I have so many things to share with you but so many discussions I have been having keep leading me back to this Mental Model Moment I thought I would share. And it’s easy, because it’s the author and this great illustrator do so much of the work for me. On the other side I can share my take aways and how I have implemented this with teams before.

Start with Clarity

Intent based leadership is all about setting the distant island we are trying to reach via the ship, and then collaborating as a team for the best way to get there. Teams are formed with different skill sets and the ability to have hard conversations around both priorities and implementation.

I had one team that was building a Form Builder. This was a priority for the company because of some compliance issues with our existing solution (PCI security) and a potential untapped market. So for that team we had two clear goals:

1. Migrate existing users off the existing solution
2. Prepare a product for go to market

Every meeting we had, every planning, every time we discussed a feature, we asked if it met those two goals. To the point that my otherwise quiet UI/UX developer (the Sheriff) would interrupt me outlining a feature to say, “This doesn’t seem in line with our goals, why are we doing it?”

In other words, the team started to understand “Is it the right thing to do”.

Build Structures around Competence

Over time the “is it safe” questions become engrained in the conversation. Each time I work with a team on whether we would release something I would ask the same questions. To the point were one of my developers started to impersonate me. “Will it break production? Have we informed the users? Do we have documentation?” Questions like that. This, as well, becomes a pattern of how the team acts.

At my last gig, we had a system that was forklifted from a mainframe with no test environment. As a result, questions of release, between my delivery lead and myself, were always about how much certainty can we have that none of us will be working the weekend. Followed directly by questions of where are the opportunities to create unit tests, or small test environments around sections of the application even if end-to-end tests can’t be done.

Moral and Ethical Responsibility

As a leader, there will always be some tasks you must reserve for yourself because it is irresponsible to allow that to be a team decision. The key here is to be explicit (using those 7 levels of delegation perhaps) on when that is happening.

When I was a department head I reserved two things:
1) Starting the firing process with HR
2) Telling a customer “no”

Neither of those things where my team should have carried that burden. I explicitly told them this. My tech leads would reserve some very specific breaking technical changes. For example, only the tech lead of my dev/ops team could take our CI/CD system completely offline.