The Performative Trap...

When Leadership Becomes Theater

In 2024, Google acknowledged that the soaring energy demands of its AI operations helped ratchet up its corporate emissions by 13% last year and that it had backed away from claims that it was already carbon neutral. Similarly, BP scaled back its renewable energy goals in 2023 before ditching them altogether this year, with new CEO Murray Auchincloss saying the company had gone too far too fast. These reversals often received far less public attention than the original announcements, illustrating a pattern where the spectacle of commitment overshadows the substance of follow-through.

This scenario illustrates a troubling evolution in modern leadership. The elevation of public messaging over substantive action. Across both democratic politics and corporate boardrooms, we are witnessing the rise of performative leadership, a style that prioritizes the appearance of decisive action over the resilient, often invisible work of actually solving problems.

The Incentive Structure of Appearances

The shift toward performative leadership stems from a fundamental misalignment of incentives. In our hyperconnected age, leaders face constant pressure to demonstrate activity and progress to multiple audiences simultaneously. Politicians must satisfy voters, donors, and media cycles that reward dramatic gestures over incremental improvements. Corporate executives answer to shareholders, analysts, and business journalists who often measure success in quarterly soundbites rather than long-term value creation.

Consider the divergent paths available to a newly appointed school superintendent facing declining test scores. The performative approach involves announcing bold reforms, hosting community forums, and implementing visible changes like new uniforms or technology initiatives. Actions that generate headlines and create the impression of decisive leadership. The substantive approach might involve quietly analyzing data, meeting with teachers to understand classroom challenges, and gradually implementing evidence-based pedagogical changes that won't show measurable results for years.

The performative path offers immediate rewards. Positive media coverage, community excitement, and the appearance of strong leadership. The substantive path risks being labeled as inactive or insufficiently ambitious, even though it may ultimately prove more effective.

At Unity Environmental University, we chose the quieter road. When we built a model to offer flat-rate tuition through 2030 for our Maine-based in person learning and distance education students, we didn’t roll it out with fireworks. We made the change, stuck with it, and aligned our entire financial model behind it. No tuition gimmicks. No hidden fees. Just a clear commitment to access that didn't need a rebrand every year to stay relevant.

The Democratic Distinction

The pressure for performative leadership manifests differently in electoral versus organizational contexts, though both share common pathologies. Elected officials face the unique challenge of needing to appear constantly engaged with public concerns while simultaneously managing the complex, slow-moving machinery of governance. This creates what political scientists call “position-taking” behavior, the tendency to make public statements primarily to signal alignment with constituent preferences rather than to advance practical solutions.

A city council member, for instance, might hold numerous press conferences demanding action on homelessness while quietly voting against funding for proven but unglamorous interventions like mental health services or housing vouchers. The press conferences fulfill the performative requirement of showing concern and leadership, while the voting record reflects the harder reality that effective solutions often lack dramatic appeal.

Corporate leaders face different but related pressures. Unlike elected officials, they don't need to win periodic popularity contests, but they must maintain confidence among investors, employees, and customers. This can lead to what management experts term “innovation theater,” the public display of cutting-edge thinking and transformative initiatives that may have little connection to the company's actual operational improvements.

We’ve seen this firsthand in higher education, where institutions announce new partnerships and AI initiatives without the infrastructure to support them. At Unity, we are simply embedding AI tools (within our means) across our operations as best we can., adopting AI isn’t a quick fix, It’s how we work. We didn’t need to call it a transformation because we were too busy doing the work.

The Erosion of Truth-Telling

Perhaps the most insidious effect of performative leadership is its gradual erosion of honest communication. When public statements become primarily about managing perceptions rather than conveying information, the relationship between leaders and their constituencies fundamentally changes. Citizens and stakeholders begin to view all official communications with skepticism, assuming that messaging has been crafted for effect rather than accuracy.

This creates a vicious cycle. As public trust in official statements declines, leaders feel even greater pressure to craft their messages for maximum impact, further divorcing their public communications from operational reality. Eventually, the performance becomes so detached from substance that leaders themselves may lose sight of the distinction.

The COVID-19 pandemic provided a stark illustration of this dynamic. Some public health officials found themselves caught between the scientific uncertainty inherent in a novel virus and political pressure to project confidence and control. The result was often messaging that prioritized reassurance over accuracy, ultimately undermining public trust when reality diverged from official statements.

