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.
The Three Parts of Intent in Practice
Start with the End State and be concrete about it. Not “become the market leader,” which is a wish, but a described condition. Instead define what is true about your organization, your customers, and your people when this is done. I coach leaders to write their End State as if they are describing a photograph taken on the day of success. The more specific the picture, the more useful it is as a touchstone, because people can measure their daily choices against something they can see.
Then identify the Key Tasks. These are not the full project plan. They are the few things that absolutely must go right, they are the load-bearing walls. Most leaders list too many. The discipline is to find the three or four tasks that, if they fail, the End State fails with them. When people know the Key Tasks, they know where to spend their best energy and where to allocate priorities. For most of us, everything cannot be of equal importance.
Last, make the Purpose explicit and keep saying it. The purpose is why the End State matters beyond the organization’s own tactical KPIs. Purpose is what carries a team through the stretch where the work is hard and the finish line is not yet visible. A leader who states the End State and the Key Tasks but never connects them to a Purpose has given people a destination but no reason to want to reach it.
The Backbrief, the Tool That Confirms Intent Landed
Here is the tool I trust most for making sure Leader’s Intent has been understood. It is the Backbrief. After I describe the Intent, I ask the person receiving it to brief it back to me in their own words, including what they believe the End State is and why it matters. Not repeat my words. Translate them.
The Backbrief does something a nod and a “got it” never will. It surfaces the gap between what the Leader said and what they heard while there is still time to close it. More than once, a Backbrief has shown me that my own Intent was muddier than I thought, and the fix was on my side, not theirs. If I had learned to run a proper Backbrief before that war exercise years ago, I suspect someone would have discovered the flaws in my plan before the enemy did.
The most common way leaders get intent wrong is confusing volume with clarity. They explain the plan in great detail and assume the intent came along for the ride. It did not. Detail the Intent, verify it with a Backbrief, and then you can give people the freedom to adapt, because they will adjust but remain true to the same End State we defined success.
I’d love to hear about a time your team executed the plan perfectly and still missed the point or caught a flawed plan early on because they understood the Leader’s Intent.
Leave a comment below and let’s talk about it.
Enjoy the journey!
