A plan tells people what to do. Intent tells them what you’re trying to accomplish — so they can adapt when the plan meets reality.

Years ago, commanding in a war exercise, I made a decision I have never forgotten. I attacked the enemy’s strength instead of his weakness. It was the wrong call, and the exercise made that clear in a way no classroom ever could. We lost. When it was over, I stood up in the tent in front of my team and said the only honest thing there was to say. “I let you down.”

I have told that story for a long time as a lesson about owning failure, and it is. But there is a second lesson inside it that I have come to think matters just as much, and it is about The Leader’s Intent.

When I made that decision, my team executed it. They were skilled and they were disciplined and they did exactly what I directed. And that is the problem. They followed the order rather than the intent, because the intent had never been made clear enough for anyone to question the order against it. If the people around me had truly understood what we were trying to achieve, the end state we were driving toward, someone might have looked at my plan to hit the enemy’s strength and said, “Sir, that does not get us where you said we needed to go.”

Mission Tells You Who and What, Intent Tells You Why It Matters

The first component of Set the Azimuth is Mission. The second is Intent, and it is the one leaders most often skip, because it feels redundant. It is not.

Mission answers who we are and what we do. Intent answers what success looks like and why. In military terms, intent has three parts. The End State, which is the condition you want to exist when the work is done. The Key Tasks, which are the handful of things that must happen to get there. And the Purpose, the reason the whole effort matters. This is the commander’s intent, translated into organizational language.

The reason intent is the component leaders skip is that they believe they have communicated it when they have instead only outlined the plan. A plan tells people what to do. Intent tells people what you are trying to accomplish, so that when the plan meets reality, and it always does, they can adapt without waiting to be told. A team that knows the intent can necessitate changing the plan and still win. A team that has just the plan is helpless the moment conditions change.

Why Intent Is What Makes Delegation Safe

I meet a lot of leaders who say they want to empower their people but cannot bring themselves to let go. When I dig into it, the fear is almost always the same. They are afraid that if they step back, their people will make decisions that pull the organization off course.

That fear is legitimate when intent has not been set. Without a shared end state, delegation really is dangerous, because every person is deciding against their own private idea of what matters. But once intent is clear, delegation stops being a leap of faith. You are no longer trusting people to guess what you want. You are trusting them to pursue an end state they understand as well as you do. That is a completely different kind of trust, and it is the kind that scales.

Setting intent well is the difference between a team that needs you in every decision and a team that can move without you and still stay on azimuth. Below, I walk through the three parts of intent in practice, the tool I use to confirm intent has landed, and the most common way leaders get this wrong. To read the rest of this article, visit this link.

 

Enjoy the journey!