Why leadership insight doesn’t change behaviour

Knowing what great leadership looks like is not the same as doing it. (If it were, I’d be out of a job.)

Here’s a pattern I see almost every week. Every senior leader I work with can describe great leadership beautifully. They’ve read the books. They’ve done the programs. They’ve absorbed the podcasts on the drive home. Ask them what good leadership looks like and you’ll get a clean, articulate answer. Then you watch them on a hard Tuesday and it’s a different human entirely. Let me say this gently: this isn’t a character flaw. I’ve done it. We’ve all done it. Insight and behaviour are neighbours who almost never talk to each other.

Let me share a quick story. I once worked with an executive who was running what looked, on paper, like a textbook leadership playbook. Fortnightly one-on-ones. A written team charter. Skip-level coffees. Honestly, the diary alone was dreamy. But his team was stuck and he couldn’t work out why. When we unpacked what was actually happening, it became pretty clear, pretty quickly. The one-on-ones were status updates dressed up as conversations. The charter was living its best life in a Confluence page no one had opened in six months. The skip-levels were polite. He knew the theory. He just wasn’t practising any of it and that’s a crucial distinction.

Here’s the idea I want you to sit with for a minute: behaviour doesn’t change because you had a lightbulb moment in a workshop. It changes when the old habit finally becomes more uncomfortable than the new one and when there’s a structure around you that keeps the new behaviour alive. Without that structure, most of us drift back to what’s familiar inside a fortnight. Which is why the big transformational offsite approach is, to put it kindly, optimistic.

The leaders I see actually shifting do something genuinely unglamorous. They pick one just one leadership behaviour to practise. They tell their team what they’re working on. They invite feedback. And they keep at it long past the point where it feels interesting. It’s not exciting. There’s no retreat in the mountains. There’s just you, a sticky note, and a willingness to be slightly terrible at something new in public. That’s the whole game, really.

Here’s a question I often put to my clients, and I’d invite you to try it on yourself this week: if I asked three people on your team what you’ve been doing differently in the last month, what would they actually say? If the answer is, “hmm, nothing really” no drama. It just means the insight hasn’t landed yet, and the work is still ahead of you. That’s useful information, not a grade.

In practice

•     Pick one behaviour to practise for the next 60 days not five, not even two.

•     Tell your team what you’re working on. Out loud. They’ll respect it, not judge it.

•     Find one person you trust to rate you honestly on it every month. Bribe them with coffee.