You Sound Like a Press Release, and it’s Costing You

What happens when executives stop performing professionally and start talking like humans?

Read your last five LinkedIn posts out loud. Like, in your kitchen, with nobody around to perform for.

Do they sound like something you’d say to a colleague over coffee, or do they sound like someone wrote them for a corporate earnings call? If it’s the second one, you have a voice problem, and it’s probably costing you more than you realize.

Here’s what I see constantly. Smart, experienced executives with genuinely interesting perspectives on their industry will sit down to write a LinkedIn post and immediately switch into Professional Mode, where the language becomes formal, the sentences grow longer, and the personality vanishes from the page entirely. What comes out reads like it was approved by legal before it was approved by the human who supposedly wrote it.

Nobody taught them to do this. It’s a reflex built up from years of corporate communication that trained them to strip the personality out of everything they wrote. Emails, presentations, reports, the implicit rule was always to sound credible without sounding too human, as if those two qualities lived on opposite sides of some invisible line. Most executives internalized the idea so deeply that they no longer notice when they’re doing it.

LinkedIn doesn’t operate on boardroom rules, though. The executives who build real followings and real authority are the ones who figured out that the professional voice and the real voice can share the same page. The real voice carries more credibility, because it signals something polished corporate language never can: this is a person who thinks for themselves.

Let me give you a real example. A tech executive I worked with had been posting about digital transformation for months. Her content was solid, well-structured, and thoughtful, and it was also completely generic, the kind of post that could have been written by any one of ten thousand people in similar roles. When I asked her to tell me what she really thought about digital transformation, off the record, she said: “Honestly? Most of it is just rebranding projects that already existed, so the board feels like we’re innovating.”

That is a perspective. That is the kind of observation that makes someone stop scrolling. She would never have posted it in Professional Mode because it felt too honest, too specific, too much like an opinion instead of a position paper.

We worked on getting that version of her voice into her content. The version with opinions. The version that occasionally said something that made her marketing team slightly nervous. Within a few weeks, her engagement tripled, and the quality of engagement shifted along with the numbers. People started responding with their own honest takes. Conversations started happening in the comments. She started receiving DMs from other executives saying thank you for saying that, I thought I was the only one who felt that way.

That is what voice does. It attracts the right kind of attention, specifically by filtering for the people who share your perspective and repelling the ones who don’t, and both of those outcomes have real value for the person doing the writing.

At Wild Lore, I work with an archetype system based on story genres: Epic, Memoir, Fable, Sci-Fi, Fairy Tale, Thriller, Myth, Satire. Each one represents a different natural storytelling style, and when executives discover their archetype, something clicks into place. They stop trying to sound like “a thought leader” (which sounds like everyone) and start sounding like themselves (which sounds like nobody else).

The Memoir voice tells stories from personal experience and draws lessons from them. The Thriller voice creates tension and urgency in the way it sets up an idea. The Satire voice uses sharp observations and humor to land a point. These archetypes describe storytelling patterns that already exist in how you naturally communicate, and the work is recognizing yours and leaning into it instead of flattening it into corporate neutral.

Here’s the test I use with clients. Take your last post and rewrite it the way you’d explain the same idea to your smartest friend at dinner. The version that comes out won’t be dumbed down or strained for casualness; it’ll just sound like the way you talk when an idea has you genuinely excited, and you want someone to understand why it matters.

That version is almost always sharper than the polished one, with more specificity and more of your fingerprints on the language.

The fear, of course, is that being yourself on LinkedIn will undermine your professional credibility, that someone will think you’re not serious enough, not polished enough, not executive enough for your audience. Look at the people who hold real influence in your industry, though. Do they sound like press releases, or do they sound like people who happen to know what they’re talking about?

Your voice is your competitive advantage. It’s the thing that makes your perspective recognizable in a feed full of sameness, and when you sand off all the edges to sound professional, you’re removing the one quality that would have made people remember you in the first place.

Stop performing professionalism. Start talking like a person who happens to be really good at what they do. Your audience has been waiting for that version of you for a long time.