ZenLeader

“A sharp word from my partner or a sassy one from my daughter provides a startling reminder of the fragility of unconditional love.”

How much of your day are you awake?  I mean really awake.  Try a simple exercise.  Contemplate all that you think and do between waking and sleeping on an average day.  Strip out everything you do out of sheer habit.  Next peel away all that you do out of obligation, obsession, and compulsion; or under duress; or to neutralize, minimize or otherwise reduce emotional charge.  Finally, eliminate every thought made or action taken in reaction to the comments or actions of others.  Now, what do you have left?   For most of us, very little day remains.

Yet, within that remaining slice lies a critical component to your satisfaction and your effectiveness as a leader – intentionality, (1).  Intentionality is defined as “characterized by conscious, deliberate design or purpose.”    My experience with moments of intentionality is that they are rich and deeply satisfying.   So much so that I want to fill my day with as many intentional waking moments as is humanly possible.  In fact I would ideally fill all of my waking moments with intentionality.  Therefore, I think it would serve us to stop for a moment and smell the roses provided by that concise definition, to really understand just what it frames.   To walk in the garden of intentionality let’s break down the qualities provided by that definition.

conscious, deliberate design or purpose.

Conscious – of your own free will or design, done by choice, not forced or compelled

Deliberate – carefully thought out in advance.

Design –  an anticipated outcome that is intended or that guides your planned actions.

Purpose – being determined to do or achieve something.

If you put it all together, intentionality is choosing of one’s free will, in advance and with careful thought an anticipated outcome, guided plan, or determined achievement.    OK… I know what you are thinking.  Why, Sarah, are you reading me the dictionary?  Are you going to read me the phonebook next?  And, if these moments of intentionality are so few and far between why make such a big to do about them?

I set up this discussion by asserting that most of our thoughts and actions are automated, tied to emotions and thoughts that flit across our psychic landscape like the weather.  Triggered reactions, obsessions and compulsions grip us more powerfully acting as major storm fronts assaulting our psyche to complete distraction.  This paints a bleak picture for intentionality and the possibility of satisfaction.  And, if our only choice were to be at the behest of our emotions and random thoughts it would indeed be bleak.  So, it is time to pull a rabbit out of our collective hat.  And, we CAN with our old friend, (from a few articles ago,) commitment.  In the spirit of the dictionary I am creating here let’s give commitment a definition.

Commitment – the act of binding yourself (intellectually or emotionally) to a course of action.

Commitment is then a source of intentionality beyond emotions, compulsions, and fleeting thoughts.  If your commitment is stable then you provide yourself with a stable source of intentionality at the behest of your choice rather than the demands your transient desires and emotions place on you.  The really cool part of commitment based intentionality is that it has the capacity to take ground on that day that might be otherwise filled with compelled thoughts and behaviors.  If you are continuously operating in commitment then your thoughts and actions will always come from self-disciplined intentionality.  By extension, the satisfaction of your experience will improve as well.

As usual, I am getting all theoretical.  So let’s bring this discussion down to earth with an example that also hits literally close to home.  I have a commitment that my partner and my daughter both continuously experience my love for them.  Since I enjoy immense satisfaction when I am loving them this commitment should be a no brainer.  Unfortunately, life intrudes on that ideal.  A sharp word from my partner or a sassy one from my daughter provides a startling reminder of the fragility of unconditional love.  With amazingly little restraint and rapier speed I find myself hurling my own sharp and/or snarky quips at them in self righteous indignation.  In that moment I have shifted out of my loving commitment to reactive domestic warrior.   Intentionality dashed, my satisfaction is obliterated.  In the past, and I say this with a great deal of chagrin, I have managed to remain in that state of self righteous upset for weeks and months.  These days, in my commitment to love and satisfaction, the turnaround is much shorter.  On a good day the turnaround is sometimes just as instantaneous and the original reaction.  It is just so much more fun to be satisfied than righteously justified in my anger.  My partner and daughter also appreciate my commitment to love and satisfaction.  It makes me a far less painful person with which to endure.

Intentional domestic loving is great.  But, what does that have to do with leadership?  Well,… a commitment is a commitment is a commitment.  We are leaders in the world by virtue of the commitments we make to exact change.  The tricky part is allowing that leadership commitment to become personal.  By that I mean allowing the commitment to dictate our behavior as leaders.  Every time I make a professional commitment that stretches me into a new capacity I ask myself, “Who must I become to meet this new commitment?”  Then I intentionally adjust my behaviors, actions, and even thoughts to be what is necessary to move myself and my team through the process of bringing that commitment to fruition.

One of my executive assignments required that I manage a loosely confederated team of about forty executives across the company to deploy global operational changes that affected tens of thousands of employees in all areas of the enterprise.  Since none of these people reported directly to me I had to up the ante on my influencing game.  When leading the team meetings I had to maintain a balance between prescriptive and collaborative, selling and executing.  When engaging these executives one-on-one I had to speak to them, like a master linguist, from their perspective.  While talking with finance executives I spoke financials.  While dealing with marketing executives we spoke in market speak.  When engaging the folks in the trenches I had to speak in details and specific tactical impacts.  When reviewing progress with senior executives I had to speak in broad strategic and financial impacts.  Within that context my required intentional behavior was so demanding that I had no room for my passing emotions or ego desires.  I simply and intentionally had to be that person that delivered success on a very large corporate commitment.  In doing so I spent much of those long and difficult days as one satisfied camper.

Note: (1) Traditional western philosophy establishes intentionality as expression of internal emotional and mental drivers such as love, hate, desire, fear, belief, judgment, perception, hope, etc.  For example, a desire for status can be a driver for intentionally purchasing a car I cannot afford.   While I have no argument that those mechanisms drive intention, I focus in this article on a deliberate, choice-based intentionality.  A heady discussion of the philosophical implications of intentionality can be, from an ontological perspective, found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/.  My article takes a decidedly more practical approach and argues for an amendment Brentano’s first thesis in that I believe intention can be based on choice as a powerful alternative to emotional and other mental drivers.

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