Leadership is one of the most discussed and researched topics in social sciences. Billions of dollars are spent in the leadership training industry, yet we continue to have so much poor leadership in our organizations and world.
Why is that?
There are numerous factors that affect it, but one of the biggest reasons is this:
The word ‘leadership’ itself has become nearly meaningless.
It gets applied to everything from preschool behavior programs to personal development to tech startup job titles to motivational Instagram posts.
When a word is used for everything, it starts to mean nothing — and when ‘leadership’ means nothing, we end up with fewer people who actually know how to lead.
This isn’t an attack on the idea of leadership. It’s the opposite. Leadership matters too much for it to become a hollowed-out, meaningless word.
In this article, we will dive deep into how leadership has become its own worst buzzword. We will explore the buzzword concept, how leadership became one, what it costs us, and what we can do about it.
“Leadership” Has a Word Problem
Buzzwords are trendy, important-sounding terms people repeat so often that they start to lose any clear, concrete meaning. Even good words with originally good meanings become hollow.
Examples of buzzwords you may have heard include “synergy”, “empowerment,” or “disruption.”
Unfortunately, “leadership” fits that bill.
It has become one of the most overused, diluted, and monetized terms in today’s culture, and it makes sense: it sounds aspirational and prestigious.
It’s hard to know what good leadership is when there’s no clear meaning for the term itself.
Before We Go Further — Here’s What Leadership Actually Is
If one of the biggest problems of leadership today is a lack of a clear definition, it’s probably important for us to find a clear definition that we can use moving forward in this article (and beyond).
This definition is a paraphrase of Peter Northouse’s definition (paraphrased to make it more human and less technical sounding):
Leadership is the process of guiding people toward the accomplishment of a goal through influence.
Or the short version:
Leadership is guiding people somewhere through influence.
Leadership is a process – It’s grounded in principles, but what you do changes based on the need and situation, and working with people and situations is a process.
You are taking people somewhere – If you aren’t taking people somewhere, you are just being a nice (or not so nice) person. You must be going somewhere.
It’s guiding through influence – It’s not based on authority or manipulation or force. People willingly follow. Influence is the trust, respect, and relationship you have with others that causes them to act with and for you.
(To learn more about the definition, read the article here).
This is a good definition because it’s grounded in research, it’s neutral, and it tells what the work is. It defines what leadership is instead of trying to define it by the how.
Leadership is also not management. The simplest way to tell the difference between the two comes from Julie Zhou’s book, The Making of a Manager. To paraphrase:
Leadership is a skill. Management is a position. You don’t need a position to be a leader, but you can’t be a good manager without also being a good leader.
(We dive deeper into this difference in this article here).
I think it’s important to note that not everyone who says “leadership” poorly intends to mislead. Many mean something useful (personal growth, responsibility, self-management), but they rarely define it precisely.
With that definition in hand, let’s look at all the places the word gets used for something else entirely.
Where “Leadership” Shows Up (And Why It Doesn’t Belong There)
Few if any of the things I’m about to describe are necessarily bad. Some of them are genuinely good programs, useful apps, and come from well-meaning people.
The problem isn’t the content — it’s the label. Calling something ‘leadership’ when it isn’t doesn’t help the people in it. It confuses them.
And at scale, that confusion has real consequences.
1. Programs, Conferences, and Apps
Programs, conferences and training
Many programs, trainings, and conferences like to add the term “leadership” somewhere in their marketing, even when it doesn’t have anything to do with leadership. And it makes sense to add leadership.
Leadership sounds better. Leadership feels aspirational. Leadership sells.
You can sell something for more calling it “leadership training” versus what it really is, such as “goal setting”.
They may say it’s “for leaders” without defining what they mean by that (“For all the leaders in Atlanta, GA…”), or they just may call whatever they are teaching “leadership.” It may be good things, just not leadership.
For example, it may be a training or program about goal setting or time management or communication. Good things to have, and good things for leaders to learn, but it’s not leadership itself. Switching the terms because it sounds better is deceptive, creates confusion, and makes people confident in their “leadership” when they shouldn’t be.
