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In This Episode:
Leadership might be the most overused word in leadership. In this episode, Thomas breaks down how the term gets stretched to cover everything from entrepreneurship to preschool fundraisers, why that makes it harder to spot or build real leaders, and lays out a simple, usable definition to bring the word back to something worth teaching.
What You’ll Learn
- Why “leadership” has become a catch-all label attached to almost anything, and why that actually makes it harder to develop real leaders
- A simple, usable definition of leadership, guiding people toward a goal through influence, built on Peter Northouse’s work
- How entrepreneurship, personal development, and general good behavior get mislabeled as leadership, and why mixing them up causes confusion
- The role of title inflation, where people get fancier titles instead of raises and end up stuck when they try to step into a real leadership role later
- Why the coaching industry’s lack of regulation lets anyone call themselves a leadership expert, whether or not they actually understand the topic
- How social media rewards leadership content that feels good and spreads over content that’s accurate or useful
- What thought leadership originally meant, and how it’s become another label people apply without much behind it
- Why blurring this one word contributes to low engagement, high turnover, and distrust in leaders today
Resources Mentioned
- Peter Northouse’s definition of leadership (paraphrased in this episode)
- Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2026 (Engagement stats)
- Thought leader buzzword article
Transcript
Welcome to the Real Truth About Leadership, where we debunk myths and teach what works. Before this was called No More Bad Leaders, but changed the name to make it more clear. So basically the same show, but different name.
In today’s episode, we’re talking about buzzwords, or the buzzwords of leadership, or rather one single buzzword that causes a lot of harm when it comes to leadership and us having good leaders.
Now, you’ve probably heard a lot of different buzzwords. They’re words that are overused, they lose meaning, and you may have heard things like synergy or things like empowerment—things that might be good, but they’re so overused they’ve kind of lost meaning.
Why “Leadership” Itself Is the Problem
And this word I want to talk about is similar because it’s used for so many things that in many ways there’s no clear meaning for it, and because of that, it hurts us when it comes to good leaders. And that word is leadership itself.
Because leadership, I believe, has become the biggest buzzword when it comes to, well, leadership, because it’s used for so much. Leadership is a feel-good word that people use basically for everything. It’s a catch-all replacement for terms that could be more precise.
And again, it just sounds good to call things leadership. So many things out there use that term “leadership” where it actually has anything to do with leadership.
It just sounds good and it feels good to say, “This is for leaders,” or “Be a leader,” or “Do this for leadership,” or “Our leadership program,” when it really doesn’t have anything to do with leading people.
And when it comes to definitions, there’s not a clear definition that is used for leadership. People write books and talk about leadership, but don’t ever really define what they are talking about.
So many programs and so many even schools get names with “leader,” “future leaders” of this, without really defining what they mean by leadership. And it may not seem like a big deal—so what, people like to throw the word “leader” around?
However, it is a big deal because when leadership is used for everything, when the term is used for everything, then it loses its meaning. Because if everything is leadership, then nothing is leadership.
How can people know what good leadership is when it means everything? When there’s no clear definition of what it is?
When we use it for everything, how can people know how to be a good leader? And when it’s used for everything, how can you critique what people are doing or saying? “Hey, that’s not effective, do this,” because everything’s leadership.
The Cost of an Undefined Term
And it creates a negative cycle because if you can call almost anything leadership, then people teach things as leadership—not necessarily with bad intentions, it’s just what they understand because of the buzzword-ness of it—so they teach it, or they call what they’re doing leadership, and then it’s taught to other people and they think they know leadership when they really don’t, so it hurts them.
And we can just look at today in our culture and our world and see that leadership isn’t doing too well. You have super low engagement, you have the Great Resignation, you have such a distrust in people—or I should say a distrust in leaders and CEOs and just government and so much—because of poor leadership.
And we spend billions of dollars on supposed leadership training and it’s not working.
