The Intention Imperative

3 Essential Changes That Will Make You a Successful Leader Today

Mark Sanborn

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780718093174
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Today's leaders often lack clarity and therefore the ability to execute, leaving their organizations mired in the status quo. Renowned leadership expert Mark Sanborn demystifies the essential elements of great leadership and provides a formula for leaders to achieve breakthrough success.

Culture, inspiration, and emotion--these are the three new imperatives of the intentional leader. They're the focus of consistent action that a leader must take daily to lead powerfully in the world that is, not the world that was. While every company will approach these three imperatives differently, they're the backbone of a successful company, and they're the essential elements of intentional leadership.

The Intention Imperative explains how five very different businesses use clarity of purpose and consistent action to achieve extraordinary success in their given fields. Using their practices as examples, Sanborn shows how they've harnessed the three imperatives and how it's possible to improve your own business by adopting their practices. The larger points of intentional leadership, intentional leaders, and their place in the current world are explained, giving readers the opportunity to spot the parallels in real-world examples. In addition, readers will

• Discover why motivation isn't enough today, and why employees need inspiration to deliver great results
• Build a culture that powers the right actions and creates the right results
• Make a shift in thinking, to design and deliver positive emotions for customers
• Learn how other organizationshave applied intentional leadership principles and achieved breakthrough results

CHAPTER 1

A QUESTION I COULDN’T ANSWER

What’s the one thing all successful leaders have in common?

For thirty years, I have been asked this question and for thirty years I didn’t have a satisfactory answer. I could have made something up, but it wouldn’t have been honest or valid. Leadership, after all, is a special combination of unique qualities, the balance of which is as varied as the leaders themselves.

In leadership development, generalities come to mind: leaders are inspirational, focused, innovative, brilliant, and sometimes a little crazy. But do any of these characteristics rise above the others?

Was Henry Ford more innovative than focused?

Was Steve Jobs more brilliant than inspirational?

Ask a hundred people and you’ll get a hundred answers. The reality of this leads to two possible conclusions: (1) the question itself is rather useless, because no one thing defines a great leader, or (2) a singular identification of the one thing great leaders have in common is elusive and unknown.

The question also assumes that leadership is unchanging, that what made Ford a great leader isn’t so much different from what made Jobs one as well. As we’ll see, I do believe there is truth to the universality of leadership, but I remain skeptical that a resurrected Ford, without a penny to his name, could repeat his stupendous success in the twenty-first century—or that a time-traveling Jobs would be smoking cigars with the robber barons of the nineteenth century. Not to take anything away from either leader, but things have changed and continue to change.

For these reasons, I have been honest when asked this question: I don’t know that “one thing” all great leaders share. I know leaders who did nearly everything right but who were remarkably mediocre in the results they achieved. I also know leaders who did a lot wrong but were able to achieve amazing results. Then, to confound things even further, I have known leaders who have achieved both amazing success and terrific failure. Same leaders, wildly different results.

Then I had an epiphany: no one ends up at the top of Mount Everest accidentally.

The defining characteristic that all successful leaders have in common is intentionality. In other words, a climber takes consistent action to get to the top of the world. Likewise, great leaders act consistently to achieve their goals. Mediocre leaders might have a goal but act inconsistently to get there. Then there are the bad leaders, those with no goal and no consistent action.

The difference between the three is dramatic.

For a while I was happy with this breakthrough. My other theories and notions on leadership started to spin around this central core, like planets around the sun. But something still seemed to be missing. Is being intentional all it takes?

Turns out, no. There’s more to leadership than intentionality.

At a gathering of small- to medium-size companies in Phoenix in 2016, a group of four of my closest friends and I led a session on helping these owners and leaders grow their businesses. Formally, this group was known as the Five Friends, all of us bestselling authors, speakers, business consultants, and, yes, great friends as well. It became clear that despite the diversity of businesses in the room, most faced a common challenge, and it wasn’t intentionality. This was a group that was intentional. These were high achievers. But they still needed help—as many leaders do—in one area. What was that one area?

I’ll get to that area in a minute, because it is essential to what I call intentional leadership. Intentionality, it turns out, is worthless without it. And I’ve come to believe that intentionality is inextricably intertwined with it. And, after thirty years of thought and study, I can now answer the question of what all great leadership has in common.

THE PARAMETERS OF GREAT LEADERSHIP

But before answering the question, we first need to set some boundaries. The type of leadership I’m talking about is organizational in general but business-oriented in particular. I do believe that the answer applies to any type of leadership, from political to military to industry, but to entertain these other areas would be to write a book without much focus. (And, as we’ll see in a moment, focus is no small thing when it comes to great leadership.) Effective leaders in every arena, in ages past and present, have something to tell us, and I will “cheat” and use some of their insights and ideas to highlight and support the assertions and insights that follow in this book. Nevertheless, the practical application of my lessons is intended for those who lead organizations in the world of business.

Second, let’s avoid the anomalies. One can always think of some lucky flukes or one-hit wonders who caught the proverbial lightning in a bottle. Good for them. I don’t wish to take away from their accomplishments, but I want to focus on those leaders who have exhibited sustainable and replicable success. I’m not going to let the one-offs derail leadership lessons in this book.

