Intent Management
Intention setting is a management practice of identifying what’s important to you and your team. It is a contribution to a management style that can set the focus, on a daily basis, of achieving goals. As you will see in our section on Communication, a teams goals do not always have quick resolutions and ad hoc goals are not easily achieved as the focus quickly blurs. Our “intentions” are like flexible guard rails that help your team(s) work together effectively. In fact, your team will never really finish this practice once they begin to use it as once intentions are completed, there are other goals running alongside each other with new goals continually being set.
Intent(ion) Leadership/Management was bought into the spotlight via by former U.S. Navy captain David Marquet’s treal life story. His book, Turn the Ship Around! was published in 2013 and hundreds of thousands of readers have enjoyed and learnt from his leadership challenges.
Marquet was a Naval Academy graduate and an experienced Naval officer when he was selected for submarine command. Trained to give orders in the traditional model of “know all–tell all” leadership, he faced a new wrinkle when he was shifted to the Santa Fe, a nuclear-powered submarine. Facing the high-stress environment of a sub where there’s little margin for error, he was determined to reverse the trends he found on the Santa Fe: poor morale, poor performance, and the worst retention rate in the fleet.
Almost immediately, Marquet ran into trouble when he unknowingly gave an impossible order, and his crew tried to follow it anyway. When he asked why, the answer was: “Because you told me to.” Marquet realized that while he had been trained for a different submarine, his crew had been trained to do what they were told—a deadly combination. That’s when Marquet flipped the leadership model on its head and pushed for leadership at every level.
BEFORE PROGRESSING FURTHER I URGE TO TAKE A LOOK AT A VIDEO GIVING A CLEAR AND CONCISE EXPLANATION TO MANAGING BY INTENT. CLICK THE BUTTON ABOVE!
Sharing Intent
My first experience in managing with shared intent has nothing to do with nuclear submarines or with anything matters military. It came about with my first assignment as a football coach but even then, not with the Senior team, I was the coach of the seconds, the support team and a team in a competition that was not of a high standard. I was going to playing in the Seniors so even as the Coach of the team, I was also separated from the team.
I went into this role with my life long “intent” when it came to football. Train hard and achieve the best possible result you could with the idea that that best possible result was becoming the Premier team that season.
My players “intent” was to play a game of football whenever they felt like playing and to many of those players the result of the game was not important. However, many still wanted to win or at least compete. And at least we had discovered these differences in the pre-season.
There were going to be clashes. We had different goals and intentions across the group of individuals who were not a team. How was this going to work? This was all new to me, it was time to talk to the people in the group who had more experience in this type of set up than me.
Understanding that a number of individuals and small groups of like minded individuals had different goals, due to the level of the competition the team was involved in was new to me. But we still had to foster collaboration amongst the individuals so that those individuals eventually became team members. There was a real need to initiate open and honest discussions to learn about each team member's aspirations, motivations, and priorities. We needed to encourage potential team members to share their personal objectives for becoming actual team members as there were no professional objectives involved.
So there was me, the coach, who wanted every potential player to attend each and every training session, apply themselves to the top range of their ability so that they could be considered to play for the senior team at the club.
There was the long standing captain of the seconds who never considered himself capable of becoming a senior player but would be at all training sessions and always encouraging everyone to work hard and prepare well. He represented between 6 & players with his attitude and presence at our get together.
The captain had suggested another senior player from the club who played in the seconds but due to work committments could only attend training spasmodically and would be working about once every 5 weeks so could not play on those Saturdays. He was a shearer and as we were in the “bush” we had a number of potential players who needed to commit to the farm over football.
As it it transpired, the most important person that attended this meeting of the minds was a player who didn’t really want to train at all and would turn up to play of a Saturday if he woke up that Saturday without a hangover and when he looked outside it was not raining. I had been at the club for about 3 months and had only ever seen him at the Sunday barrel. I had no idea he was a potential player.
So this Fab Four met, asked questions, discussed the situation and agreed to try and remedy the situation, a situation that they agreed should be rememedied.
As this meeting began, I quickly realised that this meeting was a time for me to take a back seat. I quickly told the other attendees that it was my intent to make the team as succesful as possible but it was currently beyond my understanding how that could be achieved.
