Big Talk, No Walk: How to Avoid Leadership Theater

Recently, I got to be Putin, Xi Jinping, Ayatollah Khamenei, and Kim Jung Un in the space of about forty minutes.  Needless to say, the power went to my head immediately. 

I sat as a panel member giving feedback to students developing national defense strategies for some of our besties like Russia and North Korea.  This is right up my alley—the class covers doctrine from adversary nations, and learning to think from their perspective is a crucial part of it.  The panel entertained both because I got to put myself in those authoritarian boots and because the students were so willing to argue back with me on why their plan was, in fact, the best one to destroy America.

Team USA, however, disappointed me the most.  Even though the given scenario involved significant gains from our adversaries, they advocated for maintaining the status quo through what they called decisive actions, which translated to actions either too vague or inconsequential to actually matter.  And yet, I don’t blame them for this.  I blame today’s foremost style of leadership: big talk, no walk.

First, a caveat.  Obviously, no one leadership style encompasses every leader, or even every moment of a single leader’s day.  Also, I am by no means immune to this style myself.  So take this with a large grain of salt from one who knows he doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on.  This is an opinion piece, and like going to the DMV, you just have to endure it.

Big talk, no walk style leadership involves, as one might guess, lots of words with little action to back them up.  This breaks out into three areas.  First, a reliance on vague buzzword salads instead of concrete goals or actions.  Second, overpromising results with zero likelihood of success.  And third, an abject failure to embrace humility.

Let’s start with the first area, vague buzzword salads.  This occurs as a leader say nothing of importance even after vomiting words out their mouth for an entire meeting.  The concept unperins Weird Al’s song “Mission Statement” and makes it entertaining.  Take the first few lines:

We must all efficiently operationalize our strategies,

Invest in world-class technology and leverage our core competencies,

In order to holistically administrate exceptional synergy.

Try to gain a single useful bit of guidance out of that.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.  You can’t, because it carries no substance.  Yet I’d bet anyone who has worked in a large organization has heard those same terms ad nauseum.  We watch leadership theater as our leaders mouthing words that sound right but fall apart at the most cursory of glances.

More distressingly, this concept also defines what Bruce Stubbs talks about in his article on the failures of recent heads of the US Navy.  He argues that the past few Chief’s of Naval Operations have relied far more on vague generalities than concrete guidance, which Stubbs claims sits at the root of many of the Navy’s current woes.  One cannot follow a leader’s vision if that vision is little more than a mirage.

The second area is likely as old as humanity.  So long as we’ve been talking with each other, I’m certain people have overpromised knowing they can never deliver.  Today, however, followers rarely hold their leaders to account for it.  Politicians tend to have the most bombastic examples, as campaign trail promises vanish soon after the polls close.  Yet these objectively provable fallacies rarely blows back on them, particularly here in the United States where voters often care more about the letter after a candidate’s name than any of their policy positions. 

This concept also impacts every other sector in which leadership is a thing.  So, you know, all of life.  Off the top of my head, I can think of the Theranos CEO bilking investors out of millions with false claims about blood test technology, televangelists claiming that if people mail them money, they’ll be healed, and every restaurant review on Google Maps.  

Again, this is not new.  But what concerns me is how little consequence there seems to be for it these days.  It has become the norm to overpromise things and have no need to follow-up, which leaves those following a leader with little hope of knowing what to expect.

Finally, there is humility.  As I’ve touched on before, humility is important.  It is the fundamental trait to all effective leadership, because without humility you cannot learn from your own mistakes.  It’s also critical to recognizing when the situation is too complicated for a simple solution, or to acknowledge when a leader is out of their depth. 

It’s a cliché at this point to say when everything is a priority, nothing is, yet that’s how leaders continue to operate.  Rare is the organization that can define a priorities list and actually stick to it.  Even more rare, the leader who puts their credibility on the line by saying no, we can’t do that. 

Where does humility factor into that?  Recognizing that you can’t do everything.  We live in a resource constrained world—time, money, resources, and people are finite.  Even a country as powerful as the United States can’t be everywhere at once, but it sure seems like we’ll keep trying.

Vague buzzword salad, overpromising, and a lack of humility.  Big talk, no walk.  That’s what I saw when these students briefed how America would handle their scenario crisis, and that’s why they’re doomed to fail when their little tabletop exercise kicks off.  Maybe one day we can turn things around and start with a big walk defined by as little talk as possible.  That’s the leader I hope to be one day.