Think of it this way: you wouldn’t call a class for surgeons or doctors on communication “medical training”. They are good for doctors and surgeons to have, but it’s not medical. In the same way, many of these things are good for leaders to learn and do, but it’s not “leadership”.
Similarly, when people look for someone to speak on “leadership”, they are often looking for someone motivational or inspirational. People may leave feeling good, but leave with no practical skills.
And when a majority of trainings and similar or graded on attendee satisfaction versus actual effectiveness, you get more of the same inspirational talks labeled “leadership”.
Apps
There are also phone apps that supposedly teach you “leadership”. I remember seeing ads for this one app that promoted itself by saying “Speak Like a Leader”.
It sounds good, but what it’s really teaching is how to speak confidently.
There are other apps and similar trainings that teach you how to talk or walk or act like a “leader”. What they are really teaching is body language, speaking ability, confidence, and image management.
2. Companies — Titles, Job Descriptions, and Hiring
The way companies handle the term “leadership” doesn’t help either.
One of the trends that have happened over the past years is title inflation: companies change job titles to “leader” or add VP/senior/principal/chief , often instead of raises.
I read about one company that changed all senior analysts to vice presidents because it sounded better, not because they were suddenly leading people.
People get these jobs, thinking they are leaders when they may not be leading anyone. Then it hurts them down the road.
Startups can do something similar. They may call everyone a “leader” to flatter team members or justify stock options, even when the work is individual/tactical with no one being led.
There’s also a lack of quality training. Some HRs focus on hours and getting it done, while trainings themselves can focus on things (such as personality) that really don’t help people lead better – and that’s if they even get training.
Job descriptions can be vague with statements like “must demonstrate leadership” without defining what that means. Do they mean owning projects? Influencing peers? Making decisions? Nobody says.
If leadership itself isn’t defined in the organization, then in the job descriptions and on the interviews, everyone will be on a different page. What one person thinks leadership is may be different than another.
Then people who actually know how to lead may be filtered out because of a misconstrued viewpoint someone has on the hiring team.
I remember an interview I had that this happened (or at least, it seemed that way to me). I was all ready to show how I could help build the new team that was being developed, and then I got a question that, unfortunately, I let throw me off.
It was on influence. It was something along the lines of: “Give me an example of how you ‘influenced’ someone to do something they didn’t want to do?”
I was thinking, “That’s your definition of ‘influence’?”
That framing treats influence as a kind of soft coercion: getting someone to do what they’d otherwise resist, rather than the trust-based process it actually is.
When the interviewers don’t know what leadership is, it’s hard for them to hire good leaders.
3. Education — From Daycare to Grad School
Leadership is used as a replacement for many terms or programs in education as well. It’s, again, not that they’re bad, but imprecision leads people to believe they have knowledge of something when they don’t.
It starts with daycare. You have daycares and preschools named “Future Leaders Early Learning Center” or similar. It’s doubtful that there is a real curriculum being used for preschoolers on leading or that those they hire are highly trained in leadership to teach it.
It’s just a marketing decision.
It sounds good.
Charter schools can be similar. There are quite a few that have “leadership” in the name.
This doesn’t mean they’re bad schools, but the labels can easily be aspirational branding, not a description of what’s being taught, or what is being taught may be based off a misinformed view of leadership.
It leads into programs that come into schools as well. I once was subbing at a really good school, and they had some organization come in and do a program that was some form of fundraiser where they did laps in the dark in the gym with neon lights, raising money for something.
However, a big part of their program was to “be a leader”, and they had these traits that they said, “This is what leaders do. Be these traits. Be a leader.”
They weren’t bad traits, but it was still not an accurate depiction of what leadership is. It was basically just character development.
Other programs do that too, and it makes sense why.
Calling something character development is just not sexy.
And with other programs and similar, leadership becomes a catch-all for good behavior. Kids may be called a leader for being responsible or being kind or working well with others or showing good character.
4. Personal Development and Coaching
Programs and talks revolving around personal development also gets rebranded as “leadership”.
