The Knowing and Doing Gap: From Leader Insight to Practice
As senior leaders, we usually don't struggle because we lack knowledge. We've read the books, attended the programs, reviewed the engagement data, and talked with trusted advisors. We know that clear expectations matter. We know people need feedback, meaningful accountability, room to think, and confidence that they can raise a concern without being dismissed.
Yet knowing these things does not mean our teams experience them consistently.
That is the knowing and doing gap. It is the space between what we understand about effective leader practice and what reliably shows up in our calendars, conversations, decisions, meetings, and responses under pressure. The gap is rarely caused by a lack of commitment. More often, the demands of senior leadership crowd out the practices we believe matter most.
Why knowledge alone changes so little
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton brought widespread attention to the knowing and doing gap in their research on why organizations often fail to act on what they already know. Their central observation remains relevant for senior leaders today: information, analysis, and discussion can create the appearance of progress while leaving behavior largely unchanged.
We can see this pattern in leader and leadership development. We may leave a program with new language, useful frameworks, and genuine motivation. But team performance improves only when those ideas alter how we lead the work. A productive learning experience and a changed leader practice are not the same outcome.
This is not an argument against development. Lacerenza and colleagues conducted a large meta-analysis of leadership training and found meaningful gains in learning, behavior, and organizational results. They also found that design choices matter, including needs analysis, feedback, spaced sessions, and multiple delivery methods. Development works. It works best when it is built to be applied.
Research on workplace learning transfer reinforces this distinction. Studies continue to show that application depends on more than the quality of the learning itself. Opportunity to practice, support from others, feedback, reflection, confidence, and the surrounding work environment all influence whether a new behavior is used and sustained. A 2021 study of two leadership development courses found that personalized feedback, increased confidence in the role, the opportunity to use new knowledge at work, employee feedback, management facilitation, and continual reflection were among the strongest influences on whether leaders maintained new practices over time.
This helps explain why insight can feel significant in the moment but have limited effect months later. We return to the same pace, expectations, meetings, and pressure. Unless something changes in how the work is led, the old patterns remain easier to repeat than the new ones.
Senior leaders make the gap more consequential
The higher we lead, the more our patterns shape the environment around us. A small gap between what we say and what we do can become a much larger gap across the organization.
We may say that we want initiative, then step in quickly when a decision feels uncertain. We may say that candid dialogue matters, then become defensive when someone challenges our thinking. We may tell leaders to develop their people, while our own calendars communicate that immediate execution always takes priority. None of this necessarily reflects poor intent. It reflects how easily pressure can pull us toward the behaviors that feel fastest, safest, or most familiar.
Our teams learn from these patterns. They pay attention to which questions receive thoughtful consideration, which mistakes become learning opportunities, which decisions can be challenged, and which commitments remain visible after the meeting ends. Over time, our repeated practices teach people what leadership actually means in this organization.
This is why the knowing and doing gap is not merely a personal development issue. It affects team capability, trust, decision quality, accountability, and execution. What we practice shapes what others believe is possible and expected.
Closing the gap starts with greater specificity
Broad leader intentions are difficult to practice. We may want to listen better, empower the team, communicate more clearly, or hold people accountable. Each intention sounds worthwhile, but none tells us exactly what to do in the next meeting.
A more useful question is: what would my team see or hear if I practiced this well?
Listening better might mean allowing the other person to finish, asking two questions before offering a solution, and summarizing what we heard before responding. Empowering the team might mean clarifying decision boundaries, resisting the urge to reclaim the decision, and conducting a review afterward rather than controlling the process beforehand. Accountability might mean naming the expected result, confirming ownership and timing, and returning to the commitment when we said we would.
The more observable the practice becomes, the easier it is to repeat, assess, and improve.
Practice must become part of the work
We often treat leader growth as something separate from operational work. In reality, the work provides the practice field. Our next staff meeting, difficult conversation, strategy review, or decision is where leader development becomes real.
That shift allows us to build the desired behavior into an existing rhythm rather than hoping we remember it when pressure rises. We can place a question at the top of a meeting agenda, add a reflection to a weekly review, ask a colleague to observe a specific behavior, or identify one conversation each week in which we will deliberately practice a new approach.
In my work with senior leaders, the ones who actually change their practice are almost always the ones who decided in advance where the new behavior would show up. They named the meeting, the conversation, or the decision point before the week started. The leaders who left it to memory rarely got there. Planning the application is not a small administrative step. It is often the difference between an intention and a practice.
For senior leaders, this does not require a complicated development system. It requires disciplined attention to one or two practices that matter, placed inside the work we already lead.
Feedback keeps intention connected to impact
We often evaluate ourselves by what we intended. Our teams experience what we actually did.
Closing the gap requires a way to compare those two perspectives. We can ask trusted colleagues and team members questions such as:
What do you notice me doing that helps this team think and perform well?
Where do my actions make it harder for others to contribute or take ownership?
What is one practice you would benefit from experiencing more consistently from me?
The goal is not constant self-critique. It is greater accuracy. Feedback helps us see whether the practice we believe we are demonstrating is producing the effect we intended.
The environment matters too
We should be careful not to frame every knowing and doing gap as a failure of individual discipline. Research on learning transfer consistently finds that the work environment matters. Blume and colleagues, in a meta-analytic review of transfer predictors, found that support and a favorable transfer climate were among the conditions associated with whether trained skills were applied on the job. People are more likely to use new skills when they have support, opportunity, reinforcement, and room to practice.
Senior leaders help create those conditions. We influence what receives attention, what gets measured, how quickly people are expected to change, and whether leaders can acknowledge that they are still learning. When we make practice visible, discuss it openly, and reinforce progress, we make development part of how the organization operates.
This also means we can extend the conversation beyond our own behavior. We can ask whether our leadership systems make good practice easier or harder. Do our meeting rhythms support thoughtful decisions? Do our performance expectations reinforce people development? Do our leaders receive useful feedback? Does the pace of work allow enough reflection to learn from experience?
Individual commitment matters, but conditions determine whether that commitment can endure.
Progress is built through consistency
The knowing and doing gap can sound like an indictment of leaders and leadership. I see it differently. It is a normal part of growth. We will always know some things before we can practice them consistently. Awareness is not the finish line, but it is a necessary beginning.
The encouraging part is that the gap does not close through a dramatic reinvention of who we are. It closes as we choose a meaningful practice, make it observable, place it inside our regular work, invite feedback, and return to it with consistency.
Our teams do not need us to demonstrate every effective leader practice at once. They benefit when the practices that matter most become increasingly reliable. That is how knowledge becomes behavior, behavior shapes conditions, and better conditions strengthen team performance.
What is one leader practice you already know matters, but your team needs to experience from you more consistently?
References
Blume, B. D., Ford, J. K., Baldwin, T. T., & Huang, J. L. (2010). Transfer of training: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Management, 36(4), 1065-1105.
Lacerenza, C. N., Reyes, D. L., Marlow, S. L., Joseph, D. L., & Salas, E. (2017). Leadership training design, delivery, and implementation: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(12), 1686-1718.
Pfeffer, J., & Sutton, R. I. (1999). The knowing-doing gap: How smart companies turn knowledge into action. Harvard Business School Press.
Söderhjelm, T. M., Nordling, T., Sandahl, C., Larsson, G., & Palm, K. (2021). Transfer and maintenance of knowledge from leadership development. Journal of Workplace Learning, 33(4), 273-286.