And that’s kind of a different topic we’ll talk about some more in a different episode. And it’s also an issue because think about it: if we don’t define leadership well, if we keep it as a buzzword, then that bad leadership will continue.
People won’t truly understand it; they think they will because they’ve been taught or learned this or seen this from somebody and they think they know it, but they don’t. So then they go into a position or whatever and they do things that are not really helpful, and it hurts them.
And we have the Dunning-Kruger effect with all of that, which basically says, you know, the less you know about something, the more confident you are about what you think you know and less likely to learn, and so on. And so the Dunning-Kruger effect hurts people.
How It Hurts People’s Careers
And then people don’t know it, and then you have the Dunning-Kruger effect and all that. It also hurts people in their jobs because—we’ll talk in a minute about title inflation, which is part of the issue—and people get put into these positions that are labeled leadership, but they don’t actually lead people.
It’s just a fancy title that was given to them. Then when they try to move to a different position or try to do something of that nature, it hurts them being able to move up or to move to a different company because they don’t really have the experience.
They just had a nice title, but they didn’t do the work. But if you’re suddenly labeled a VP of something, but not really leading anybody, it’s just the fancy title, and then you’re put into or try to move into a position that’s an actual VP position, you really don’t have that experience or knowledge because you didn’t really do it.
But it’s hard for that person also to want to go down and be like, “Okay, let me go down to middle manager or first-line manager and learn,” because you were already a VP.
It’s also hard for organizations to hire or promote good leaders because when there’s not a clear definition of what leadership is, how do you know? And when people don’t understand, how do they know?
How do they find a good leader? How do they know what questions to ask because of the buzzword-ness of it?
And I’ve seen this and experienced this myself with some different questions that, I guess from my perspective, came from a misunderstanding of what leadership is—and I could be wrong, but that was my perspective.
What Good Leadership Could Look Like
And lastly, of course, when it’s a buzzword we continue to have bad leadership, and that’s not what we want. We want good leaders because leadership is so important.
It changes everything. When you have good leadership, it changes culture, things move forward.
Just think about if we had the percentages of good leaders over bad leaders, if it were reversed where we had like 70% something good leadership and engaged employees because of it, versus 30% or 20% depending what stat and worldwide or US, etc. It would make a huge difference.
So, before we dive in, I want to talk about in this episode—we talked about kind of why it’s important and we’ll give examples about ways that leadership is defined poorly and examples of where kind of industries are—not necessarily industries, but places that kind of where it’s affected as well.
A Clear Definition of Leadership
But we need to kind of come up with a definition or talk about a definition first. If we’re talking about how it’s a buzzword, what’s a clear definition that we can use?
Now, in a sense there are different definitions of leadership in the sense that if you say a company is ahead of everybody, then they’re “leading” the other companies and in that term they just mean they’re ahead. So sometimes it’s used that way.
Sometimes people talk about leadership positions, but those are really just the positions where people should be leading; it doesn’t mean they are leading or know how.
But when it comes to leading people, when it comes to leadership, here is a clear definition that we can use of what leadership is. And this definition comes from Peter Northouse—or I should say it’s a paraphrase of that because his was very kind of wordy and I just made it more simple.
Other definitions that I’ve seen are very similar to this; they just use different words, but it basically means the same thing.
So, here is a clear definition we can use: leadership is the process of guiding people toward the accomplishment of a goal through influence. Or if you want kind of a shorter, easier one, it’s that you’re guiding people somewhere through influence.
That’s basically what leadership is. You’re guiding people, taking people somewhere through influence.
Because if it’s not through influence, if it’s through position and so on or that you’re just forcing an authority, that’s not really leading. You also have to be taking people somewhere.
Where “Leadership” Gets Misused
Let’s look at some of the ways that leadership is used. And when I talk about all of these, I in no way mean to be cynical about it, and I also don’t mean to imply that people are intentionally misleading.
Now, of course, some people might be out there doing that, but many people do it with good intention; they’re just misinformed themselves and they teach things trying to be helpful.
