DECEMBER 2025AEROSPACEDEFENSEREVIEW.COM8In My OpinionBy Jeff Charron, Director, Learning and Organizational Effectiveness, Pratt & WhitneyACKNOWLEDGING AND OVERCOMING THE LEADERSHIP KNOW-DO GAPIndividuals, 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 classroom-style 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.Jeff Charron
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