Leaders: closing the knowing-doing gap

Most leaders know what good leadership is supposed to look like.

Listen carefully. Stay curious. Involve people. Consider different perspectives. Avoid jumping to conclusions.

But knowing what to do is not the same as being able to do it when the situation is ambiguous, the stakes are high, and somebody challenges your first answer.

More than 25 years ago, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton gave this problem a name: the knowing-doing gap.

Their focus was organisational performance, but the same tension runs through leadership development.

We are often good at teaching models, frameworks and principles. The harder task is helping people apply them in realistic situations where there is no obvious answer.

Research into leadership development points in the same direction. Practice, feedback and repeated opportunities to apply learning matter.

That is why I have been building Leadership Skill Builder around realistic conversations.

You are placed in a difficult leadership situation. You decide what you would do. Then the AI assessor questions your reasoning, challenges your assumptions and asks you to go further.

The aim is not to find out whether you know the language of leadership.

It is to explore what happens when you have to use it.