“True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.” — Rick Warren, as quoted in The Purpose Driven Life
In the concept of adaptive leadership that I discuss in The Power of Being All In: Transformative Times Demand Transformational Leadership there is a powerful underlying theme – humility. The best leaders demonstrate this trait in everything they do. To them, it’s not about “I and Me.” It’s about “We and Us.” 
So, begin by making it about “We and Us”… By setting your Azimuth (Mission, Intent, Values, Cultural Behaviors) as a team, the beauty of adaptive leadership emerges in establishing intent. While you’ve already derived your Mission as a collective effort, now you can build your Intent for the organization.
There are three components of Intent:
- Our End State: What does success look like in 3-5 years?
- The Key Tasks: What are our “Must Do’s” to achieve this end state?
- Our Purpose: What’s our Why?
How does this collective effort reflect humility in a leader? It shows the leader is focused on us – the team develops the intent, not just the senior leader. This process generates tremendous buy-in on the part of each person who participates in the work of developing the Intent. The future belongs to everyone. Indeed, We’re All In. (Shameless promotion of my previous 2017 book, but I couldn’t resist the temptation!)
I don’t know how many times I’ve seen leaders fail because they didn’t understand the importance of this key aspect of the culture of commitment. Building the Intent as a team brings people together to make the Mission come to life. This is how we do what we say we will do. It takes commitment on the part of each leader to do this. And persistence.
We demonstrate persistence by then conducting quarterly reviews of our Intent to make sure we’re on track. Each ‘Key Task’ can have a ‘Champion’ and ‘Co-Champion’ to steward this organizational “roadmap,” which emerges from the process of building the Intent. Humble leaders know this is the embodiment of “We and Us.” It works.
Enjoy the journey!
This blog post is partially based on the book, “The Power of Being All In.” You can download the first chapter for free at this link. Or, if you’d like to purchase the entire book (available in paperback, eBook, and audiobook), it is available on Amazon.
