Business Bite: Intent Vs. Impact

Welcome to Business Bites. My name is Sara. This is the podcast for busy professionals who want the quick hits of business terminology, historical context, and strategies for integration. This week, we're going to be talking about intent versus impact when it comes to leaders.

I'd like you to take a moment and imagine an individual who you had the privilege of following. I'd like you to imagine for a moment a leader that you've worked for. On the one hand, let's think about that leader who was the best leader, a leader who you'd happily work for again, who was fantastic to follow, gave clear and insightful instructions, had a vision, had a path forward, and you wanted to work with them. What did it feel like to work with them? How did they make the team operate?

Now, as I'm describing this person, you're probably also thinking about that worst leader, that individual who you are glad that you're not working with them anymore, who you've tried to avoid, who you've unfollowed on LinkedIn. You can vividly remember what they did, what they said, how they made you feel, and how they created an environment that you hated.

And when we're thinking about this difference between that best leader and that worst leader, I'm sure we could come up with themes of what made a difference, what that individual was like. But at the end of the day, thinking about the intentionality around that leader.

When I ask the question, does it matter more intent or impact? I encourage folks to think about, well, I didn't mean to, or I didn't know that you'd react. Those are all statements around intention, and while I do think being intentional is very important, it's essential for us to think about the impact of the decision that we're making.

When you're thinking about that leader, that worst leader, no one tries to do a bad job at work. No one sets out to be an ineffective leader. When I'm leading courses or I'm leading trainings, when we're talking about micromanagement, oftentimes I get individuals who come to me and say, but Sara, you don't understand. You don't understand what it's like to manage this team. I have to micromanage them. I have to lead with an iron fist. I have to be on them all day, every day.

But if I come back to the premise and come back to the understanding that no one is trying to be bad at their job, then I think about the difference between the intent or the impact. That worst boss that you've ever had, that worst leader that you've ever been forced to follow, do you think that they thought that they were the worst leader? That they were the most ineffective at their work?

One of the traps and one of the challenges of being in a leadership position is sometimes we get to think that we are better than we actually are, or perhaps we are pulling and sampling data that fits our narrative, that fits our story. Or that we listen to or select what we want to hear that supports our position. This difference between our intention and our impact comes down to feedback and getting information from other people about how we're actually doing.

Now, one way that folks get information about how they're doing in a specific situation is thinking about how we receive that data. Some folks do things like self-assessment, right? I look at myself, I look at the work that I'm doing, and I can gauge, for the most part, how I'm doing in a specific situation based on a certain set of criteria. But it is not providing me the information that is going to tell me what do other people think about how I'm doing? What do other people know about the work that I have done?

And so when we're talking about that, that is providing a 360-degree view about how our feedback is actually being received. And so a 360 assessment, for example, gets feedback from our supervisor, gets feedback from our peers, and gets feedback from the folks that we supervise in order to increase our awareness. So that separation between intent and impact gets a little bit closer together.

By increasing our own awareness and thinking about how we pull these things apart, we want to be able to raise our own capability. Because we can't change things that we don't know about. We can't adapt, we can't improve, we can't evolve if we don't ask for that feedback and then actually listen to it to better understand what that person's trying to tell us and how we can improve.

So if you're in the situation where perhaps you don't know if you are someone else's best leader or worst leader, or whether your intentions are not providing the impact that you'd like, this is our opportunity to think about what are we trying to accomplish and how do we know if it's working? And I'd encourage you to think about whether you're making the impact you want, or if you're focusing on the intention that you have around it.

This has been Sara with Business Bites. You can reach me at [email protected]. We would love to hear from you on what other terminology you'd like bite-sized. As always, give us a quick rating on your platform of choice and share this podcast with a friend. We'll see you next time.