A trucking company's performance may depend less on how much its people know than on whether they consistently turn that knowledge into action.
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton's book The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action argues that differences in knowledge explain only part of the performance gap between companies. The larger difference is often the ability to act on what people already know.
The authors offer two reasons that doing matters more than knowing. First, there are too many ways to acquire and share knowledge for performance problems to be blamed on secret information. Second, successful improvement usually depends on implementing familiar ideas rather than adopting entirely new ones.
A trucking company may already know that revenue per truck per week, fleet miles per gallon, out-of-route miles, idle time, or other benchmarks lag competitors. The harder question is what prevents the company from acting on that knowledge.
Ask Why, Not How
Managers often focus on how successful companies perform particular practices. Pfeffer and Sutton recommend beginning instead with why the company exists and what it values.
Actions should flow from the mission and core values rather than from copying another company's techniques without understanding their purpose.
Knowing Comes From Doing and Teaching
Organizations often underestimate learning by doing. Online courses can communicate information to drivers and dispatchers, but many lessons about operations, people, and company behavior can be learned only through direct experience.
Teaching others how work is done also deepens understanding and helps translate knowledge into repeatable practice.
Action Matters More Than Words
Sounding smart is not the same as doing something smart. Planning can become so prominent that it displaces execution.
Companies should reward employees for carrying out useful ideas, not merely for proposing them.
Expect Mistakes
Action often requires risk. If employees believe an error will provoke anger or damage their careers, they will hesitate to act.
Mistakes should be treated as part of learning rather than as evidence that employees should avoid initiative.
Eliminate Fear
Fear disrupts organizations. Employees who worry that one mistake could cost them their jobs are unlikely to take the chances required for improvement.
Removing fear supports confidence, responsible risk-taking, and stronger performance.
Fight the Competition, Not Each Other
Internal competition can pit employees against one another and undermine company performance. Research cited in the article found that employees prefer cooperative work arrangements and that cooperation improves morale and task completion.
That preference was becoming particularly important with the growing millennial workforce.
Measure What Matters
Companies often assume that measuring more will cause more work to be completed. Instead, they should focus on the measures that explain the company's economic engine.
Trucking companies also tend to measure outcomes rather than the processes producing them. A company may know that it collects receivables in 45 days without understanding whether that result is good, bad, or why it occurs.
More useful measures may include:
- How long drivers take to submit paperwork
- The number and cause of re-bills
- The number of collection calls made each day
- The number of days between load pickup and mailing or transmitting the invoice
Measuring those processes gives the company something operational to improve rather than merely reporting the final outcome.
Lead by Example
Leaders at companies with the smallest knowing-doing gaps understand that they cannot know and do everything themselves. Their role is to create an environment in which others can learn and act.
What leaders do, how they spend their time, and where they allocate resources all communicate priorities. Closing the knowing-doing gap begins with understanding its causes and then demonstrating the behavior the organization is expected to follow.