What is the Intention-Impact Gap? And why it’s critical for Leaders to close.
Closing the intention-impact gap allows leaders to act with clear, values-aligned intention to ensure they’re having the impact they desire in the workplace.
Often in our relationships both personally and professionally, what we say and do and how we wish to be perceived by others doesn’t align. This is called the intention-impact gap.
When we build self-awareness, both internal and external, we better able to identify the discrepancy in where our intentions aren’t aligning with impact.
Intentions are energy. They are potential. When they’re clear, they offer us direction and guidance. Understanding what our intentions are is the first step in closing the intention-impact gap as a leader.
However, our intentions are not enough alone to drive the impact we want to have. To translate intention into impact, we need to ensure we’re thinking and behaving in a way that truly aligns with our intention.
What are the steps to closing the intention-impact gap?
Get clear on your values: To close the intention-impact gap, it’s first critical that we become conscious of what we value, and how we want these values to reflect in how we live and lead. Uncovering our personal core values helps us understand what is most important to us and these will act as a guiding light in helping as make decisions that are values-aligned. Knowing your core values drives intentional behavior, this helps you make healthy decisions and assists with prioritizing and boundary setting.
Set clear intentions around your values: At Human Leaders we call these your Leadership Intention Statements. They’re statements that gives your values momentum by define how they look in action. For example if one of your personal core values is growth, your leadership intention statement could be “I stay attuned to opportunities for my team to grow individually and collectively so we can experience challenge and joy at work and we can evolve.”
Seek feedback on your impact: Ensuring our impact matches our intention is an ongoing process of seeking and integrating objective data and information, and adjusting course.
Once your core values are identified and translated into your leadership intention statements , it’s time to close the gap between the impact we want to have and that which we actually do. To do this, we have to be willing to understand how others see and experience us. That is, how our impact is felt and received by others. And to see where discrepancies between intention and impact lie. And be willing to make changes to our thinking and behavior that close the gap.
Seeking feedback can feel uncomfortable and vulnerable, as we need to be open-minded and non-judgemental in order to give others the opportunity to share how they experience us in a candid and safe way. While feedback can sometimes be confronting, remind yourself that it’s part of your leadership growth and evolution journey - and a necessary part of closing the intention-impact gap.
Adjusting your Leadership to close the intention-impact gap
Closing the intention-impact gap doesn’t end when we seek candid feedback from those around us, this is just the beginning of our leadership growth journey. The real work is paying conscious intention to how we integrate this feedback into changing our behaviour each and everyday. This includes being mindful of how our communication impacts others, how our leadership intentions are imbued in our behaviour and decision making, and continuously checking in on whether we’re being received in the way we intended to close the intention-impact gap.
As a Human Leader two critical skills necessary to close the intention-impact gap are Mindful Communication and Radical Candor. Listen to the We Are Human Leaders podcast episodes with Heather R Younger on Active Listening, and Jason Rossoff on Radical Candor to learn these leadership skills for yourself.