the room is not the one that will let you lead honestly once you're there. What kept you safe starts keeping you distant.

A Different Question

If I could say this directly to the leader who feels the weight of all of this: you don't need to become louder to become more credible. You don't need to become harder to become more respected. And you definitely don't need to imitate the leadership style that got rewarded in someone else's body, in someone else's context, in someone else's generation. Influence is not volume. Authority that depends on constant performance is far more fragile than it looks.

So here's the question I want to leave you with. Instead of asking, do I look like a leader right now, try asking this: Am I leading in a way my values can live with?

Maybe this week the work is small. Notice one moment where you're performing confidence you don't actually feel. Pause instead of filling the silence. Ask one more question before you assert your answer. Pay attention to the version of you that shows up when you're not trying so hard to look like a leader.

Because that version of you knows a lot more than you think it does. It can impact the world more than you think it can. Choose conscious over ego. Choose humanity over power.