Programs titled “Grow as a Leader” that are really about time management or goal-setting. These are good things, but they’re just not leadership itself.
Now, you may have training specifically for leaders on the topic, but labeling the topic itself as leadership is disingenuous.
When personal development is conflated with leadership, then most any personal growth content can be marketed as “leadership” content.
You can then call almost anything “leadership,” which works for those selling it, because you can charge more when you call it leadership.
But the truth is, someone can be highly developed personally in different areas and still be terrible at leading others. These are related but distinct.
Again, personal development isn’t the problem. The labeling is. Skills that support leadership are not leadership itself, and when we call them that, we rob both disciplines of their meaning.
What about self -leadership?
Self-leadership is a concept researchers use, and the term itself illustrates the definitional problem well.
When everything from managing your calendar to inspiring a team to managing your emotions gets called “leadership,” the word stops doing useful work.
Even if we use the term self-leadership, we need to make sure we don’t conflate it with leading other people.
Coaching
Along with personal development is the coaching industry. Today it seems many more people are calling themselves coaches and many of those attach the term “leadership” to their coaching title, even if they don’t really know much about leadership (but because it sounds valuable).
With coaching being unregulated and anyone able to call themselves a “leadership coach”, and with the great misunderstanding of leadership, it being the buzzword it is, so many people are “coached” in a misunderstood view of leadership.
5. Entrepreneurship
People sometimes seem to call entrepreneurs “leaders” as a default, as if starting a business automatically makes you a leader.
Starting a business requires many skills: some that relate to leadership and many that don’t. They’re different skill sets.
Some skills may be related, but they aren’t the same thing.
When I was looking for the teaching position at one point, I saw a job for a “leadership and entrepreneurship teacher”. That looked interesting, so I looked into it.
One of the duties was to prepare students for a “leadership talk”. When I dug further, I saw that the leadership talk was really a shark tank-style presentation where they presented an entrepreneurship-type idea.
It was entrepreneurship, but they were calling it “leadership”.
Leadership is leading people somewhere. As an entrepreneur, you may do that, but entrepreneurship is about starting businesses, sometimes by yourself. It’s not the same thing and conflating them adds to the confusion.
6. Social Media and “Thought Leadership”
The content inflation on social media doesn’t help the buzzword problem. In fact, it makes the issue worse.
Some people post about leadership because it’s cool or they want to be seen as a leader. Others have a misinformed view of it or are heavily influenced by the Dunning-Kruger effect.
And the result is trendy, cliché, feel-good statements that are surface-level and superficial. No depth, no grounding in what leadership actually is.
And the problem gets worse because the algorithm rewards engagement, not accuracy. Emotionally resonant, pithy leadership statements are repeated whether they’re right or not.
Nuanced advice with more depth and accuracy often performs poorly.
The result is content inflation: a flood of vague, feel-good advice with little grounding in principle or experience.
And there isn’t a barrier to posting content. Anyone with a quote card and a ring light can be a “leadership expert.”
If the existing content is wrong or surface level, new content just amplifies that. Marketing writers, not leadership practitioners, write a lot of the SEO content on leadership, and so the same inaccurate ideas get recycled and ranked.
Thought leadership:
The whole thought leadership concept doesn’t help either.
Thought leadership at one point may have meant something. Thought leaders were people whose views on a subject were taken as authoritative and influential. It may have referred to new thinking within that area, different than the norm. Pushing people.
Now, however, it mostly means self-promotion and content marketing. Many people claim to be thought leaders, and even some companies list the “thought leaders” in their company.
And as Dan Pontefract posted in Forbes, often, what many of those “thought leaders” post or discuss are just “a foundation of buzzwords and recycled ideas” (Pontefract, Forbes, 2024). Others even see thought leadership as the most overused phrase in leadership (Goble, Junkyard Wisdom, 2020).
So how did we get here?
How Did “Leadership” Become a Buzzword?
You can see that leadership has become a buzzword used for, well, almost anything.
How did this happen? Let’s look at the reasons why.
1. There Is No Agreed-Upon Definition
There is no one clear definition for leadership.