And a lot of the things are good things that are labeled leadership; it’s just not leadership. It’s more about precision of the term, not that all these things are bad but only this is good.
Again, leadership is often used as a catch-all label. Everything is called leadership because it feels good to add that term to it, to call it leadership, even when it’s not.
Entrepreneurship
One thing that I’ve seen it used for is entrepreneurship. So instead of calling something just what it is, entrepreneurship, they say it’s leadership.
One example that I’ve seen is when I was looking at different teaching jobs at one point that were about leadership. One of the things was like a leadership entrepreneurship teacher.
And I thought, “Okay, cool, let me look and see what this is talking about.” And so one of the duties and it does mention entrepreneurship in the title, however, one of the duties that the teacher was supposed to do is to prepare their class for a “leadership talk.”
And I was like, “Okay, what is this leadership talk that they’re discussing?” And I look at it and it’s basically a Shark Tank presentation.
And I’m thinking, “I think they misunderstand what leadership is,” because leadership is not developing a product and presenting it; it’s leading people. That’s entrepreneurship what they’re talking about.
Now as an entrepreneur, you may need to lead people, but those are two different things with two different skills. Some things may align, be similar, but many are different.
When you conflate those two, it can make things confusing and again, hurts the precision that we need when it comes to leadership.
Personal Development and Social-Emotional Learning
Another area that it’s often used a lot is when it comes to personal development and social-emotional learning. It’s so easy to label those as leadership, to rebrand it and call it leadership because it sounds cooler, it sounds better to call it leadership or “grow as a leader,” even if it has nothing to do with being leadership.
So someone could come in, have a presentation or a program online, and they just throw that word “leader” in it because again, it’s cool. But really they’re talking about just goal setting or self-awareness or communication or decision-making or habits, which all can be good things, good things to learn and do, it’s just not leadership.
And as a leader, you may use those things and those can be good things for you as a leader, but in itself, it’s not leadership.
When we conflate leadership, when we conflate anything with personal development with leadership, then basically you can market and call anything leadership so that you can sell it that way, even if it doesn’t really have to do with leadership.
And you can also charge more money for it because you call it leadership versus if you call it something else. Leadership also is—can be used for a general bucket for good behavior.
You do good things, you model good behavior, you volunteer, well that means you are a leader because you have good behavior. Sometimes it’s just leadership is just whatever feels good to you.
In today’s world of content online, sometimes it’s promoted so much is “How do you like to lead?” “What do you like to do?” and it’s okay because as long as it feels good to you and you, that’s okay.
And so leadership can almost become anything that way when that’s the mentality.
Programs, Conferences, and Marketed Tools
And of course, there’s other ways that you probably have seen other things conflated with leadership that then hurts the definition of what leadership and good leadership is. And all these conflations, all these things where they are called—the whole buzzword use of leadership—it’s shown in different ways.
And we’ll talk about some of the things we talked about earlier in more specific cases. So for example, you often see leadership as the buzzword conflated when it comes to programs, to conferences, and other tools marketed as leadership.
An example of this is you have apps or tools that you can buy and they talk about walking like a leader, speaking like a leader, you know, “do this like a leader” because again, it’s cool to say things it’s like a leader. Oh, it feels good.
And so they have that term “leader” in it.
I know specifically on one of my feeds I kept seeing this ad for this app called—I don’t even remember what it was called—but the thing it kept promoting was “Speak like a leader.” And really when I looked at it, what it was talking about was how to speak more confidently.
Instead of speaking hesitantly or waffle when you’re talking, it was trying to help you speak in ways that show yourself to be more confident. And that can be a good thing as a leader at times, you know, to be more confident, but that’s not leadership itself.
And I think sometimes people use those things because what they’re defining leadership or their understanding of leadership is they just see these hero, charismatic CEOs and that’s their label for it, and so they’re trying to market as being like that, whether that’s effective or a good image of leadership, which it’s not.
