The Leadership Industry Has Overcomplicated Leadership
Dana Hatch is renowned for employing a variety of coaching methods to assist leaders in overcoming their struggles and achieving the next level of success. Her expertise in executive and neurolinguistic coaching helps professionals overcome imposter syndrome, strengthen communication skills, and build cohesive, high-performing teams.
Leadership does not need another acronym. I realize the irony of writing another article about leadership when there is already no shortage of books, podcasts, frameworks, assessments, and methodologies telling us how to do it. We have frameworks for communication. Assessments for personality. Models for motivation. Systems for accountability. We categorize people by colors, letters, numbers, generations, strengths, tendencies, and working styles.
Listen, I use some of them. I think they can be incredibly valuable. But for an industry with this many tools, organizations are still struggling with some remarkably basic human problems.
People don't communicate. Leaders don't say what they actually mean. Employees don't understand expectations everyone assumes were obvious. Difficult conversations get avoided until relatively small issues become expensive ones.
High performers disengage. Managers get frustrated. Trust erodes. Accountability either disappears entirely or becomes synonymous with punishment. Eventually, someone ends up sitting across from me saying some version of “I don't understand. We've tried everything.”
Maybe that's part of the problem. Maybe we've spent so much time teaching people how to do leadership that we've forgotten to teach them how to understand people.
Because leadership isn't happening inside a framework. It's happening between human beings. Complicated, contextual, occasionally irrational human beings who can hear the exact same sentence and somehow participate in two entirely different conversations.
They respond differently to pressure. They process information differently. They need different levels of context, autonomy, challenge, and support. Inconveniently, they don't always behave the way their personality assessment said they would.
Yet we keep searching for a standardized way to lead them. That is where I think we've overcomplicated leadership.
A framework can give you somewhere to start. An assessment can give you language. A model can help you recognize a pattern. But none of them can tell you exactly what is happening with the person sitting across from you. For that, you still have to pay attention.
We keep trying to standardize something fundamentally human
I understand why leadership became so driven by frameworks. Organizations need leadership development to be teachable and scalable. We need common language. We need ways to make complicated concepts easier to understand. That makes sense.
What doesn't make sense is treating those tools like an instruction manual for human behavior. I see this all the time. A manager tells me, “I've given them complete autonomy. I don't understand why they're struggling.” To the manager, autonomy means trust: I believe you're capable. I'm not going to micromanage you. Great.
Except the employee isn't experiencing trust. They're experiencing: I have absolutely no idea what this person wants from me. Nobody is necessarily wrong. They're having two different experiences of the exact same leadership behavior.
Quiet is another one. A leader tells me someone has become disengaged because they aren't contributing in meetings anymore. Maybe.
Or maybe they disagree and don't feel comfortable saying it. Maybe they're processing. Maybe they've tried contributing for six months, watched every idea disappear into the organizational abyss, and decided to conserve their energy. All three people are sitting quietly. Only one might actually be disengaged.
This is where leadership gets interesting. We see behavior and immediately want to explain it. They're difficult. They're resistant to change. They're not accountable. They're not motivated. They're not leadership material.
Labels are efficient. They're also a fantastic way to stop being curious. Because behavior is information. It isn't always an explanation.
What you're seeing is the output. The leadership work is figuring out what's producing it. People aren't static. Someone who normally thrives with autonomy may need more direction during a major organizational change. Someone who usually handles feedback well may become defensive under enormous pressure. A confident executive may start second-guessing decisions after making a costly mistake.
Same person. Different context. Different behavior. That's not inconsistency. That's being human.
Pressure matters. Relationships matter. Experience matters. Perceived risk matters. The environment matters. Oh, and by the way, yes, the behavior of the leader matters too.
The danger isn't using tools to understand people. It's becoming so confident in what the tools told us that we stop looking at the actual person. You can know someone's personality type, communication style, strengths profile, and preferred working style. You can put all of it into ChatGPT and ask for a beautifully organized analysis of how to lead them.
You may get one. Unfortunately, at some point you still have to talk to the person. Because the moment the profile becomes more interesting than the human being it was supposed to help you understand, we've missed the point.