Sometimes it’s defined as position. Sometimes the definition is a how (example: decision making or building relationships). Sometimes the definition is just about being in charge.
Sometimes it’s in response to bad leadership they encountered so they define the opposite. Sometimes the definition is one of the things we’ve mentioned in the previous sections such as personal development or being a good person.
For some, leadership is whatever you want it to be. Whatever feels good to you, that’s your definition.
Even in research, there is no one clear definition, which then affects all the research, because the results you get will depend on how you define leadership in the first place.
Scholars estimate there are now more than 650 documented definitions of leadership—some suggest much more—with most definitions focusing on how leaders act rather than what leadership itself is (Silva, 2016; Genza, 2021).
This ambiguity allows anyone to claim what they’re teaching, practicing, or writing about as “leadership”, because, if there is no clear definition, how can someone say you are wrong?
2. The Relativism Problem
When our culture pushes “your truth is your truth” — the idea that personal experience and feelings matter as much as, or more than, empirical evidence — it’s not surprising that mentality has infected leadership.
You hear it in statements like “How do you like to lead?” or “What’s your authentic style?”. Instead of learning the behaviors of effective leadership, people are encouraged to “discover” themselves — their leadership style, their philosophy, their preferences — and then frame everything through that.
The problem is multifold. First, leadership isn’t about you or your feelings or preferences. It’s about doing what’s needed and what’s effective.
Just because it’s your values or preferences doesn’t mean it’s good, helpful, or effective.
Your preference may be to avoid difficult conversations, but that’s going to hurt the people you’re supposed to be leading. You may value your career above everything else and “lead” accordingly, and it will show in your results and your relationships.
You don’t get to redefine leadership just because your personality leans a certain way or you don’t want to grow.
Second, when leadership is whatever you want it to be, there’s no standard. Anything goes. You can’t evaluate it, measure it, or critique it.
And that results in more bad leadership.
3. The Leadership Industrial Complex
The leadership development industry is enormous, and it has every incentive to keep the term broad and to keep things the way they are.
The leadership development program market was valued at $82.2 billion globally in 2024 and is projected to reach $193.2 billion by 2032 (Yahoo Finance, 2025).
Despite the massive investment:
- Only 11% of 500+ executives surveyed by McKinsey strongly agree that their leadership development programs “achieve and sustain the desired results” (McKinsey Quarterly, 2017).
- Only 31% of U.S. employees are engaged at work — a decade low (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2025 Report, 2025).
- Globally, only 21% of employees are engaged (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2025 Report, 2025).
- Though it’s an older statistic, 86% in 2014 of experts polled said the world is facing a leadership crisis (The World Economic Forum, 2014).
That is despite the billions spent.
This should tell us something.
As Haslam, Alvesson, and Reicher put it in their study “Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us”, some leadership ideas “live on not because [they have] empirical support but because [they] flatter and appeal to elites [and] to the leadership industrial complex that supports them” (Haslam et al., 2024).
4. Poor Teaching and Training
Many trainings focus on philosophy, theories, or personality and styles rather than skills and principles. Some may teach personal development or entrepreneurship (or some other skill) and call it leadership.
Many programs measure success by whether people liked the training (satisfaction scores) rather than whether behavior actually changed.
In fact, according to LeadX, only 39% of leadership development professionals measure behavior change and only 22% measure business impact. (LeadX, 2024)
Other times organizations teach what’s inspirational/motivational versus what actually helps people lead better. And then if people are feeling “motivated” and mark their responses high for the training, those kind of training keep getting repeated, even if it doesn’t bring about any change or growth.
They may conflate personal development, SEL, or character development with leadership in training. People leave programs thinking they understand leadership when they’ve actually learned something else.
When people leave training thinking they know leadership but don’t, the Dunning-Kruger problem kicks in. They’re now less likely to seek out real development because they believe they’ve already done it.
Here’s What It Actually Costs
In a feel good way, it may not seem like a big deal. So what if personal development is called leadership? So what if there are hundreds of different definitions?
The so what is this: it has a real cost.