And again, like we mentioned earlier with personal development and social-emotional learning and stuff, it’s easy just to call things leadership because it may sell better that way, it sounds better. You know, it’s a marketing decision, not an accurate categorization.
We call our goal setting or we call our conference a “Leadership Conference” because man, it sounds good, whether they actually teach what it means to be a good leader.
They may have some inspirational, motivational things, but it doesn’t really teach or necessarily even about leadership itself. It may be some good things, but not leadership.
Education and Schools
Then you have the education realm where some of this hits as well. You have, of course, different schools or daycares and things that may call themselves “The Future Leaders Early Learning Center” or something like that.
And it’s not really about again, teaching leadership; it’s more marketing, because I really doubt in a lot of those places that they really teach how to lead people to preschoolers. But it sounds cool to, you know, call your kid a future leader.
It’s good marketing, feels good. And then you have different schools, of course, there’s charter schools and other things that have their term leadership in it that talk about supposedly developing leaders, and some may—and I hope they do in many ways—but there’s a lot of that term there whether they actually teach leadership or not.
But then there’s also programs in school that are similar to what we’ve talked about before. You have programs that emphasize some characteristics or traits and they call it leadership without defining really what leadership is.
I remember when I was subbing at a school at one point—and it was a great school, I loved the school that I was subbing at—and they had this group come in, this program, some kind of fundraising thing where they had to run laps or whatever it is.
And they had this thing, you know, “Be a leader,” and they had these random traits like being courageous or something. And so they said, “You know, try to raise money, fundraise, run the laps in the gym with the lights, the glow lights, whatever, and be a leader with these traits.”
And those traits may be good things, but just calling everything leadership again hurts when we actually try to talk about leadership.
One of the things with that is a lot of the things are really character development, right? They’re character education, but it just sounds old-fashioned to call something character education.
Leadership sounds better, more aspirational. And some of those programs that come in, again, they teach good things, but when you call a kid a leader because they are able to organize their backpack and do their homework—well, you’re a leader because you do that—we again are hurting what leadership is.
Good things they’re doing, teaching responsibility, we just don’t need to call everything leadership.
Companies and Title Inflation
And then you have companies. And of course, first there’s like the training and the same things we talked about: everything can be labeled leadership whether it’s leadership.
And so you may learn communication skills, which can be good, or some other things, and it’s just labeled leadership, and so people leave thinking they know leadership when they don’t, and it can create that cycle we’ve talked about.
So sometimes—and I think more maybe more often than not—a lot of that training is ineffective. And honestly, a lot of training out there just in general, even in higher education and stuff, some of the stuff I’ve seen is they talk about more personality-based and finding your philosophy and all those things that are very self-focused versus teaching leadership as a skill and “this is what leadership is” and “this is the things that you do to be a good leader.”
Yes, things change based on the situation, but the general principles stay the same, such as when you’re building a building: there’s foundational principles you have to follow to make sure the building stays, you know, stable, but then how you do on top of that depends on the situation and what you’re doing. And leadership is similar.
So training can easily be ineffective in companies. But then you have the thing of title inflation that we talked about before.
And title inflation is where titles are given—they sound better as a leader or you move them up to supposed Vice President or whatever it is—instead of a raise. So you inflate the title and maybe instead of a raise, you just make them have a better title.
And it sounds good and it feels good, but as we said before, it can hurt people later in their jobs. And people are given these leadership titles when they aren’t actually leading and may not even know how to lead because they may not be trained well or trained at all.
I don’t remember the exact company this happened in, but I remember reading about one company that they changed all their senior analysts to vice presidents just because it sounded better.
It wasn’t necessarily that they were suddenly leading, it’s just it’s cooler to be called a vice president, a leadership role, versus just whatever they were, senior analyst.
You know, in startups, founders may call everyone a leader to flatter them to help people come on—maybe they aren’t getting paid much because it’s a startup—or to justify stock options or whatever. But they may not actually be leading people.
