Why Do Managers Struggle to Turn Knowledge Into Action

Jimmy: Let people graze their knees, not break their legs. So, allow them to test and create and pilot and explore as much as possible. And when you do that, you move people from knowing to doing. You move people from knowing to doing, to learning, to failing, and they get more wisdom from that.
Welcome back to this week's episode of The High Performance Leader, the podcast for leaders working in complex, challenging environments to gain insights and ideas which help you increase your impact without burning out and to help you build a high-performance culture in your team.
I'm your host, Jimmy Burroughes. And if you're new to The High Performance Leader, make sure you subscribe or follow so you don't miss any of our upcoming episodes before you put down your device.
Hello and welcome back to this week's episode of The High Performance Leader. And as always, these solo episodes are an opportunity for us to go a little bit deeper on the topics, the conversations, and some of the challenges that keep coming up for us while we're working with clients on ways of working or in our coaching programs.
So today, I would love to go into the idea of the knowing-doing gap. And you probably haven't heard of that, but you are going to be familiar with the concept.
So let me try and paint a little bit of a picture about what I mean. If you think about what is the secret to old age and growing old gracefully, healthily, and happily, one of the things that you'll probably intuitively know is that you need to eat healthy, you need to reduce your consumption of toxic things like alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, and you need to get enough sleep. And if you eat healthily, it's probably choosing vegetables and fruit and the Italian diet or the Mediterranean diet, versus fish and chips, and Big Macs, whatever it is that you'd like to indulge in.
But what we often see is when we get really busy, or really stressed, or overwhelmed, we resort to junk food, we drink a glass of wine, or a bottle of wine, or a case of wine on a frequent basis. A lot of people are medicated on various different concoctions from their pharmacies, they're not getting enough sleep, they're giving up their down time. And all of these actions are not necessarily aligned with what they know is right, but they're doing something because they think they have to, they're making choices.
And this is really the knowing-doing gap. You all know what being healthy is about, but you don't necessarily do those things. And if we transfer this now to a leadership context, one of the first questions I often ask leaders and teams when we get in the room with them is what does good leadership look like? What does a high-performance team look like? And intuitively, we get nearly all the right answers.
But what the difference is, is how many of those things are actually taking place versus not. And the excuses, or the reasons, or the justifications of why those things are not getting done. You know, we don't do one-to-ones because there's just not enough time or we have too many meetings already. Oh, we don't really check the goals and development plans of everybody, because, you know, we're just all about doing the work. I'll just grab a takeaway on the way home, because I've worked a really long day, and I don't have time or energy to cook. I'll skip the gym this week because somebody's booked in an early morning meeting. And we do this on a daily basis. We justify to ourselves where we know what we intuitively should be doing because we know it's right, versus what we actually do. And this is the knowing-doing gap. In reality, and essentially what it is, is it's where our knowledge and beliefs of what is right is misaligned with our actions and our choices and the priorities we leverage. And it's this misalignment that is causing us a lot of the stress, because essentially it creates a tension. I know I should be doing this, but I feel like I have to do this.
And so what we're going to cover in this episode is how do we understand that and work through it a little bit more effectively, and how can we deal with it.
The first piece that we need to understand is why does it happen? Well, it happens because you're really busy, because you've got a whole lot going on. And whilst this idyllic life that you want for yourself and hope for yourself around eating healthy, exercising lots, looking after yourself, is just overloaded with too many other things.
And one of the core questions that I would ask you to think about is why do you have so many priorities? Why are there so many things pulling you in so many different directions? And are you really brutally, ruthlessly, and religiously prioritising effectively? And if you're not, then how can you do that more effectively? Because prioritisation is actually saying no and making some choices, or getting rid of some things out of your to-do list so you can do the things that keep you performing at your best. If we allow things to keep creeping in, then we have to give up something, and we only have a certain amount of hours in the week. And so giving up something generally looks like giving up sleep, giving up free time, giving up exercise, giving up eating healthy, and so on and so on, even though we know we need to do those things.
Also, it's around starting to front up to the fact that your values and your actions are not lined up. And again, one of the things we see with people who are burning out is they know this, and it's grinding on them, and it's ground them down over time. And they start to resent the work, because they feel like they're being forced into these situations where I have to work, I have to take on these problems, I have to do all this, but I just don't have the time and energy to recuperate.
So when you think about what are my values, what's really important to me? Is it exercise, diet, eating healthy? Is it work, success, and promotion? Or is it some sort of balance of the two that is more manageable for you? And only you can answer that question.
Equally, if you are the one who is giving up all of your free time and weekends, you're generating a whole cycle of work, which is cascading to your team as well. And leaders inadvertently often create even more stress and pressure for their team by living the knowing-doing gap in a in a real way for themselves. Let's take some examples of those.
Perhaps it could be the overemphasis on knowing the answers or having all the answers before you take action. We talk in our workshops around curiosity, we have a beautiful model which is the curiosity curve, appetite for curiosity over results gained. And what we see is a lot of teams operate in the first two segments of the model, which is I have to be absolutely certain before I'll take action, or when I take action, it's only very, very cautious action, just tipping a toe in the water. Both of those limit our upside.