People Think They Know Leadership — But They Don’t
When everything is labeled leadership, people graduate programs, get titles, and read content thinking they now understand leadership.
But they don’t, and because they think they do, they don’t seek out real development.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect says thatthe less you know about something, the more confident you are in what you (wrongly) know, and the less likely you are to learn.
Giving someone a “leader” label without (good) training creates exactly this problem. They’re now confidently incompetent — and leading people.
It Hurts People’s Careers
Title inflation puts people into roles labeled “VP” or “Senior Leader” without the actual responsibilities. It may look good on a resume until they try to move into a role that requires the real thing. Then they’re stuck, often unable to perform at the level their title suggests.
It’s also hard for those people to step back to a lower title, even if that’s where they need to be to actually learn. The ego cost of “going backwards” prevents real growth.
Job seekers with real leadership knowledge and experience get filtered out because their definition of leadership doesn’t match the interviewer’s vague, unspoken assumption.
It Makes Hiring and Promoting Good Leaders Harder
If leadership isn’t defined, organizations can’t hire for it, assess it, or develop it reliably.
If you say someone must demonstrate leadership, what do you mean? Managing people? Owning projects? Influencing peers?
What you end up getting is inconsistent evaluations, inconsistent hiring, and bad promotions. You get interviewers asking questions they think are about leadership but aren’t.
You get performance reviews that list “leadership competencies” measured with vague checkboxes that are interpreted arbitrarily.
And then those who rely on the ATS/keyword automated hiring systems end up filtering for people who know to use the word or certain words, not people who actually do the thing.
It hurts followers
Leadership doesn’t happen without followers. When you have people who misunderstand leadership because of the buzzwordiness of it, you get more bad leaders.
And bad leaders = hurting followers.
You get lower morale, greater frustration, less productivity, confused priorities, and higher turnover.
It Keeps Bad Leadership Going
Bad leadership continues because we keep perpetuating the confusion. People with good intentions teach and call things “leadership” — and the cycle repeats.
And, without a clear definition, there’s no standard, so there’s nothing to critique. You can’t improve what you can’t define.
If leadership can mean anything, organizations have no way to measure whether their leaders are being effective.
And while it may not always be that extreme, following and using a inaccurate definition of leadership still hurts everyone.
Leadership is the most important organizational force. When leadership fails, everything downstream suffers — business performance, culture, employee wellbeing, results.
So What Do We Do About It?
Since leadership has become a buzzword that has real cost, how do we fix it?
Let’s look at a few ways.
(Note: Some of this has to happen at an organizational or cultural level. But it starts with individuals. Here’s where you can start.)
1. Define It — Actually Define It
Imagine if “organic” on a food label meant everything from chemical-free produce to whatever a brand decided to call organic, with no regulatory meaning. People would stop trusting the label or buy the wrong product thinking they were getting something they weren’t.
That’s what’s happened with “leadership.”
The fix starts with precision.
We need to have a common definition we use and only use the word for that. The definition mentioned earlier is a great one to use.
And if something doesn’t fit it, we don’t use the word.
If you mean personal development, say personal development. If you mean time management skills, say time management skills. If you mean character education, say character education.
These are valuable things. They don’t need to borrow the word “leadership” to be worth doing.
We need to stop using ‘leadership’ as a cheap substitute for more precise language.
When someone else uses the word “leadership” — whether in a program title, a job description, or a conversation — ask: what do you mean by that? What definition are you using? What does leadership look like here, specifically?
As an organization, make sure leadership is defined well within your organization and is thoroughly understood. Makes sure people know what you are looking for – and what you aren’t.
2. Examine What’s Actually Being Taught
Before signing up for a “leadership program,” look at what’s actually being taught. Is it about guiding people through influence? Or is it personal development, communication skills, motivational content?
Neither is bad. But knowing which one you’re getting helps you know what you’re actually getting.
There may be a “communication skills for leaders” specifically for leaders, but make sure what’s being stated, or what you are offering, is being precise.
Advocate for precision.
