When leaders know what to do but can’t do it
Here’s what most leadership experts won’t tell you: the problem isn’t that leaders don’t understand good leadership. Most do. They’ve read the books, attended the seminars, and can articulate the principles perfectly.
The real problem is far more complex and uncomfortable to address.
The Knowledge-Action Chasm
Walk into any organisation and you’ll find leaders who can describe transformational leadership, servant leadership, and authentic leadership with impressive fluency. They know they should delegate more, communicate better, and think strategically. They understand the importance of psychological safety, employee engagement, and organisational culture.
Yet they continue to micromanage, avoid difficult conversations, and get trapped in operational firefighting.
This isn’t ignorance. It’s incapacity.
The Four Barriers to Leadership Capacity
1. The Confidence Deficit
Most leaders suffer from a profound lack of confidence in their leadership capability. They’ve been promoted based on technical expertise, not leadership competence. They know what good leadership looks like in theory, but they don’t trust themselves to execute it in practice.
This creates a vicious cycle: lack of confidence leads to over-controlling behaviour, which prevents them from developing the very leadership muscles they need to build confidence.
Consider the manager who knows delegation is crucial but thinks: “It’s faster if I do it myself. What if they get it wrong? What if they ask questions I can’t answer? What if this reflects poorly on me?”
The knowledge is there. The confidence isn’t.
2. The Example Vacuum
Most leaders have never worked for truly exceptional leaders. They’ve learned leadership from managers who were also promoted for technical skills and management rather than leadership ability. They’re trying to model behaviours they’ve never actually witnessed.
When your primary leadership education comes from observing other struggling leaders, you inherit their limitations along with their occasional insights. You learn to manage by exception rather than lead by example. You copy their crisis management style without understanding their strategic thinking.
You can’t become what you’ve never seen.
3. The Latitude Limitation
Even leaders who understand good leadership principles often lack the organisational latitude to implement them. They’re constrained by:
- Organisational culture that rewards firefighting over strategic thinking
- Systems that punish failure more than they reward innovation
- Senior leaders who model the very behaviours they claim to discourage
- Resource constraints that force short-term thinking
- Performance metrics that emphasise individual contribution over team development
They want to coach their people, but they’re measured on immediate deliverables. They want to think strategically, but they’re pulled into every operational crisis. They want to develop others, but they don’t have time to develop themselves.
4. The HR Confusion Factor
Most HR teams compound this problem by fundamentally misunderstanding the difference between leadership and management. They design “leadership development programmes” that actually teach management skills:
- Project management techniques (useful, but not leadership)
- Performance review processes (necessary, but not leadership)
- Prioritisation (important, but not leadership)
- Compliance procedures (essential, but not leadership)
- Reporting structures (required, but not leadership)
These are valuable management competencies, but they don’t develop leadership capacity. They don’t help someone inspire a team, navigate ambiguity, or create psychological safety.
Leadership development typically happens in safe training environments with hypothetical scenarios. But real leadership happens under pressure, with real consequences, and no time to consult the framework from last month’s workshop. In Amplify we hardwire the frameworks so they are second nature. And then practice them to ensure they stick.
The gap between classroom learning and workplace reality is enormous. Leaders are expected to practice complex interpersonal skills whilst managing actual crises, real deadlines, and genuine conflicts.
It’s like learning to perform surgery by watching YouTube videos and then being handed a scalpel.
Management is about systems and processes. Leadership is about people and possibilities.
When HR conflates the two, they create programmes that make people better administrators whilst leaving their leadership capacity unchanged.
The Lunch-and-Learn Illusion
The most damaging aspect of current leadership development trends is the expectation that complex leadership skills can be learned in bite-sized sessions between operational demands.
Picture this: A middle manager attends a 90-minute session on “Crucial Conversations” during lunch. They see slides about preparation, creating safety, and managing emotions. Then they return to their desk to find three urgent emails, a team member in crisis, and a deadline that was moved up by two days.
When they attempt to apply what they learned, it goes poorly. The conversation becomes awkward. The team member gets defensive. The outcome is worse than if they’d handled it their usual way.
Their conclusion? The training doesn’t work in the real world.
But the training was never designed to work under those conditions. Complex interpersonal skills require practice, feedback, and gradual development. They can’t be mastered from a few slides consumed between crises.
The Real Solution: Building Leadership Capacity
Addressing the leadership capacity crisis requires a fundamentally different approach:
Build Confidence Through Competence
Instead of teaching leadership concepts, create opportunities for leaders to practice leadership skills in low-risk environments. Use simulations, peer coaching, and structured practice sessions where failure is safe and feedback is immediate.
Confidence comes from repeated success in progressively challenging situations, not from understanding theoretical frameworks.
Provide Real Leadership Models
Connect developing leaders with genuinely exceptional leaders, not just senior managers. This might mean looking outside the organisation, bringing in external mentors, or creating cross-industry leadership exchanges.
Leaders need to see what great leadership actually looks like in practice, not just in theory.
Create Organisational Latitude
Change the systems that constrain leadership development:
- Measure leaders on team development, not just individual output
- Reward strategic thinking, even when it means saying no to urgent requests
- Create protected time for leadership activities like coaching and strategic planning
- Establish psychological safety for leadership experimentation
Distinguish Leadership from Management
HR teams need to understand that leadership development is fundamentally different from management training. Leadership development focuses on topics like:
- Influencing without authority
- Creating and connecting vision and meaning
- Developing others’ potential
- Navigating ambiguity and complexity
- Building trust and psychological safety
These skills require different learning approaches than management competencies.
Create Sustained Implementation Opportunities
Replace lunch-and-learn sessions with sustained development programmes that include:
- Regular practice sessions with real scenarios
- Peer coaching and feedback
- Gradual skill building over months, not hours
- Integration support to apply learning in daily work
- Safe spaces to experiment and fail
Most organisations aren’t ready to invest in real leadership development because it’s expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to measure. It’s easier to run workshops on management techniques and call it leadership development.
But until we address the capacity crisis, we’ll continue to promote good people into leadership roles they’re not equipped to handle, then wonder why engagement remains low and turnover stays high.
The solution isn’t more leadership knowledge. It’s more leadership capacity.
What barriers to leadership capacity do you see in your organisation? How might you begin to address the gap between what leaders know and what they’re able to do?
When you are ready to find out more, here are a few ways you can connect with me
- Tired of leadership advice that doesn’t work in the real world? → Get practical insights that actually work
- Stuck in the leadership weeds and can’t see a way out? → Book your 1:1 Strategic Breakthrough Session
- Ready to reclaim 6+ hours weekly and lead with confidence instead of firefighting in chaos? → Discover Amplify
- Exhausted from your team needing constant oversight and direction? → Transform them with WoW
- Burning out from leadership overwhelm? → Get the antidote (my book)
