The candidate walked into my client's boardroom last Thursday speaking like he'd swallowed a motivational poster. "I'm passionate about leveraging synergistic opportunities to ideate scalable solutions that optimise stakeholder engagement." I watched three seasoned executives try not to roll their eyes.
Welcome to the leadership authenticity crisis that's slowly strangling Australian businesses.
We've created a generation of leaders who sound like they're perpetually delivering keynote speeches rather than having actual conversations. They've mastered the language of leadership development programs but forgotten how to talk like human beings. And we wonder why employee engagement scores are circling the drain.
Here's my unpopular opinion: most leadership training has made our leaders worse, not better.
I've been watching this trainwreck unfold for sixteen years across mining sites in the Pilbara, manufacturing floors in Geelong, and corporate towers in Sydney. We're producing leaders who can recite the latest management theory but can't have an honest conversation with their team about missing a deadline.
The problem started somewhere around 2015 when everyone became obsessed with "authentic leadership" while simultaneously teaching people to communicate in corporate speak. It's like teaching someone to be genuine by giving them a script. The cognitive dissonance is staggering.
I remember working with a regional manager for a major retailer who'd just completed an expensive leadership program. Brilliant woman, fifteen years of operational experience, knew her business inside out. But after six months of "executive presence" training, she'd lost the ability to give feedback without wrapping it in three layers of management jargon.
Her team went from respecting her practical knowledge to questioning whether she'd been replaced by a corporate robot. Sales dropped. Turnover increased. The training that was supposed to make her a better leader had made her completely ineffective.
This isn't just happening in retail, either. I've seen the same pattern in construction, healthcare, professional services - everywhere we're prioritising leadership appearance over leadership substance.
The worst part? These leaders aren't trying to be inauthentic. They genuinely believe this is how successful leaders communicate. They've been taught that gravitas requires complexity, that authority demands jargon, that inspiration needs to sound like a conference presentation.
But here's what actually happens when leaders communicate like walking LinkedIn posts: their teams stop listening.
Real leadership communication is messier, more direct, and infinitely more effective than the polished presentations we're teaching in leadership programs. It includes admitting when you don't know something, asking for help when you're struggling, and saying "that was my mistake" without adding seventeen qualifying statements.
I learned this watching my old boss, Frank, who ran a construction company in Newcastle. Frank never used the word "leverage" in his life, probably couldn't define "synergy" if pressed, and his idea of a strategic planning session was spreading blueprints across his desk and asking, "Right, how do we build this thing?"
His teams would run through brick walls for him. Why? Because when Frank said something, you knew exactly what he meant. When he was concerned about a project, he'd say "I'm worried about this deadline." When someone did good work, he'd say "bloody well done." When changes needed to happen, he'd explain why in language everyone could understand.
No corporate speak. No management theory. Just clear, honest communication from someone who cared more about getting results than sounding impressive.
Compare that to the leaders I meet now who can't give directions to the toilet without mentioning "optimising the user experience journey." It's exhausting, and more importantly, it's ineffective.
The research supports this, though you won't hear it in most leadership development programs. Studies show that employees respond better to leaders who communicate clearly and directly than those who use complex, formal language. Yet we keep training leaders to sound like management consultants.
Part of the problem is how we select and promote leaders in the first place. We've become seduced by articulate presenters who can talk a good game rather than practical operators who can deliver results. The person who sounds most like a CEO in the interview gets promoted to be one, regardless of whether they can actually lead.
I've seen this disaster play out repeatedly in mid-sized Australian companies. The technical expert gets promoted because they "have leadership potential," gets sent to leadership training, comes back speaking in buzzwords, and promptly loses credibility with the team that used to respect their expertise.
Meanwhile, the person who could actually lead - the one everyone goes to with problems, who keeps projects on track, who can make tough decisions without three committee meetings - gets passed over because they don't interview well or sound "executive" enough.
It's backwards, and it's costing us good leaders and good companies.
The solution isn't to eliminate leadership development - it's to fundamentally change what we're teaching. Instead of training leaders to sound impressive, we need to train them to be useful. Instead of teaching them corporate communication, we need to teach them human communication.
What effective communication skills training should focus on is helping leaders find their natural voice and use it more effectively, not replacing it with someone else's vocabulary.
The best leaders I work with now are those who've either avoided formal leadership training entirely or had the courage to ignore most of what they learned. They communicate like themselves, not like characters from a business school case study.
Take Sarah, who runs operations for a logistics company in Brisbane. Former forklift driver, worked her way up, knows every aspect of the business. When she talks to her team, she sounds like someone who's actually done the work, not someone who's read about it in Harvard Business Review.
"The new system's not working like they promised," she'll say. "We're going to have to figure out workarounds until IT sorts it out. I know it's frustrating - it's frustrating me too." Her team doesn't doubt her commitment or competence because she communicates like a real person dealing with real problems.
Contrast that with leaders who would turn the same situation into: "We're experiencing some integration challenges with our new technological solutions that are impacting operational efficiency. We're implementing interim processes to optimise workflows while we collaborate with our technical partners to enhance system performance."
Same message, but one version builds trust while the other builds cynicism.
The irony is that authentic leadership isn't something you can teach in a traditional sense - it's something you have to stop preventing. Most people have natural leadership communication abilities until we train them out of it.
Australian workplace culture makes this even more critical. We have a built-in bullshit detector that's been finely tuned over generations. When someone starts speaking like a corporate press release, we instinctively switch off. We prefer straight talk over smooth talk, substance over style.
Yet our leadership development programs are importing American corporate communication styles that clash fundamentally with how Australians prefer to interact. We're training our leaders to communicate in ways that guarantee they'll lose credibility with Australian teams.
I've started recommending what I call "unlearning sessions" for leaders who've been through traditional training programs. We work on stripping away the jargon, finding their natural communication style, and learning to lead conversations rather than deliver presentations.
The results are remarkable. Teams start engaging again. Meetings become productive instead of performative. Problems get solved instead of discussed to death. Communication skills training that focuses on authenticity rather than polish creates leaders people actually want to follow.
website : https://sewazoom.com/what-to-expect-from-a-communication-skills-training-course/
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