3. Stop Calling Everything Leadership
Educators: if you’re teaching students to think, communicate, manage projects, or develop personally — call it that. Let them know what they’re actually learning. The word “leadership” attached to something doesn’t make it leadership; it just adds confusion.
Companies: if you’re giving someone a VP title instead of a raise, know what you’re doing to them long-term. Before you interview or promote, make sure your organization is clear on what you mean by leadership and what you are looking for.
Content creators and coaches: call yourself what you actually teach. “Personal development coach” or “communication trainer” are legitimate, valuable things. Adding “leadership” to it doesn’t make it more valuable. It makes it less accurate.
Make sure what you label leadership is quality leadership content. Stop sharing the feel-good quotes and superficial content. In fact, make sure you understand leadership well before posting content or coaching others in it. Watch out for the Dunning Kruger effect.
Everyone: when you see “leadership” on a program, a product, or a title, pause and ask what they actually mean. Real leadership is too important to let pass without scrutiny.
Stop sharing feel-good and pithy statements that are superficial, reactionary, or just plain wrong. Just because it feels good or has a lot of likes doesn’t mean it’s accurate.
Let’s make sure what is shared is quality leadership content that helps people grow.
4. Demand Better Standards
Organizations investing in leadership development: makes sure the development you use is quality. Does it define leadership well? Does it teach it as a skill, or is it focused on personality, theories, or finding your style?
Make sure to (or that it does) measure behavior change and outcomes, if possible, not just if people liked it.
Hold coaches and consultants to actual definitions. Ask them: what is your definition of leadership? What outcomes do you measure?
What you can do as a leader in an organization
If you are a leader of your organization (or even with your team), make sure you understand it well. It’s often easy to think that because you are in a position, that you understand it. But the Dunning Kruger effect affects “leaders” of all levels.
Define it well. Make sure your organization has a clear understanding of what leadership is, what behaviors or mindsets you are looking for, and what success looks like.
Make sure interviews, hiring, and promotions are all aligned with the definition and criteria that’s set. Make sure everyone is on the same page.
Overcommunicate it.
Create the incentives around it. One reason even good leadership training fails is that people learn the right behaviors but then return to a culture that rewards the opposite or doesn’t incentivize the right behaviors.
Make sure your incentives and rewards actually incentivize the behaviors and actions you want.
Remove the vague job descriptions and performance standards. Be specific to what leadership is and what effective leaders do.
A Few Questions
Q: Isn’t this just normal language evolution?
A: Language does evolve, and that’s fine in many settings. But in a technical domain where imprecision has real consequences (people lead or fail to lead actual teams), the cost of vagueness is concrete. A doctor benefits from good communication, but we don’t call communication training “medical training.” Precision matters when the stakes are real.
Q: Aren’t you gatekeeping who gets to be called a leader?
A: No — this isn’t about who “earns” the label. It’s about what we actually teach and claim when we use the word. Calling a volunteer program a “leadership program” doesn’t help the volunteers. It robs them of clarity about what they’re actually learning and doing.
Q: Isn’t some leadership development better than none?
A: Not necessarily. Bad or mislabeled content can actively harm. It creates false confidence (Dunning-Kruger), displaces better learning, and lets people hide behind jargon. Quality and accuracy matter, not just quantity.
Conclusion
Leadership matters. Genuinely good leadership changes everything: organizations, teams, communities, people. That’s why it’s worth protecting the word. Not because of semantics, but because of substance.
When “leadership” means everything, we lose the ability to teach it, measure it, and hold it accountable. People call everything or anything they want “leadership.” And that’s when we end up with more of what nobody wants: bad leadership at scale.
So if you’re building a program, hiring a team, or developing leaders in your organization, the fix isn’t complicated, even if it isn’t easy: define the word, hold yourself and others to that definition, and stop borrowing the label for things that don’t fit it.
And if you’re simply reading, watching, and sharing leadership content, the bar is lower but no less real. The next time you see “leadership” on a program or a piece of content, pause. Ask what they actually mean. And before you share it, ask whether it’s accurate, or just something that feels good.
Because those questions, asked enough times, might be how we start to get this right.
