High-performance organisations are built on decision-fit leaders who know how to expertly move a team through ambiguity.
For decades, ‘leadership’ has been HR’s go-to remedy for everything from engagement to performance. But what if I told you that leadership – or more precisely, how we’ve come to define and develop it – might actually be an obstacle?
As a leadership development strategist, I’ve worked with hundreds of HR professionals who are deeply committed to building great leaders. Yet a troubling pattern has emerged: the more leadership is treated as a capability to be filled, the more organisations get filled with what I call leaders-in-waiting – people with titles and training, but without the real-world decision-making muscle to create business value.
We’ve made leadership conceptual, abstract, safe, and wrapped in models, assessment, and nice-sounding words that rarely drive sharper thinking or faster execution.
The result? Organisations filled with leaders who are inspirational but indecisive; empathetic but ineffective; busy but unclear on impact.
The problem with personality-based leadership
Many leadership programs still anchor development in personality: strengths, style, preferences. This has its place as self-awareness is critical, but it doesn’t necessarily create value for the organisation. Leadership becomes an introspective exercise rather than an outward commitment to results.
Meanwhile, managers continue to struggle with the basics: making confident decisions, addressing underperformance, influencing up and out and leading through ambiguity. In short, they don’t need more leadership theory; they need leadership tools that help them think, act, and decide differently. And they need them right now.
Why HR should flip the development script
If you’re an HR leader, here’s the shift: stop asking, “How do we grow our leaders?” and start asking, “What decisions and behaviours does the organisation need to move forward, and who’s equipped to deliver them?”
Start with pain points: delayed decisions, siloed thinking, talent risk, wasted meetings. Then trace those issues back not just to strategy gaps, but to leadership habits. From there, your development strategy becomes surgical: precise, practical and tied to specific value levers.
“We’ve made leadership conceptual, abstract, safe, and wrapped in models, assessment, and nice-sounding words that rarely drive sharper thinking or faster execution.”
This is where modular, performance-oriented leadership programs shine. The best don’t require someone to go on a retreat to become “more self-aware”, they offer the right development intervention at the exact moment it will shift performance.
Leadership as a business asset
What would change if you treated leadership less like an identity, and more like an asset? Something that creates value, or costs the organisation when underdeveloped?
Here’s the truth: high-performance organisations aren’t built on charisma or style. They’re built on decision-fit leaders who know how to move a team through challenge, ambiguity and accountability. Not because they attended a workshop, but because they’ve trained for it – repeatedly, and with feedback, frameworks and skin in the game.
The takeaway for HR
Leadership isn’t the answer. It’s the obstacle – if we keep clinging to outdated ideas of what makes someone a leader. However, if we reframe leadership as a deliberate performance toolkit, built for your unique organisational context, it becomes one of the greatest accelerators of value.
And that’s a shift HR is perfectly placed to lead.
Book a session with Karlie Cremin to discuss this further.
Karlie Cremin is the Managing Director of Dynamic Leadership Programs Australia (DLPA) and the CEO of Crestcom Australia.
