Many executives and managers have in our experience this endless appetite to strengthen leadership by learning. Good on you! With the new year, after some time to decompress, recharge, and reflect, many consider what to learn more to up their game in leadership and to become an even better version of themselves. This shows that people in senior positions remain curious and reflective.
It is also a conundrum where a good intention can have unintended consequences. We call this the knowing-doing-gap in leadership, based on research and client work with my former Henley colleague Dr Amal Ahmadi. What we have studied is that when we learn more about leadership, how much of it gets put into action?
Morpheus and Neo
Why don't we start by asking The Matrix for help. In a key moment of the movie Morpheus says to Neo:
There's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.
(Morpheus in conversation with Neo in The Matrix ©Warner Bros.)
The very same we find when we look at building leadership strength. Many executives know the path of how to lead successful organisations, management teams or departments. We call this leadership knowing: the leadership knowledge, skills, tools, abilities, values and identity insights that you have amassed and is a great platform to be successful.
But how far are you walking the path. We call this leadership doing: when managers and executives take all the insights and put it into use, apply and show leadership action.
Mind the gap
We found that managers do not fully translate their leadership insights into action and experience a gap between the leadership potential they have and what they put in use. We call that the knowing-doing-gap in leadership.
Here's where the conundrum starts. If you decided to do more leadership learning, there is the risk that you primarily increase your leadership repertoire. Excellent first step. However, you guessed it already. This may widen the leadership-knowing-doing gap. Hence, you want to invest as much into bringing new leadership insights into use.
Why don't you focus very practically in the next few weeks or months on leadership doing from all these great insights that you already carry, and your colleagues appreciate in you? With that you learn and positively change and influence the direction, engagement, sustainability and performance of your business or department.
Triggering a focus on leadership doing- for you and others
Here some questions for what our research says can assist you to put more of your existing leadership repertoire it into action:
- Are you aware of the gap? Which of your hidden leadership superpower can you start with immediately?
- When you find time to learn and reflect on your leadership strengths, do you reserve time to work on embedding insights?
- When nobody is around, do you admit to yourself that some of the direction setting, business decision-making or difficult conversations in the top team require more courage on your end and holds you back? Does it really?
- Can you link more excitement to your leadership work?
You sensed it. While the above are questions, they are in fact self-leadership actions.
And for your network? As an executive and senior manager your focus also shifts to enabling others and developing leadership capabilities in your colleagues. You job is to assist the people in your network to enact more of their wealth of leadership insights and tools that might be dormant
Some guiding questions we find helpful in our client work: What role do you play? Is hierarchy in the way of their leadership action, to speak up, to proactively innovate? Can you empower your managers more?
CEO 360 Programme
Professor Bern Vogel is one of the world-class professors of our newly launched CEO 360 programme. This game-changing 9-month programme is a game changer for CEOs who want to strengthen their board-level expertise in strategic foresight, global navigation, and to lead organisations towards a sustainable future.
References
Ahmadi, A. & Vogel B. (2023). Knowing leadership, but not doing it: Knowing, but not enacting leadership: Navigating the leadership knowing-doing gap in leveraging leadership development. Academy of Management Learning & Education. 22, 507–530.