The other three guys were told by me to work it out and I would only enter the discussions if I felt they were getting too far off track.
I was pleasantly surprised.
While listening intently, something that I had not given much credit to previously, I discovered that the three guys at the table were pretty much a formerly tight group of mates who had become distanced as life in general threw up more responsibilities as their live went different routes. Their town and the two major social aspects of the town, the football club and the cricket club were where they grew up.
Their conversation about our team problem only went for a quarter of an hour before they told me that I could go if I liked as I had to drive back to the city, they would work the details out over a couple of beers and then give me the solution 2 days later at our next training session.
And they did.
The captain explained. They understood that when the football team was successful the entire town was happier and a happier town was a more prosperous town. Without going to in depth, their proposal was,
They wanted me to have ample time to prepare myself to play in the seniors.
The captains intention was to become more of a leader to the seconds particularly when my attention was take away to prepare for my own game.
The captain also wanted me to appoint the part time player as his vice captain. This players intentions had changed so much that he wanted responsibilities he had never considered before. He has also made himself responsible for ensuring that at least another 5 of these now and then players become full time players (which he did).
The guy who played every week also made his intentions clear. He would become the support to both of these others guys who had taken the major steps in forming a team. He would make sure these other 2 guys carried out their intentions.
What these guys had done was put together a plan without even realising it. I was the office boy who took their game plan away and turned their combined intent into a game plan for the next few weeks, something the four of us could measure our teams progress against and something the club turned into thir Vision for the next 5 years.
I called when I started it the Scope of Work and while it had many working names, a Scope of Work was what it actually was.
A Scope of Work
A Scope of Work(s) (or, SoW) is considered an essential document when working on a project with people who are outside your organisation.
As we saw at the Footy Club, a Scope of Work(s) can and should be an essential document when working with people within your organisation. See our discussions on Communications and Silos. Otherwise, it’s all too easy for miscommunication or presumptions to send a project off course.
A SOW brings everything together, with all the details, to schedules, terms and our expected intentions to not only define exactly what should be done on a project, but also to protect you from the dreaded “blowouts” where additions and ownerships “oops I’ve changed my mind” brain explosions, place your project well beyond what you’d initially planned, financially and time wise.
The smallest projects like a web site redesign to a large project like a new factory construction all benefit with a properly designed and thought out SOW.
What is a Scope of Work?
Why do we need One?
Essentially, a Scope of Work is a document that covers the working principles between two parties. That’s US (the client and an outside vendor or contractor (Party B) in many SoW or contracts.
The SoW is to make sure the expectations nd responsibilities are clear and agreed upon and that both you and whomever you’re working with know exactly what they should be doing prior to the work commencing, during the agreed to SoW duration and at the end of the project when payments are due.
An effective SOW should include things like (but not limited to),
Project objectives
Schedule/Milestones
Individual Tasks:
Materials
Deliverables:
Payment Information:
Expected Outcomes:
Terms, conditions, and requirements:
A SoW must be used when working with outside vendors and/or contractors. It needs to be especially clear and contain no ambiguous statements, use a common language that both parties understand and set detailed tasks, standrds, deliverables and completion.
A good SOW will avoid some of the biggest project management traps,
Confusion, miscommunication, and disputes over scope
Misinterpretations of expectations and needs
the Standard of materials to be used
“Selective Amnesia” of what was said and the need for expensive rework*
*Reworks and other project variations in the Australian construction industry were misic to the contractors ears when I was involved in construction. With bidding hard fought for each contract to get a change where you could virtually charge any amount was the key to making money.
2 of the projects I worked on in Vietnam were totally different. No variance or change in the contract amount was made when an actual variance occurred. The changes would be made and the budget just had to accept this and then the longer the project went the more quality declined as all the changes plus the original project content was to be completed for the initial contract amount.
You would hope that that “common langauge that both parties understand” would be explained to the parties who did not understand. I can assure, no always!
Preparing a SOW is not an easy task but a task that becomes easier the more of them you prpepare.
But just like our country footy club, the more you get your team involved, the more you listen rather than just talk (and try to control) and the more you ask questions, the less strenuous your task becomes.
A SoW will ensure you, your stakeholders and the outside vendors and contractors that you are working with all have a clear idea of what the “successful” project will look like and what map you are going to use to get there.