Third, profitability isn’t the sole consideration of a great leader. It is a primary one, to be sure, because without profit a business wouldn’t exist. But if money was all that mattered, then we would be ignoring other essential components of great leadership. Uber founder and CEO Travis Kalanick built an extremely profitable company that will go down as one of the most disruptive in history. He was also fired for having nurtured a destructive workplace culture. Uber (and Kalanick) should be commended for many things—leadership isn’t one of them.

Next, let’s discuss failure. Failure doesn’t necessarily mean bad leadership. In fact, navigating a company through failure is one of the hallmarks of a great leader. And few leaders are uniformly successful through their careers. They experience setbacks and failures like the rest of us. The net effect, however, is one of success.

But we must consider the source and magnitude of the failure when judging a leader. The definitions I provide in this book look at leadership from several angles, but they add up to a complete whole. To have built an outstanding culture in a business whose product failed to sell is like defaulting on a beautiful home you purchased.

Finally, as much as possible, I’m going to focus on the present day. As we’ll see, an essential component of great leadership involves working in the world as it is. Leadership doesn’t exist in a vacuum. This is truer than ever, as the ever-changing state of technology and the pressure this puts on the modern business are more profound than at any time in history. This doesn’t mean that the great leaders of the past have nothing to tell us, but it does mean that leadership, as I define it, is inseparable from the world in which the leader lives and works.

In practice, what this means is that I’ll avoid regurgitating stories about Henry Ford or Steve Jobs.

CLIMBING MOUNT EVEREST

Now back to Everest and the insight that fired my imagination in Phoenix.

To reach the summit of the tallest mountain in the world is one of humanity’s great achievements. Even if the occasional amateur climber does make the top, that climber doesn’t do so without a great deal of determination, extensive planning and preparation, and sustained effort. There’s no other way to get there. To summit Everest requires a mental focus and physical endurance that is simply beyond the scope of most people. You can’t do it on a whim. In fact, you can die if you aren’t 100 percent committed to the goal (and even the 100 percent committed sometimes die anyway).

To repeat: no one reaches the top of Mount Everest accidentally.

In Phoenix, I contemplated the common challenges of our clients and listened to them to determine what else, aside from intentionality, is a necessary component of great leadership. Many of the people in the room that day were torn, not sure exactly what it was they really wanted to do. Some were chasing more than one rabbit and catching none. Others were trying lots of different things, not just in the spirit of innovation but because they weren’t sure what they really wanted to do, what they should do, or what they could do. And in that discussion lay the answer.

The first thing one would need to climb Mount Everest is clarity.

Put another way: What do you want to do? Answer: I want to climb Mount Everest. Simple. Direct. Precise. It’s a goal that doesn’t need qualifications or further explanation. It’s a goal that has only two possible outcomes: either you stand on the top of the world or you don’t. Yes, there are details—hundreds, if not thousands, of little devils and considerations that will determine your success in this endeavor. But, as a goal, it doesn’t get any clearer than this: I am going to climb Mount Everest.

No one who has done anything great did it by chance. Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet by chance, Michelangelo didn’t end up with the Sistine Chapel, and Neil Armstrong didn’t suddenly find himself on the moon. Each one achieved greatness starting from a single point: clarity of vision, of goal, of purpose. They knew exactly where they wanted to go. People do win the lottery, but no one creates greatness just by buying a random ticket.

And if greatness doesn’t happen by chance, neither does great business leadership. When I applied this idea of clarity to the thousands of clients with whom I’ve worked over the years in nearly every imaginable market space, I saw the difference between the mediocre and the great: clarity. The great ones knew where they wanted to go; the mediocre ones kinda had an idea. Many had no idea at all. With clarity, everything works. Without it, nothing works.

What does clarity look like when it comes to a business leader? I asked that very question of Jesse Cole, whom you’ll get to know much better later on. Here’s what he said: “The name of our company is Fans First Entertainment. Our mission is ‘Fans First. Entertain Always.’ We believe we can provide the best fan experience in the world. That’s what we want to be known for and it’s what we stand for.”¹

Simple. Direct. Precise. Above all, clear.

Clarity is the starting point. The great leaders of business began with a clear understanding of where they wanted to go, what they wanted to build, whom they wanted to serve. They could explain what success looks like, what their version of standing atop the world would be.

Can you?

CLARITY ABOUT WHAT?

Let’s be honest. Isn’t clarity just a fancy way of saying what your company does? If you’re in the business of making furniture, then what else do you need to be clear about? You want to sell as much furniture as you can. There, that’s clarity!

Except it’s not. You might as well say that you just want to make as much money as you can, all else be damned. To define your goal in terms of sales isn’t ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Chapter 1: A Question I Couldn’t Answer
• Chapter 2: Intentional Leadership, Defined
• Chapter 3: A Tale of Two Leaders
• Chapter 4: The World as It Is
• Chapter 5: High Point University
• Chapter 6: The Culture Imperative
• Chapter 7: Acuity Insurance
• Chapter 8: The Inspiration Imperative
• Chapter 9: Savannah Bananas
• Chapter 10: The Emotion Imperative
• Chapter 11: Texas Roadhouse
• Chapter 12: Envisioning Green
• Conclusion: Don’t Fall Down the Stairs
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author