They may just be independent working on their own stuff, but again, it’s cooler to have that title because being called “leader” is cool.
The Coaching Industry
And then there’s the coaching world out there. And one of the things I was reading when I was researching this episode and looking at different studies and looking at what different people said about this topic was the coaching industry, with the fact that everybody today that’s a coach—I won’t say everybody, that’s exaggerating—a lot of people like to add the term leadership to their coaching title, like they’re a “leadership coach.”
Because it does sound better to call yourself that. The problem is, as I read some people mentioning, is that coaching is unregulated.
Anybody can call themselves a leadership expert, leadership coach, executive coach. And it’s popular to label yourself that.
It just means you may not know or those people who call themselves that may not truly understand what leadership is. And that’s not helpful.
That just creates more of the conflation of all these other things that they may call leadership as leadership when it’s really not.
Social Media and Content Inflation
And then you have social media and the content and articles and such that’s put out there. There’s a plethora of content when it comes to well, most topics, but especially leadership.
There’s so much content inflation, a flood of vague, feel-good advice that often isn’t grounded in principle or just—it’s superficial and it feels good. The problem is with a lot of that is that the algorithm incentivizes people to post things that feel good, that may not be true, but that people like, because it gets engagement.
It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, doesn’t matter if it’s helpful or not. What matters is that it gets engagement.
So it rewards posting things that get the retweets or get the likes on LinkedIn or whatever, not because it’s true. And so it incentivizes people to keep posting the junk or the feel-good quotes or whatever stuff that doesn’t really help.
And there’s no, of course, filter of who can write about it. So as long as you have a computer or if you’re doing videos, you know, a camera, you can call yourself a leadership expert and start writing about it even if you don’t understand much about it.
And one thing you may not know, if you don’t do much blogging or haven’t explored that world much, is for when people are trying to write on a topic—let’s say leadership—what they often do is go and look at the other articles that are written about the topic and then try to one-up it basically.
So if you want to get this keyword on leadership, you read the articles, you see what they talk about and see how you can do it better, so you can try to one-up that article and do it better, so hopefully you’ll raise it.
The problem is that a lot of the content out there on leadership in the blog world is inaccurate or focuses on the wrong things—the feel-good things, the trendy things, the hype—and the people who are just trying to get some content for their website, they’re not necessarily leadership experts, they might be marketing people.
And so they write based on what they see, and so the same things get perpetuated whether it’s true or not. It’s just perpetuated because it’s what was written there again, whether it’s true or not.
Thought Leadership
And one more thing that we’ll talk about is thought leadership. And again, it has that term leadership in it.
And at one point it may have meant something. And in some places and cases maybe it still does, I don’t know.
But thought leadership maybe had meant something good at one point, you know, people have unique ideas, they’re authoritative, they’re leading the way in different directions or whatever unique thinking that people follow. But now a lot of people just like to call themselves thought leaders.
And if you search different websites where people post, a lot of people like to label the thought leadership. And I forget which article it was—I may post it in my show notes if I find it—but they talk about how a lot of the thought leaders now who label themselves, they just often repeat the same things, the same buzzwords, regurgitate information versus anything new.
But it’s cool to call yourself a thought leader, and of course, it has that term “leader” in it.
Closing Thoughts
With all that being said, I was trying to give different examples of ways and how leadership has become a buzzword and in what ways and how you can see it and where you see it.
And while again, this may not seem like an important topic, it really is, because when we don’t have a clear definition, when it means everything, then leadership really means nothing. And we will continue to have bad leaders if we continue to call leadership everything.
So I think it’s important that we recognize how it’s becoming a buzzword so that we can try to stop it.
In the next episode, we’ll talk about why it’s become a buzzword, what kind of the conditions and things that have created it where it has become a buzzword. And then the episode following that, we’ll talk about how we can work against it being a buzzword so that hopefully we can make it where it’s not one anymore.
See you next time.