When Talking the Job Became More Valuable Than Doing It?

There was a time when competence was obvious. Now, talking the job has become almost as important as doing it.

You could see it in how someone approached a problem. In how little noise they made. In how few excuses they needed. The job was completed safely and properly, often without anyone outside the team even noticing.

Today, something else is rewarded.

The ability to talk a good job has become fashionable. Not just useful. Not just helpful. Fashionable.

We now operate in environments where confidence often outweighs capability, presentation beats performance, and fluency replaces fluency of action. The person who can describe the work convincingly is often valued more than the person who can actually execute it. This is commonly referred to as “The Bullshit Premium”.

This isn’t accidental. It’s systemic. And it’s costing organisations far more than they realise.

The Rise of the Professional Narrator

Modern workplaces are saturated with language.

Frameworks. Strategies. Roadmaps. Vision statements. Alignment sessions. Stakeholder engagement. Thought leadership. Transformation journeys.

None of these is inherently bad. But somewhere along the line, narration replaced delivery.

We’ve created roles where the primary output is explanation rather than execution. People whose main contribution is translating what others do into polished language for decks, reports, and meetings. Again, translation has value. But the imbalance is the problem.

In many organisations, the closer you are to the work, the less visible you become.

The further you are from it, the more time you have to talk about it.

And because senior leaders rarely see the work itself, only the story of the work, the storyteller wins.

Why Talking Looks Like Competence

Talking well feels like competence for a few key reasons:

1. Confidence is Easy to Mistake for Capability

Humans are wired to trust certainty. Someone who speaks fluently, without hesitation, using familiar professional language, triggers credibility shortcuts in the listener’s brain.

Thus talking the job can sound like expertise.

But sounding competent and being competent are not the same thing. Real capability often includes hesitation, nuance, and an awareness of complexity, things that don’t always play well in fast-paced meetings.

2. Language Creates the Illusion of Control

When work is complex or poorly understood, language becomes a comfort blanket. Naming things feels like managing them.

If we can’t fix the problem yet, at least we can describe it elegantly.

This is especially true in large organisations where decision-makers are insulated from consequences. Talking about work feels safer than being responsible for it.

3. Metrics Reward Visibility, Not Substance

Performance systems often measure what is easy to document rather than what matters.

Presentations delivered. Meetings attended. Papers authored. Initiatives launched.

Very few systems measure quiet competence: risk avoided, problems prevented, work done right the first time.

So people optimise for what gets noticed.

The Death of Craft

One of the less discussed casualties of this trend is craft.

Craft requires time. Repetition. Mistakes. Humility. It involves being bad at something long enough to become good at it. And it rarely produces neat soundbites.

In technical, operational, and frontline roles, craft still exists, but it is increasingly undervalued by those who don’t practice it.

Instead, we promote people away from the work and reward them for talking about it.

The tragedy is that the best practitioners often make the worst self-promoters. They are too busy doing the job properly to build a personal narrative about how well they do it.

Meanwhile, others build entire careers on being adjacent to competence.

Why Organisations Encourage This (Even When It Hurts Them)

Most leaders don’t consciously choose style over substance. But organisational structures quietly push them there.

Distance From Reality

As organisations grow, leaders move further from the operational coalface. They rely on summaries, dashboards, and second-hand interpretations.

Over time, they become better at evaluating presentations than performance.

Risk Aversion

Doing the job involves risk. Talking about the job distributes it.

If something goes wrong, a well-documented narrative provides cover. Slides and emails create plausible deniability. Action creates accountability.

In many cultures, survival beats excellence.

Speed Over Depth

We reward fast answers over correct ones. Meetings overthinking. Alignment over understanding.

Someone who speaks immediately and confidently often wins over someone who needs time to reflect, even though the latter is usually right.

The Cost of the Talking Class

The real damage doesn’t show up immediately. It creeps in quietly.

1. Decision Quality Declines

When decisions are based on how well something is framed rather than how well it works, outcomes suffer. Risks are missed. Trade-offs are misunderstood. Optimism replaces evidence.

2. Competent People Disengage

Nothing kills motivation faster than watching people who contribute little get rewarded for talking well.

Eventually, the best performers either leave or stop trying. They learn that excellence isn’t the currency here, visibility is.

3. Organisations Become Brittle

When a crisis hits, narratives collapse. Reality asserts itself. And suddenly, the people who do know how the work actually functions are gone, sidelined, or unheard.

This is when organisations realise they’ve hollowed themselves out.

Usually too late.

Social Media and the Performance of Work

Outside organisations, the same trend is amplified.

LinkedIn is full of leadership theatre. People curating professional identities built on insights rather than outcomes. Stories of success without context, struggle, or accountability.

We’ve normalised the performance of work over the substance of it.

Again, sharing ideas is not the problem. But when personal branding becomes more important than professional contribution, the balance tips.

We start rewarding those who look like leaders rather than those who carry the weight of leadership.

Why This Feels “Fashionable”

Fashion follows incentives.

Talking the job is fashionable because it is:

• Lower risk
• Higher visibility
• More scalable
• Easier to replicate
• Less emotionally demanding

Doing the job requires resilience, patience, and the willingness to be wrong in public. Talking about it allows you to stay abstract and safe.

In uncertain times, abstraction feels comforting.

But comfort is not progress.

What Real Competence Looks Like (And Why It’s Quiet)

True capability often looks unimpressive on the surface.

It’s the person who asks uncomfortable questions. The one who says, “That won’t work,” and can explain why. Who fixes problems before they become visible, and who doesn’t need to talk much, because the work speaks for them.

These people rarely self-promote. They assume outcomes matter more than optics.

They are often invisible to systems that reward noise.

Rebalancing the Equation

This isn’t a call to stop communicating. It’s a call to rebalance.

Healthy organisations do a few things differently:

• They value evidence over eloquence
• Reward outcomes over narratives
• Keep leaders close enough to the work to recognise substance
• Promote people who can both do and explain, not just the latter

Most importantly, they create cultures where asking “Who actually did the work?” is normal.

Talking the job has always mattered. It helps us coordinate, learn, and improve.

But when talking replaces doing, we end up with hollow systems built on confidence rather than capability.

Fashion fades. Reality doesn’t.

At some point, every organisation, team, and individual is judged not by how well they explained the work, but by whether it actually worked.

And when that moment comes, only those who can do the job will still be standing.