The Intention Deficit Virus
AA..AAA... ATTENTION - Bless You!
‘WARNING’ Leaders set back by prevalent Virus!
How can you tell if you may have this virus? Here are some of the indicators:
- As a leader you are 'managing' more than 'leading'!
- As your leadership heats up you are burning up in details!
- While leading you are ‘doing’ more than ‘seeing’!
- Recently you are struggling to see the ‘why’ through all the procedures of 'how’
If you find yourself or your leaders showing symptoms of the above maybe you are suffering from the ‘Intention Deficit Virus’. This is a contagious disease that thrives throughout an organisation’s culture. I believe it to be a by-product of yesteryear's management efficiency, and once exposed to it, most leaders fail to shake it off. You may be wondering why leaders struggle with this or what to do about this. If so, that's the design of this article.
‘Intention', (n) an anticipated outcome that is intended or that guides your planned actions.
Have you ever thought or said to someone, ‘You know I think I might have a cold, I’m not sure. I don’t have any obvious symptoms, and yet I just don’t feel right’. You may also have noticed that your performance at work or maybe in the gym just wasn’t there. Yes? In a similar way, this is how the ‘Intention Deficit Virus’ affects organisations and its leaders. It just goes on undiagnosed.
The larger affects of this are often leaders running around repairing or holding organisational weaknesses and underperforming staff together. Under the illusion that they are ‘helping’ that they are adding ‘value’. This illusion often gets worse in the later stages of the virus, and even more destructive to the organisation and its staff. This leads not to the original vision and direction of the leader, but to disempowering staff down the line. To having meetings for meetings sake and providing endless support and a depth of resource so inappropriate from a leader that it prevents the organisation from realising what it needs to do to ‘get better’.
Diagnosis
The ‘Intention Deficit Virus’ is a deficit of intention, suffered by the leader or the organisation in failing to distinguish between what the leader is attending to and the intention behind the attending. Yet, here is where the virus gets smart, as viruses do once we find them out and try to rid ourselves of them. The intention on first view may seem fitting, even admirable. The organisation ‘needs’ me to do this’ or ‘we don’t have the resources to have others doing this, so I will add value by supporting this need’. An important first step is becoming aware of our intentions. This is part of the way to rid ourselves of the deficit. However, just knowing our intention is not the cure. We need to ask, ‘Is this leadership or leading that I want to give my attention too? We need to ask, "Why am I giving my attention to this?" We need to ask a higher why, the why that will drive a leader.
- What - am I attending too
- How - is this displaying leading or leadership
- Why - am I doing this
This is where we have to jump a logical level, we have to go meta or above the current line of inquiry. That's because there is intention in all attentions. What we need to ask to be a ‘healthy’ intentional leader is:
- What is the quality of my intention?
- What do I intend with what I attend or give my attention to?
- What is the intention of my intention?
Cure
As you start to ask yourself these questions, you are starting to become a healthy leader again. You are beginning to once again see the bigger picture. You will feel like you have risen above the doing. You have a great big why with which to guide and energise your leading. With a big enough why, the how will start to be done by the people tasked to impose ‘how,’ namely management! In fact, as we look at the formula of management and leadership in these terms, we can broadly say:
- Management = Attention
- Leadership = Intention
As managers ask ‘what and how,’ a leader’s role is to ask or know ‘why’. This is the exploration of intention. So I ask you as a leader:
- What are you going to apply why to?
- What are you doing right now that is suffering from the ‘Intention Deficit Virus’?
- How much value to the bottom line of your business do you think you could add if you textured your leadership with intentional intentions?
- How much more of an effective leader can you sense yourself as being as you realise you can now rid yourself and eventually your organisation of the ‘Intention Deficit Virus’?
About Scott
Joseph W. Scott ACMC, MNLP; Founder of ‘The Leadership Coach’, Joseph has Internationally recognised credentials and licensing as a Neuro-Semantic/NLP Trainer with the International Society of Neuro-Semantics (ISNS) and Internationally recognised credentials and licensing as a Coach with The Meta-Coach Foundation (MCF) Sydney, Australia, A Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic-Programming (ANLP), delivering one on one leadership coaching exclusively to CEOs, Directors and Senior Executives working as leaders in public and corporate environments.
To Learn more about Scott
Send an Email
www.theleadershipcoach.com.au
