#davesdailychallenge (162): Commander’s Intent. This is a huge topic and I’ll be writing more on this in the future but for now I want to introduce something that the military calls “Commander’s Intent”. This isn’t a hard topic at all. You might hear words in your life like “endstate”. It’s essentially the same thing. The basic concept involves a leader giving members of their team an endstate of an effort. That effort could be a sales push into a new territory, launching a new high-end technology product, or designing a new cancer treatment. The leader sets some basic guidelines like where we want to go and why this is so important but it’s up to the team’s leaders and overall membership to figure out the “how”. As you can imagine this is very closely related to an increase in decentralized leadership and I have found this approach also increases the ownership that team members feel toward the overall organizational mission. Naturally this isn’t an excuse for a leader to give loose guidance and then walk away. If you’re the leader you’re still accountable for the end result and the actions of your people but I encourage you to push yourself to give up direct control when possible. This act will build trust, short and long term cooperation, and loyalty. One other advantage is that it helps to solve one of the biggest recurring points of contention from senior leaders; a lack of time to focus on strategic issues vs. just tactical. Good luck my friends.