DECEMBER 2025AEROSPACEDEFENSEREVIEW.COM9Transfer, 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 day-to-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.
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