Knowing leadership is not the same as leading humans
Most leadership principles sound fantastic in a conference room. Then someone gets angry. Someone shuts down. Someone challenges you in front of your entire leadership team.
Your highest performer starts behaving as though everyone should simply be grateful for the opportunity to work near them. Or, and this one is my favorite, the difficult conversation you've been coaching everyone else to have is suddenly the difficult conversation you have to have.
This is where leadership stops being theoretical. I've worked with so many leaders who can explain exactly how a difficult conversation should happen.
They understand accountability. They know the importance of psychological safety. They can practically teach the workshop. Then I'll ask: “Okay. Have you actually said any of this to them?” “No.” There it is.
Apparently, somewhere along the way, we started hoping expectations could be absorbed through organizational osmosis. Unfortunately, your team cannot be held accountable for a conversation that only happened in your head.
Knowing what good leadership looks like and being able to practice it when another human being is emotional, defensive, or unpredictable, or when you are frustrated or uncomfortable, are completely different capabilities. A leader can know the perfect feedback process and be so focused on getting through it that they don't notice the employee stopped processing five minutes ago.
They can understand psychological safety and still somehow be the person everyone becomes quiet around. They can know someone's personality profile inside and out and still misunderstand what is driving their behavior today. They can attend every accountability workshop available and still avoid holding their highest performer accountable because they're afraid that person might leave.
Knowing the model is one skill. Reading the moment is another. Research gives us reason to take that distinction seriously. A 2018 meta-analysis examining 98 studies and more than 27,000 participants found a moderate positive relationship between leaders' emotional intelligence and leadership effectiveness, with the strength of that relationship varying across organizational and methodological contexts.
That context matters. Leadership doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens when you're frustrated. When you're under pressure to deliver. When the person across from you is defensive. When you genuinely care about someone and still have to tell them they're not meeting expectations.
It happens when someone's behavior gets under your skin, and you have to figure out whether you're responding to the situation or reacting to your own reaction to it. There is no acronym that's going to do that part for you.
A model can give you direction. It cannot exercise judgment for you. It definitely cannot regulate your behavior for you. That part still belongs to the leader.
Different approach, same standard
This is usually where someone pushes back: “If I'm leading people differently, isn't that inconsistent?” No. Changing your approach is not the same thing as changing the standard. I think we confuse those two things far too often.
Take two employees who repeatedly miss deadlines. The first is trying to prioritize six different things that have all somehow been labeled the organization's “number one priority.” Which is always helpful. The second knows exactly what needs to happen, has the time and resources to do it, and simply doesn't follow through. Same outcome. Completely different problem.
If I give the first employee another lecture about accountability, I'm holding them accountable for navigating ambiguity leadership helped create. If I give the second employee another project tracker, additional support, and a beautifully color-coded priority system, I've turned an accountability problem into an arts and crafts project. Neither solves anything.
The deadline still matters. The performance expectation still matters. Accountability still matters. None of that changes because I'm willing to understand why two people arrived at the same outcome.
What changes is the conversation that needs to happen next. One may need clarity. The other may need accountability. Knowing the difference requires something no standardized leadership response can give you: judgment. This is the distinction that matters.
Adapt the approach. Keep the standard. Understanding people isn't about lowering expectations or making exceptions for every behavior. It's about understanding what you're actually looking at before deciding how to respond.
That's not inconsistent leadership. That's what leadership looks like when the leader is actually paying attention.
Leaders need to become students of people again
That brings me back to what I think we've lost somewhere along the way. We need leaders to become students of people again. Not amateur psychologists. Not experts in diagnosing every behavior. Just leaders willing to slow down long enough to notice what is actually happening before deciding what it means.
What changed? What am I seeing versus what have I decided it means? What am I assuming this person understands? What have I already tried? Then there is my personal favorite, the question leaders generally enjoy considerably less: What am I doing that might be contributing to this?
Because leadership isn't something we simply do to other people. We're in it too. I've watched leaders tell their teams they want more initiative and then require approval for nearly every meaningful decision.
I've seen executives say, “Bring problems to me early,” and then react so strongly to bad news that everyone learns to bring problems to them late, preferably after they're already solved. I've seen leaders ask for honest feedback, defend themselves against every piece of honest feedback they receive, and then wonder why everyone suddenly thinks everything is “fine.” A mystery for the ages.