Where we encourage you to play is in the curious zone: I wonder what might happen if, how might we, can we do some human-centered design on this, can we innovate a little bit more and try and work out a way of finding a new way through? Humans love to innovate, humans love to be creative, but it's stifled by fear and pressure and stress. So being a little bit more creative versus only waiting for certainty means you can move from knowing stuff to actually doing stuff.
And I read a beautiful model, which is the amount of learning that you can gain from knowing and reading, from knowing and doing and trying, and knowing and doing and trying and failing, we learn the most from failing. So what we want to do is encourage our teams to fail. Now that doesn't mean catastrophic failure that ends the business, that brings you and your career to your knees. We use the phrase, let people graze their knees, not break their legs. So allow them to test and create and pilot and explore as much as possible. And when you do that, you move people from knowing to doing. You move people from knowing to doing to learning to failing, and they get more wisdom from that. That means they pick up performance, that means they can support you more because they've got more experience and more skills, that means some of the weight is being taken off your shoulders.
Equally, many organisations have this culture of fear. We're not going to act unless we're certain, we're not going to do anything that's risky, and if we fail, it's the end of the career. It's the end of the line. And so you as a leader can start to really shift that balance from the fear of failure in an organisation to the desire to explore or be curious in the organisation, which will drive innovation, performance, and all the things we just mentioned. So they start to stack up on one another.
The final piece that I think where we can often cause some challenges for ourselves is where we're making sure that we're the one with the ideas and the knowledge in the room and stifling that from our team. You feel like you have to know everything before you do everything because you're the expert. Well, let's shift away from that as well. Maybe the now there's going to be things you don't know, you've not count encountered these situations before, there's problems we haven't seen before. So how can you move from not knowing into doing and exploring? And this makes a really great difference with your team, where you're saying, "Well, hey, look, I don't know the answers either, so maybe we should go and explore this together and see what we find out. And then we'll be in a place of more knowing, because we've tried some stuff and learned from it, we've tried some stuff and failed, and we can keep moving and refining our product."
I think back to when we launched a new product in my GM role, and one of the things that we did was we waited until it was perfect. And it wasn't perfect, but we thought it was, and then when we launched it, we learned a whole lot more by putting it into the marketplace just in a pilot zone, in one country versus launching it globally. And we learned more by getting it out there than not. But I didn't know that until I actually tried it, and I encourage you to do the same, not waiting till you know all the answers, not waiting till you're 100% comfortable, and being brave and move to doing as quickly as you can, doing the right things that you know are going to help you and your team perform better. And if you don't know if they're going to help your team perform better, then actually trying it and seeing if it works or not.
So there's things to change. Move out of this analysis paralysis zone, move out of the fear of failure and start taking action. We need to use failure as a stepping stone to success.
Start empowering your team to try and do the same thing. Get them to try things and again, remember, graze your knees not break your legs. We don't want catastrophic failure in the team, we want controlled failure where people can learn lessons and be valuable. Empower them to think confidently.
There's this great example of the Google 24 hours, where once a month, everybody at Google gets 24 hours to work on something that they think is interesting and it's going to make a difference to Google. It's where Gmail came from, it's where Google Maps came from, it's where a whole lot of Google products came from, because somebody said, "Well, I wonder if we could create this in 24 hours?" And those best ideas are put into action. So start empowering your team to move from I have to be the expert, I have to know all the answers, I have to be certain, into let's try and find out.
The finding out piece is where you move into the reflection zone. And we use an apparatus called the lessons learned plotter, but essentially whatever you do, do an after action review, do a lessons-learned activity, start to go, "Well, what about that worked? What about that didn't work and how can we do better next time?" And there's a variation of that kind of concept in many organisations, but how often is it actually used? We know we should learn lessons, but how often do we actually do a lessons learned after a meeting, after a sales call, after a catch up, after our AGM, whatever it might be? How often do you actually do it?
So build in that reflective practice, and then what can we learn and do differently.
And then the final piece is could you actually get your team more involved here? So instead of saying, "I need to be the expert and I need to come up with all the answers," could you flip that and say, "I'm comfortable not to know and I'm going to surround myself with a group of people and we're going to go and explore together."
So I hope that was a useful episode for you. We just touched on there the idea of what is this knowing-doing gap, some of the things that cause it, some of the reasons that you may be making it more challenging for your team to perform better than they possibly could through your actions, inadvertent or advertent, and some things you could do a little bit differently.
Let me know in the comments below or send me an email, [email protected], on other topics you'd like us to go deep on. We have great conversations about these topics in the room with our clients, and I would love to involve you in some of those conversations with your team to see how we can help drive your performance and create the results, the recognition and rewards that you're really looking for. Speak soon.
That's it for this week's episode of The High Performance Leader. If you enjoyed this episode, please drop a review on whichever platform you listened on. We really appreciate it, and it helps us to connect with new listeners.
Also, if you haven't already, head to jimmyburroughes.com and download a copy of my latest best seller, Beat Burnout, Ignite Performance. It's the leaders playbook for building a high-performance culture, and is packed with practical action tips to get you started. Stay tuned for next week's episode of game-changing insights and ideas on The High Performance Leader.