The Competence Deficit

Performative leadership creates a systematic bias against expertise and competence. Complex problems typically require leaders who understand technical details, can navigate bureaucratic processes, and have the resilience to implement solutions that may take years to bear fruit. But these qualities are often invisible to outside observers and may even appear as weaknesses in leaders who cannot articulate simple, compelling narratives about their work.

Meanwhile, the skills that enable effective performative leadership, charisma, message discipline, and media savvy, have little correlation with the analytical and managerial abilities needed for effective governance or organizational management.

This mismatch means that selection processes, whether elections or corporate hiring, may systematically favor leaders who are better at appearing competent than at being competent.

At Unity, many of our biggest breakthroughs did not come from a visionary whiteboard session or a viral speech. They came from aligning our organizational design to allow nontraditional students to complete degrees in flexible ways, supported by wraparound services and data-informed pathways. We didn’t create a marketing campaign about access. We restructured the institution to deliver it.

The Innovation Mirage

In both political and corporate contexts, performative leadership often manifests as an obsession with innovation and disruption, even when incremental improvement would be more valuable. The pressure to appear visionary and transformative can lead leaders to pursue dramatic changes that make for compelling narratives but may be poorly suited to their organization's actual needs.

A mayor might announce a smart city initiative featuring autonomous vehicles and IoT sensors while neglecting basic infrastructure maintenance. A CEO might launch a blockchain pilot program while her company's core software systems remain outdated and inefficient. These choices reflect the reality that revolutionary change is easier to communicate and generates more excitement than evolutionary improvement, even when the latter might create more value.

This bias toward the dramatic can be particularly harmful in mature organizations or stable policy areas where the most important work involves optimization rather than transformation. A transportation department that quietly reduces commute times by 15 percent through better signal timing creates more value than one that announces but never implements a hyperloop study, yet the latter is more likely to generate positive attention for its leadership.

We’ve taken the opposite route at Unity. We focused on student outcomes, cost of acquisition, and student persistence long before those terms were trending. While others launched flashy initiatives, we asked better questions. Why does it cost what it costs to recruit one student? What processes are actually aligned with our mission? Why aren’t more institutions delivering career-ready graduates without financial trauma? The answers weren't exciting. But they were effective.

The Accountability Vacuum

Performative leadership creates unique challenges for accountability mechanisms. Traditional oversight systems like elections, board reviews, and performance evaluations often struggle to distinguish between substantive accomplishments and effective presentation. This is particularly problematic because performative leaders become skilled at managing the metrics by which they are evaluated.

A school administrator might focus resources on initiatives that boost easily measured outcomes like test scores or graduation rates while neglecting harder-to-quantify goals like student engagement or critical thinking skills. A corporate executive might prioritize projects that generate impressive quarterly results while underinvesting in research and development that could ensure long-term competitiveness.

The challenge for oversight bodies is developing evaluation frameworks that can penetrate beyond surface-level indicators to assess actual effectiveness. This requires sophisticated understanding of the domains being evaluated and resistance to the natural human tendency to be impressed by confident presentations and compelling narratives.

At Unity, we had to build those frameworks ourselves. There were no roadmaps for growing an environmental university tenfold while keeping tuition flat and expanding access nationwide. The metrics we cared about were often the ones no one else tracked.

The Path Forward

Addressing the rise of performative leadership requires changes at multiple levels. Organizations and electoral systems need to redesign incentive structures to reward long-term thinking and substantive accomplishments over short-term visibility.

Media coverage patterns also need evolution. Journalists and analysts who cover leadership could place greater emphasis on tracking the long-term outcomes of announced initiatives rather than simply reporting their launch. Business and political reporting that follows up on promises and examines implementation challenges can help create accountability for substance over style.

Perhaps most importantly, constituencies; whether voters, shareholders, clients, or employees; need to become more sophisticated consumers of leadership messaging.

This means learning to distinguish between announcements and achievements, between vision statements and operational plans, and between leaders who can articulate problems and those who can actually solve them.

The stakes of this challenge are substantial. In an era of complex global problems, from climate change to technological disruption to social inequality, effective leadership requires precisely the qualities that performative leadership undermines. Resilience, expertise, honest communication, and focus on long-term outcomes over short-term appearances.

The choice between performative and substantive leadership is ultimately a choice about what kind of society we want to build. Do we want institutions led by skilled performers who can manage perceptions and craft compelling narratives? Or do we want institutions led by competent practitioners who can navigate complexity and deliver results, even when their work lacks dramatic appeal?

We chose the latter. And we’re building proof of concept every day. Are you?