The cursor blinked, a tiny, impatient eye on a screen that glowed with corporate-approved blues and grays. Mark, a perfectly adequate mid-level manager with 15 years on the clock and maybe 5 more to go before he’d earned his gold watch, wasn’t looking at the Gantt chart for Project Phoenix. No, he was meticulously selecting a stock photo for his next LinkedIn masterpiece. A lone climber, silhouetted against a mountain peak, sun just breaking. *Inspiration.* His team, meanwhile, was collectively holding its breath across three urgent Slack channels, awaiting feedback on deliverables that were already 24 hours past their due date. Mark was crafting an ode to ‘synergy,’ a buzzword so hollow it echoed the emptiness of the executive lounge on a Friday at 5:05.

This isn’t about sharing wisdom. Let’s not be naive, not when the stakes are this high. What you’re seeing, what I’m seeing plastered across our professional feeds, isn’t thought leadership. It’s a mating display, pure and unapologetic. A performance of competence and ambition, painstakingly choreographed to signal value to management. In a world where job security feels like a mirage shimmering 5 miles away on a desert road, and meaningful contributions are increasingly hard to quantify, visibility becomes the currency. And what a cheap currency it often is.

The problem, as I see it, isn’t the individual pursuit of betterment. It’s the institutional shift that allows personal branding to become a proxy for performance itself. When the genuine impact of work becomes an abstract concept, harder to grasp than a handful of fog, we scramble for something concrete. And what’s more concrete than a well-articulated, visually appealing post, liked by 25 of your peers and 15 senior leaders? It’s a dangerous game, one that slowly, insidiously, erodes the collaborative fabric of an organization. Suddenly, your colleague isn’t just a teammate; they’re a competitor for attention, for the subtle nods of approval from above. Every ‘thought leader’ post feels like a small, personal victory in a zero-sum game, rather than a shared contribution to a collective understanding.

This isn’t just about what you post; it’s about what you *don’t* do while you’re posting.

Think about it from another angle: many of us, especially those in content creation roles, are adept at crafting narratives for external audiences. We understand the nuances of messaging, the importance of clarity, the power of a well-turned phrase. We might even use sophisticated tools to convert audio to text to streamline our workflow, focusing on impact and precision. But when that same skill set is turned inwards, not to genuinely inform or innovate, but to elevate one’s own standing, it warps. The goal shifts from educating the market to impressing the boss. The content becomes less about insight and more about affirmation. It’s a subtle but profound betrayal of the very craft of communication.

The Raw Honesty of Light and Gas

My friend, Nova P.K., works with neon signs. She’s a technician, an artist, a problem-solver who deals in light and gas and intricate wiring. Her hands are scarred, stained with the hues of her craft. When a sign works, it glows. When it doesn’t, it’s visibly, undeniably dark. There’s no ambiguity. No space for a well-worded post about ‘the luminescence of collaborative currents’ to cover up a faulty transformer.

The insidious nature of this trend isn’t in the aspiration itself. Who doesn’t want to be recognized for their work? It’s in the redirection of energy. We’re channeling precious creative and intellectual capital into self-promotion that could be driving innovation, solving complex problems, or, God forbid, mentoring someone junior. I’ve seen departments with 35 people, where at least 5 of them are consistently outperforming the others in terms of LinkedIn engagement, yet their core projects lag behind. Is the value of the ‘thought leader’ post truly worth the potential delay on a product launch that affects hundreds of thousands of users? It’s a question few dare to ask aloud, because the answer often feels too uncomfortable, too damning to the carefully constructed facades.

The Slippery Slope of Performance

Perhaps I’m being too harsh. Maybe there’s a genuine desire to share, to teach, to inspire among some of these corporate influencers. And I’ve certainly, in my weaker moments, crafted a post or two that was perhaps more about demonstrating my relevance than truly illuminating a complex topic. It’s a slippery slope, isn’t it? The line between genuine expertise and self-serving performance is thin, transparent as a newly cleaned pane of glass. It’s easy to cross without realizing, especially when the dopamine hit of likes and comments feels like a measurable return on effort. I’ve caught myself editing a sentence, not for clarity, but for impact, for that specific cadence that suggests authority, even when the authority isn’t fully earned or the point isn’t entirely novel. That’s the real danger: the internalization of the performance, until it feels like authentic expression.

Consider the recent phenomenon of “quiet quitting,” a reaction, perhaps, to this very theatricalization of work. If all I’m doing is performing, if my true value isn’t measured by my output but by my online presence, then why should I exhaust myself in the trenches? Why not do the bare minimum, save my energy, and craft a compelling narrative around it? The incentive structure has flipped, and we are witnessing the fallout. It creates an environment where 75% of employees might feel disengaged, while the top 15% are busy curating their personal brand. This isn’t sustainable. It’s a house built on sand, meticulously photographed and filtered for social media, but destined to crumble when the storms hit.

The Glow of Craftsmanship vs. LED Mimicry

It reminds me of an old story Nova P.K. once told me, about how neon signs used to be made: each tube bent by hand, filled with gas, electrodes sealed with precision. It took a deep understanding of physics, of chemistry, of artistry. Now, many are mass-produced LEDs, mimicking the glow, but lacking the soul, the individual fingerprint of a craftsman. The corporations demanding these new, cheaper signs want the *look* of the old, without the investment in the genuine craft.

Is that not what we are seeing with the rise of the corporate influencer? The desire for the *look* of thought leadership, without the painstaking, often messy, work of actually thinking, leading, and doing. It’s the difference between a meticulously hand-bent letter ‘S’ that glows with an inner life, and a generic, mass-produced ‘S’ that simply illuminates. Nova knew the difference; she used to point out the subtle flaws in the mass-produced versions, the slightly off angles, the way the light fell flat, the absence of that unique hum. It costs 5 times as much for a truly custom piece, but it lasts 25 years longer and has a story baked into its glass.

Mindful Contribution in a Noisy World

The reality is, we have to navigate this. We can criticize it, and perhaps we should, for the sake of our collective sanity. But we also have to understand it. It’s a coping mechanism, a response to a deeper systemic anxiety about value and recognition in a rapidly changing work landscape. The best we can do, I think, is to be mindful of our own contributions. To ask: Is this genuinely adding value, or is this just another post designed to polish my personal brand? Am I inspiring, or am I merely performing?

What if, instead of adding to the digital noise, we focused on making our immediate environment, our team, our projects, shine with the undeniable, tangible brilliance of Nova P.K.’s best work? What if we aimed for an output so clear, so impactful, that it didn’t need a carefully worded, perfectly curated LinkedIn post to announce its existence? Perhaps the most radical act of leadership today isn’t to join the chorus of platitudes, but to simply, quietly, build something meaningful, something that glows from within, demanding no more than 15 seconds of your manager’s attention to recognize its worth.