The effortlessness of intention

Intention is desire without attachment to the outcome.

–Deepak Chopra

We’ve likely all worked for leaders who knew where they wanted to go (at least in their own minds), but were unable to communicate their intention, so they left us dazed and confused in their wake. And then there were the leaders who frustrated us to no end because they didn’t really know where they were going (but pretended they did) and fumbled their way along, which meant we fumbled our way along too.

The Chinese symbol for “intention” is composed of two distinct characters. The upper character means “present“ and the lower character means “heart.” Both qualities are needed to reach effortless intention.

Leaders have a responsibility to be clear about their intentions. If they don’t, they’ll never quite get where they want to go or they’ll find it’s a struggle every step of the way…. Marcus Buckingham, who spent two decades at Gallup studying top leaders in business, echoes this in his article the “Clear Leader” in Fast Company. Buckingham’s stance is, “If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.” He also states (and this one’s a keeper), “Leaders can be wrong. They can’t be confusing.”

Effortless leaders are clear about what they want to create or cause; they hold that intention while knowing that they must be adaptable about how they get there; and they understand that being in relationship with others (whether they be staff, stakeholders or customers) is absolutely necessary to what they want to achieve.

These leaders not only know precisely what they want to cause or create, they also are motivated by something they care about. So many leaders seem only to care about earnings per share, maximizing shareholder value or reducing cost per unit. But earnings, shareholder value or cost per unit isn’t what they really care about even though it’s been drilled into them, and they’ve said it so much that they’ve actually started to buy it.  What they care about is something much larger than that. It’s the thing that we all want to be a part of, the something that is bigger than we all are….

For some leaders, they discover what they really care about when their perception about an issue changes dramatically—it’s like a wake up call for them. For John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, he had his own wake up call when his daughter, after watching Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, said, “Dad, your generation created this problem, and you’ve got to fix it.” That hit Doerr hard. So, motivated by his caring, he launched a Green Growth investment fund, which has invested over $500 million in new green technologies. Clearly Doerr’s intention was clear and his motivation was strong.

Without clarity of intention and caring motivation, leaders can’t effectively, let alone effortlessly, lead anything or anyone. So, if you, as a leader, don’t have that something—a mystery or a problem you need to solve for someone you care about—find one quickly.

Once you’re clear about what you care about and your intention, then and only then will you be ready to take the leadership stance everyone is waiting you to take. This is where effortless leadership all starts. Without a leadership stance, nothing else you do will have the same right impact. And you can forget about it being effortless.

Take time out of your busy day on your commute home, or whenever you have a chance to be alone and fully present, to reflect on what you truly care about and what you want to create or cause in your work. With your stance in hand, your ability to communicate your intention clearly to your staff and stakeholders will improve dramatically and so will your and their performance. And the added bonus is that you will find yourself caring even more about the right things….

What do you really care about? And how do you cause that to happen? I’d love to hear your success stories about how you’ve caused something you cared about to happen in your work because you’re intentions were clear.

Effortless leadership is an oxymoron?

I‘ve always had a fondness for a fine oxymoron that grabs you and shouts “hey, there might be a contradiction here.” So when I ran across a comment on a blog pointing out (with a wink) that effortless leadership was oxymoronic, I just simply couldn’t resist responding in some way. And so, my first blog dedicated to upholding the honor of effortless leadership was born….

Effortless leadership may imply that leadership somehow doesn’t require hard work, but we all know that’s not quite true. Leaders work hard, but, for some, everything they do just seems so effortless. That’s because effortless leadership is actually, when you get right down to it, an effortless state of being that informs everything that leader does.

So, why do we marvel at the effortlessness of these leaders?

We marvel at leaders who

• See and know exactly what to go do before others do
• Fully understand the impact of their actions and make wise decisions
• Understand the perspectives of others and have the ability to empathize with them
• Think about what’s good and right, not for just them as individuals or their team, but for the whole organization, and
• Do all of this with clear and focused intention.

And, what’s more, these leaders and their organizations are immensely successful.

While these kinds of leaders may be rare, we know they exist (usually because we’ve read about them), and we may even have run across them in our careers (lucky us if we have). And, if we’re really honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we want to be like them…. The fundamental question for us then is:

“How do we, as leaders, reach that state of effortlessness?”

We can learn a lot from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, which has studied the brains of leaders (and other mere mortals), and how they use pattern recognition, intuition and even rapid simulation in making decisions. Dr. Gary Klein’s research studies and books on how leaders decide in high stakes situations are seminal. A more mainstream look at how we make decisions is Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, which demystifies, and makes accessible, intuition’s role in decision making.

While neither Klein nor Gladwell call the developed ability to make critical decisions, effortless, it’s definitely implied. What they have both figured out is more than just how we make decisions in the blink of an eye; they have uncovered much of what lies at the root of effortless leadership.

Of course, there’s more to effortless leadership than the ability to make decisions. Based on this research and our work at Innate Strategies with leaders, we’ve found six critical capacities of effortless leaders. In upcoming blogs, I’ll explore each of these capacities in more detail (so stay tuned).

Six Effortless Leadership Capacities

1. Effortless leaders are clear about what they intend to create or cause or achieve in their organizations, and have a deep understanding of how they need to be, what they need to do, and what they already have in order to get there effortlessly.
2. To hold their intention and build the path toward their goal, effortless leaders see and understand how things are interconnected. Being able to see patterns, relationships and connections requires seeing differently than most of us normally do. Luckily for us, we can learn how to see this way, which means looking for and becoming conscious of patterns that effortless leaders see.
3. Being curious about all the pieces of the whole, and not just what they can see, requires these leaders to understand others’ perspectives on those pieces (and on the whole). And once they understand the intentions and motivations of others they come  to see through their eyes and empathize with them.
4. Effortless leaders also build an integrated model in their head of how everything works and how everything is related. That ability often comes with experience, but, even with experience, some leaders still don’t see how everything relates in their world. And many certainly don’t understand causality or we wouldn’t be in the state of affairs we’re in now. When these leaders know what the whole looks like, and they understand what actually causes what, they become acutely aware of how their actions (and the actions of others) affect other parts of the whole.
5. When effortless leaders see and know the impact of these actions, and when they balance reason with their intuition, they quite naturally find themselves at choice about the right course of action. Of course, because we have free will, they can always decide to not do the right thing, but they have to break the flow and consciously make that decision (and live with the consequences, as do others). More often than not, these leaders feel compelled to make the right decision because doing anything other than that creates such internal discord, they literally feel out of integrity.
6. And when every action a leader takes is informed by their intention and by what they know is true and right and good for the whole of the organization, that is effortless leadership.

When every action you take is informed by your intention and by what you know is true and right and good for the whole, that is effortless leadership.

Effortless leadership isn’t an oxymoron; it’s a natural state of being we can all access. What’s natural about it is its innate sense of the whole, which isn’t genetic; it’s something leaders have learned through experience, which means we can learn it too.

Some questions for self-reflection:

• Do you lead effortlessly or do you find leading to be a struggle?
• Do you live into some (or all) of the six qualities of an effortless leader? Do you know other leaders who do?
• Are you clear about your intention (what you want to create or achieve) and does it match your actions?
• When you make decisions for your organization do you feel in integrity, or do you feel a sense of unease and discord?

What does effortless leadership look, feel and sound like to you? What becomes possible for you and for your organization when leadership is effortless?  Can we learn (and be taught) to be effortless leaders? I’d love to hear from you about your experience as an effortless leader or one who aspires to effortlessness.