Players vs. pretenders: make ownership visible, and the performance fades

Every leadership team I have worked with has a quiet conversation it is not having. Someone around the table is capable, articulate and impressive in a meeting, and the work around them does not quite move. Misses arrive with a story attached. Credit arrives early. The people who report to them have stopped bringing problems. Everyone senses it. Nobody names it, partly because the person is likeable and partly because naming it feels like an accusation.

I have been on both sides of this. As a chief executive I kept people too long because they made me feel the work was in hand. And at points in my own career, under pressure, I have narrated a miss instead of owning it. That is why I am careful with the word “pretender”. It describes a behaviour, not a human being. Competence without commitment is a pattern, and patterns are learned.

So here is the claim. Pretending is a behaviour an organisation teaches. If you make ownership visible and reward it in public, most people move towards it. For the few who will not, a clear, fair proof period followed by a quick and respectful exit protects everyone — the team, the standard, and the person leaving.

This piece goes deeper on one focus area from the chapter Getting good people around you. The chapter sets out how players and pretenders behave when a miss hits the pack. Here I want to look at why organisations grow the pattern, and what to do this week.

Competence without commitment

The focus area I work from puts it plainly: competence without commitment drags culture. A player brings both. They are good at the work and they own it — the result, the miss, the people affected, and the next step. A pretender, in the sense I mean, has the competence and has drifted away from the ownership. They know how to look like they own it. That is a real skill, and it is why the pattern is so hard to see.

What does it look like in practice? Not laziness. Usually the opposite: busy calendars, polished updates, a lot of visible activity. The tells are smaller and more specific.

Moment	Ownership behaviour	Performance behaviour
A number is missed	Names their part in it, the impact on others, and the next proof with a date	Explains the context — market, timing, another function — and moves on
A decision is needed	Makes a call within their rights, logs it, and tells the people affected	Waits for the chief executive, or seeks consensus that dilutes accountability
A colleague is struggling	Offers specific help on the work, often unseen	Offers visible support in meetings and little afterwards
Credit is handed out	Names the people who did the work	Lets the credit land on themselves by default
Bad news emerges	Brings it early, unfinished	Brings it late, polished
The leader is absent	The standard holds	Activity continues; decisions drift

Notice that every behaviour in the right-hand column is understandable. Context is real. Consensus has value. Polished updates are often what the chief executive has asked for. That is the point. Pretending grows in the gap between what we say we want and what we actually reward.

Why organisations grow pretending

Three forces do most of the work, and the leader controls all three.

We mistake confidence for competence. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic argued in Harvard Business Review that confidence is often misinterpreted as competence, and that arrogance and overconfidence — the traits that help people into management — are also traits that cause poor performance. His article was about gender and leadership, but the mechanism applies to every promotion meeting I have sat in. If the person who sounds surest keeps getting the bigger job, the organisation learns that sounding sure is the job.

We do not see who is carrying the load. Rob Cross, Reb Rebele and Adam Grant found, across more than 300 organisations, that in most cases 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees. Those people are often your quiet players. Their work shows up in other people’s results. If your recognition follows the person presenting the slide, you are systematically paying the performer and taxing the player. Over time the player either burns out or leaves, and the system has taught everyone which role is safer.

We run meetings that reward narrative. If the main way I learn about the work is a weekly update, I will get very good updates. Gallup’s research on quiet quitting concluded that quiet quitting is a symptom of poor management, and recommended one meaningful conversation per week with each team member, of 15–30 minutes. That is not the same as pretending, but the cause overlaps. When the manager’s contact is thin and theatrical, people optimise for the theatre.

There is a fourth, less comfortable force: fear. People who were punished the last time they owned a miss in public learn to narrate the next one. Before I conclude that someone is a pretender, I ask what happened to the last person on that team who told the truth.

Spotlight and reward ownership in public

If pretending is taught, ownership can be taught too. The work is mostly visible and repetitive.

• Make the miss the first item. Open your weekly meeting with “What did we miss, and what did we learn?” before any good news. When a senior person owns a miss well, say so in the room: “That is exactly how I want misses handled.” Do it for the people you like and the ones you find harder.
• Name the invisible work. Ask each leader, once a month, who on their team made their result possible without being seen. Then thank those people by name, in front of peers. This is the cheapest correction for collaborative overload I know.
• Promote for ownership, not airtime. In every promotion discussion, ask for one concrete example of the candidate owning a miss and one of them giving credit away. If nobody can provide either, that is information.
• Change what you ask for. Replace polished status updates with three lines: what moved, what did not, what I need. Pretending needs a stage. Shorter formats leave less room for it.
• Meet regularly and properly. Gallup found that employees whose managers hold regular meetings with them are almost three times as likely to be engaged. A real weekly one-to-one, built around the work rather than the update, is where ownership becomes visible.

