Patrick Knaus

Patrick Knaus has spent more than twenty years trying to solve one of the most stubborn problems in professional development: the gap between knowing something and actually doing it.

It started, like most honest professional reckonings do, with a failure. Early in his leadership career, Patrick was a dedicated learner. He read the books, took the courses, filled notebooks with frameworks and ideas he was certain would make him the leader he wanted to be. He highlighted passages. He took margin notes. He saved articles. He was, by any external measure, exactly the kind of person who should have been ahead of the curve.

And then he walked into the real work of leadership — the difficult conversations, the trust he hadn't yet earned, the performance issues he wasn't sure how to address, the team dynamics that didn't follow any framework he'd ever read — and he realized that the highlighting hadn't helped. Not because the books were wrong. Because consuming an idea and applying it are two completely different things. And almost nothing in his development had been built for the second part.

That realization became the foundation of everything that followed.

Patrick is a learning and development professional with over two decades of experience designing and delivering programs that actually change behavior — not just deliver content. He has spent his career working with organizations navigating the full spectrum of workforce challenges, with a particular focus on the moment that derails more talented professionals than perhaps any other: the first leadership role.

That transition — from individual contributor to leader — is where Patrick has done his deepest work. He has seen, over and over again, what happens when organizations promote strong performers into management roles and then assume the skills will follow. Sometimes they do. More often, a capable person spends months or years struggling through challenges they were never prepared for, losing confidence in themselves, losing the confidence of their teams, and wondering if they were ever cut out for this in the first place.

The answer, in Patrick's experience, is almost always yes. The problem is almost never talent. It's the absence of a structured way to translate what you know into what you actually do differently on Monday morning.

That conviction is what led him to write First-Time Leadership: A New Leader's Guide to Starting Strong — a practical, direct, and deeply human guide to navigating the first 90 days of a leadership role. Not a theory book. Not a framework collection. A book built around the actual decisions, conversations, and moments that define whether a new leader earns the right to lead — or quietly loses it while trying to figure out the rules no one explained.

The book is organized around three phases — building trust and listening in the first thirty days, setting expectations and developing your people in the middle stretch, and leading confidently toward results in the final third — because Patrick believes the first three months of any leadership role set the trajectory for everything that follows. Get those 90 days right, and the foundation holds. Get them wrong, and the work of rebuilding is far harder than the work of building well from the start.

First-Time Leadership was followed by its companion workbook, First-Time Leadership: Assess. Reflect. Apply. — a structured tool that takes every concept in the book and gives readers a way to work through it in their specific context, with their actual team, in the reality of their particular situation. Because Patrick learned the hard way that reading about leadership and doing the work of leadership require different things from you. The workbook is built for the second one.

Beyond the books, Patrick writes The Practical Leader — a weekly newsletter for new managers, first-time leaders, and anyone doing the hard and honest work of leading people for the first time. The newsletter is built on the same philosophy as his books: leadership development that is practical, specific, and grounded in the reality of what it actually feels like to be accountable for a team when you're still figuring out what you're doing. No empty inspiration. No recycled platitudes. Just the ideas, tools, and honest reflections that make a real difference in the work.

Patrick is also an EdD candidate, deepening his academic foundation in the learning sciences that have shaped his professional practice for two decades. His work connects the research on how people learn and change behavior to the practical reality of leadership development — the kind of development that sticks not because it sounded good in a conference room, but because it was designed around how people actually grow.

He founded Knaus Press as the home for his books, his newsletter, and his ongoing work in the space where learning meets leadership. It is, in many ways, the professional extension of the same realization he had early in his career: that the world doesn't need more leadership content. It needs better tools for actually using it.

Patrick lives and works in the belief that the leaders who develop fastest are not the most naturally talented. They are the ones most willing to look honestly at where they are, take stock of what is actually happening, and make deliberate adjustments — consistently, over time. That willingness to assess, reflect, and apply is what separates the leaders who plateau from the ones who keep growing.

He wrote these books for the leaders who are willing to do that work. And for the organizations, HR professionals, and L&D practitioners who understand that putting the right tool in a new leader's hands at the right moment is one of the highest-leverage investments they can make.