There’s a moment many leaders recognise, although we don’t often talk about it out loud. You’ve spent years becoming good at what you do. You’ve built judgement through experience, learned what to pay attention to and what to ignore, developed an instinct for what will work and what won’t. Then your role shifts. You’re no longer just delivering the work – you’re responsible for helping others deliver it too.
And that’s when the frustration can creep in.
You explain something that feels entirely clear in your own mind. You outline the steps. You share what matters. Yet the person in front of you still seems uncertain. They miss nuance. They hesitate. You might find yourself wondering, sometimes privately, sometimes audibly, why they just don’t get it.
Roger Kneebone describes something he calls the “curse of knowledge” – the way expertise quietly reshapes how we see the world. When you’ve internalised a skill deeply enough, it starts to feel obvious. Natural. Simple. You might even find yourself saying, “You just…” without noticing the decades of trial, error and refinement sitting behind that word.
He shares a story of a master taxidermist explaining his craft: you “just” sculpt the animal’s shape and put the skin back on. Said with total sincerity. And total blindness to how impossible that sounds to anyone at the beginning.
This is the invisible gap between expert and novice.
From the outside, it can look like capability. From the inside, it feels like fluency. But for the person still learning, that fluency is not yet accessible. What feels instinctive to you still requires conscious effort from them.
In organisations, this shows up in small, everyday ways:
“It’s common sense.”
“We’ve been over this.”
“They just need to be more strategic.”
“It’s not that complicated.”
None of these comments are usually intended to diminish. They’re often expressions of genuine confusion. The leader can see the pattern clearly. The learner is still piecing it together.
The challenge is that once we’ve crossed into competence, we forget the strain of getting there. We forget how long it took to think strategically rather than tactically. We forget the early misjudgements, the awkward conversations, the times we needed someone to slow down and make their thinking visible.
As leaders, we can often see ten improvements at once. We notice the missed opportunity, the imprecise language, the underdeveloped argument, the stakeholder not yet engaged. But offering all ten rarely accelerates growth. More often, it overwhelms.
There’s a useful idea from educational psychology called the zone of proximal development. It describes the space between what someone can do independently and what they can do with the right support. Development happens most effectively in that space of stretch – not where it’s too easy, and not where it’s so far ahead that it feels defeating.
In practical terms, that might mean:
Choosing one piece of feedback, not five.
Explaining why something matters, not just what to do.
Narrating your thinking process out loud.
Checking what feels unclear before assuming it should be obvious.
Resisting the urge to fix everything at once.
These sound deceptively simple. In reality, they require restraint. They require empathy. They require remembering that what is now second nature to you was once effortful and uncertain.
One of the most powerful shifts a leader can make is to move from “Why don’t they get it?” to “What am I no longer seeing because it’s so familiar to me?”
That question changes the tone of everything. It invites curiosity instead of judgement. It turns frustration into reflection. It places responsibility not solely on the learner, but also on the clarity of the leader.
True expertise, at its best, is not about holding knowledge tightly. It’s about translating it. Making the invisible visible. Slowing down instinct so that someone else can begin to build their own.
If someone on your team seems slower than you’d like, it may not be a question of intelligence or motivation. It may simply be that you are standing at a point on the path that now feels smooth, while they are still navigating the uneven ground.
Bridging that gap is not about lowering standards. It is about remembering the journey that got you to yours, and offering just enough support for the next step forward.
If you’d like to hear Roger Kneebone talk about this, check out this podcast on Coaching for Leaders: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/teach-your-expertise-roger-kneebone/ or read his book “Expert: Understanding the Path to Mastery” - https://bookshop.org/p/books/expert-understanding-the-path-to-mastery-roger-kneebone/0fa061af1c838cf7?ean=9780241392058&next=t&next=t&affiliate=90226
