Acknowledging and Overcoming The Leadership Know-do Gap

Individuals, teams, and companies invest considerable resources, time, and effort into developing leadership capability. I recently read a Forbes article citing that companies in the U.S. spend nearly $166 billion annually on leadership development programs. This is a staggering investment! With all this investment, companies must have amazing leaders, right? Not always. The return on investment, or more practically, the return on expectation, is lagging considerably. C-suite executives and HR professionals seemingly have only one lever to pull to address leadership deficiencies in tenured leaders and develop new leaders’ leadership abilities. And that lever is more training!

Leadership development training has undoubtedly evolved and drastically improved over the last few decades. In the latter half of the twentieth century, many organizations sent leaders to multi-day class-roomstyle leadership courses to learn about various scholarly models such as situational leadership, leader-member exchange, McGregor’s Theory X/Y, transformational and transactional leadership, and so on. Now, the emphasis has shifted to gamification, virtual simulations, micro-learning, and self-paced and asynchronous learning, focusing less on models and more on communal leadership behaviors such as empathy, emotional intelligence, and listening. This is a notable shift in the right direction, given the modern working landscape. However, acquiring knowledge through these innovative delivery methods doesn’t always equate to changes in leadership behavior. As leadership development and/or HR professionals, we need to resist the urge to continuously pull the ‘more training’ lever when a lack of knowledge or training isn’t the problem; it’s transfer.

"Awareness of our self-protection mechanisms is essential to overcoming the know-do gap; however, organizational culture also contributes to the challenge"

Transfer, known as the know-do gap, is the 21st-century leadership headwind. Leaders have access to unlimited resources and experts on their own through books, podcasts, TED Talks, YouTube, etc., not to mention the various leadership development programs and workshops they attend through their employers. Leaders are typically motivated to improve and often take advantage of all the resources available to enhance their leadership ability. Yet, their dayto-day behavior remains the same and is inconsistent with the commitments and action plans they created at the end of their leadership development program. The real question is why? Why do leaders seek out and take in all this excellent knowledge without using it? The answer is more complicated than they don’t choose to activate their new knowledge; there are likely unconscious internal barriers and organizational culture influences contributing to the widening of the know-do gap.

Why does our actual behavior often contradict our goal or newly learned behavior? Some answers can be found by exploring our unconscious fears and assumptions that serve as our self-protection mechanism. For example, I received feedback recently that my publicly stated goal of team prioritization was inconsistent with my behavior of saying ‘yes’ to all new customer requests (as my teammate reminded me, I say yes to everything). I realized my unconscious fear was that if I said no to a request, even if it didn’t align with my priorities, I would be seen as a non-team player and assume I would no longer be valuable to the organization. The thought of saying no to a senior leader’s request caused so much discomfort that maintaining the status quo was ‘safer,’ thus driving my actual, inconsistent behavior. This realization helped me test the accuracy of my assumptions and eventually cleared the block, causing me to act inconsistently with my goal behavior. I learned that I could say ‘no’ for the right reasons, offer alternative solutions, and be even more valuable to the organization because my team and I can focus on our key priorities.

Awareness of our self-protection mechanisms is essential to overcoming the know-do gap; however, organizational culture also contributes to the challenge. Prioritization and confidence play an important role in leadership behavior change. Organizations that prioritize and reward outcomes over leadership behavior create a challenging landscape for developing leaders to close the know-do gap. Changing the leadership culture at the organizational level requires senior leaders to learn how to identify and reward the desired leadership behaviors in others and, most importantly, to role-model the behaviors themselves. This signals to the organization that leadership behavior is a priority and will help build leaders’ confidence to align their day-to-day behavior to their stated commitments.

Closing the know-do gap is a challenge for every leader and organization. We face this challenge not by throwing more training at leaders but instead by helping them understand what is keeping them from making the changes they are committed to making. This has the potential to gain more return on investment and expectation for companies investing billions and leaders investing time and energy. We need to start thinking about building bridges that span the know-do gap.