In elite sport, the rider who does the unglamorous work for a teammate is usually the one the team values most, and the good managers say so out loud. I wrote about that bridge in from elite sport to the boardroom. The boardroom equivalent is a leader who notices the pull at the front and rewards it.

Exit quickly and respectfully

Some people will not move, even with a fair system and a clear conversation. Sometimes the role no longer fits them. Sometimes they are carrying something outside work that I do not know about. Sometimes the pattern runs too deep to change on a business timetable. In each case, keeping them in the seat is not kindness. It is a cost paid by the players around them, and often by the person too, who knows on some level that it is not working.

“Quickly and respectfully” are both doing work in that sentence. Quickly means I do not drag the decision across three review cycles. Respectfully means:

1. A direct conversation first, with evidence. One or two specific behaviours, their impact on the work and on others, and what would need to change.
2. A short, written proof period. Two or three observable changes, a timeframe of one business cycle, and a weekly check-in where I give honest feedback both ways.
3. A clear decision at the end. If the behaviour has moved, I say so and close the period. If it has not, I make the call and explain it plainly.
4. A dignified exit. Private, factual, with fair terms where I have room. To the team, a short, true message that does not shame the person. No rewriting of history.

For a harder version of that conversation, the part on having tough conversations sets out a structure I use.

Arguments

The case for

Pretending is expensive in ways that do not show on a dashboard. It moves load onto the people least likely to complain, it teaches the organisation that impression is the job, and it erodes trust in the leader who allows it. Research on confidence and competence, and on how lopsided collaboration has become, points the same way: organisations routinely reward the visible over the valuable. Making ownership visible corrects that at its source, and a fair proof period gives people a genuine chance to change before anyone decides they cannot.

The case against

The strongest objection is that the distinction is too subjective. One person’s pretender is another’s politically skilled operator, and labels like this can become a tool for removing people a leader simply dislikes, or people whose style differs from the dominant culture. A second objection is that some impression management is part of senior work: boards, investors and customers need confidence, and a leader who never polishes a message will struggle. A third is cost: exits are disruptive, and a capable person in a slightly wrong pattern may still be the best available option. When the team is thin, the market is tight and the behaviour is mild, keeping and coaching the person is often the right call.

Where I stand

I agree the risk of bias is real, which is why I insist on behaviours and evidence, never labels, and the same questions for everyone. I accept that senior leaders must manage impressions outward; what I will not accept is managing impressions inward, about the work itself, to the people who need the truth. And I am not in a hurry to exit anyone. I am in a hurry to have the conversation. In my seven-step process, this starts at step 2, Awareness, often with a Trusted Feedback Loop that shows the leader what they have been rewarding. It becomes daily practice in step 5, Improvement, where we work on live talent decisions in real time.

Try this

Take one week and run a small audit of what your organisation actually rewards.

1. List the last five people you praised in public. For each, write down whether you praised the result, the visible activity, or the ownership behind it.
2. Ask each direct report to name one person whose invisible work made their last result possible. Thank those people by name this month.
3. Change one recurring meeting to open with misses before wins. Keep it for six weeks.
4. Pick one person you are unsure about. Write down the last miss they were close to and what they owned. If you cannot remember, that is your first data point — about your meetings as much as about them.
5. If you need to have the conversation, prepare one fact, one impact and one ask with a date. Have it within a fortnight.

Reflection questions:

• When did I last reward confidence and later discover it was not competence?
• Who on my team carries load that never appears in their own results?
• What happened to the last person who owned a miss openly in my leadership meeting?
• Where do I ask for polish when I actually need the truth?
• Is there someone I have kept in a seat for my comfort rather than theirs or the team’s?

Where to go next

This part sits between two others in the same chapter. Get good people around you is about designing hires so that ownership is tested before the offer. Create loyalty in your organisation is about why players stay once they see the standard held. If your table has the right people and still struggles to hold a standard together, core values of winning teams picks up from there.

If you want to work through who is around your table and what your system is rewarding, I do that in executive team coaching and, one-to-one, in executive coaching. Book a 30-minute strategy call and bring one meeting you would like to change.