The team learned. That's the part leaders sometimes miss. People are always learning from our behavior. Amy Edmondson's foundational research on psychological safety described it as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking and connected it with team learning behavior. But in practice, I think about it much more simply: Every leadership reaction teaches people something.
Challenge the boss. What happens? Admit a mistake. What happens? Bring bad news. What happens? Say “I disagree” in a meeting. What happens? Those moments tell you more about the real culture of an organization than almost anything written on its website.
People learn the unwritten rules. They learn whether it's actually safe to speak up. They learn which mistakes can be admitted and which ones should be quietly buried. They learn whose opinions matter. They learn whether disagreement is actually welcomed or merely something leadership says it welcomes.
Eventually, they stop consciously thinking about any of it. They just behave accordingly. This is why understanding people can't stop with trying to understand the employee.
Leaders have to be willing to study the environment they're creating too. Not because leadership needs to become softer. Not because expectations should change depending on someone's feelings. But because you cannot effectively influence behavior you haven't taken the time to understand. Sometimes the first behavior you need to understand is your own.
Maybe leadership is simpler than we've made it
Let me be clear: I'm not opposed to frameworks. I use assessments, leadership models, and structured methodologies. They can give us language, surface patterns, and help us ask better questions.
I'm not suggesting we abandon the tools and start leading entirely on instinct. That sounds like an entirely different organizational problem. What I am suggesting is that we use them as information, not conclusions. Because eventually, leadership requires judgment.
Maybe we've made leadership increasingly complicated because complexity feels reassuring. Systems give us structure. Steps feel controllable. People, inconveniently, do not.
Sometimes understanding people makes trying to figure out a broken Excel formula feel refreshingly straightforward. At least Excel has the decency to give you an error message when something isn't working. People rarely do.
Sometimes leadership is having the conversation you've been avoiding while searching for a better framework to help you have the conversation you've been avoiding. Sometimes it's shutting up long enough to hear the answer, which, depending on the leader, can apparently be an advanced leadership competency all by itself.
Sometimes it's realizing what looked like a motivation problem was actually a clarity problem. Sometimes it's realizing you've provided clarity, resources, coaching, and support for six months and the person still isn't doing the job. At that point, another development plan may not be the breakthrough everyone is hoping for.
Sometimes the employee isn't the problem. Sometimes they absolutely are. Sometimes it's you. Sometimes it's the environment everyone is operating inside. The hard part is figuring out which one you're actually looking at and being willing to accept the answer when it isn't the one you wanted.
I'm not convinced more leadership tools and information are going to solve that. We already know a lot about leadership. We have decades of research, assessments, certifications, executive programs, and an endless supply of books and podcasts telling us what good leadership should look like.
At this point, information is not exactly the scarce resource. The next evolution may not be knowing more. It may be noticing more.
Developing leaders who observe before they assume. Who stay curious long enough to understand what is actually driving behavior. Who know the difference between someone who can't meet an expectation and someone who won't.
Leaders who understand that empathy and accountability are not opposites. Who can adapt their approach without moving the standard. Leaders who are self-aware enough to recognize that when the same problem keeps showing up around them, eventually they have to entertain the deeply inconvenient possibility that they might be part of the pattern.
That kind of leadership is harder to package. Good. Human beings aren't standardized. Leadership cannot be completely standardized either. Use the tools. Learn the models. Take the assessments. They can make you a more informed leader.
Just don't confuse having more information with actually understanding the person in front of you. Because information was never supposed to replace attention.
Eventually, leadership requires something no assessment, methodology, or model can do for you. You have to look at the person sitting across from you, pay attention to what is actually happening, and do what leadership was supposed to be about in the first place: Lead the human being in front of you.
Read more from Dana Hatch
Dana Hatch, Executive & Neurolinguistics Coach
As a certified executive and neurolinguistics coach with over 15 years of experience in business consulting, I bring a unique blend of psychological insight and practical business acumen to help leaders and organizations achieve transformative results. My approach combines cutting-edge coaching techniques with deep industry knowledge to unlock potential, drive performance, and foster sustainable growth.
