The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Here's How to Give and Receive Leader's Intent | PPP #81

Episode Date: August 1, 2021

From Commander's Intent in the U.S. Military to Leader's Intent applied by the National Wildfire Coordinating Group and Lean teams, this first of the 'Foundational Five' is the key to setting teams in the right direction to accomplish the mission.

Hey, everyone, welcome to people process progress episode 81, foundation one, leaders intent. So if you've listened to the show before, you understand that I mentioned these foundational five things, which are an amalgam of experiences that I've learned where, when you're really busy, it's a critical response, you may not have all your people, what are some things that I can remember to help get this team going to help this group move through a difficult piece, you can't

remember, you don't have all the wall charts or the reference books, or maybe not even the experience yet, is you boil it down to foundational five things. And that is leaders intent, setting smart objectives, setting up some sort of organizational structure, getting your resources together, and establishing and maintaining communications somehow. And this varies whether you're in the field, the military, public safety, incident management, versus project management, using Messenger, all that kind of stuff. So the first of these, of course, is leader's intent. And what I'm going to do is provide three examples in this episode,

from the origins of it in the military to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group, where I started to learn about it from my leaders, and then to some project management focus. And I'm going to cross map all of these to kind of project management. Before we jump into this first, I want to say please share and like this show follow on Apple podcasts and other platforms. Leave a rating, please hopefully a positive one that really helps the show get exposure. Check out people process progress.com where I have some templates, references, some recommendations on things that I use both fitness and other things. And then of

course, I post the episodes and a little bit of write up about them in a way you can play from there or your favorite platform. So thank you again. But first, please silence your cell phones, hold all sidebar conversations to a minimum, and we will get started with people process progress in 321. Thanks again, everybody for sticking with the show coming back for this episode 81 foundation one leaders intent. So again, this is the first of the foundational five that I truly believe any team any person can implement. When you just need to get order among chaos, you need to get a group working towards something. And a quick rundown again of those five is leaders intent, smart objectives, set an org structure, get some resources and start

communicating and set up good communications and regular communication. So that's the quick of this foundational five, I'm going to break each of these down over the next few episodes. So this one, again, starts with leaders intent. That's where it all starts with what do the folks in charge that have the money or the position or both? What do they want us to do? And how do they want us to achieve it? And I'll get into the different facets of that. And again, the two areas that we're going to look at here that I hope is helpful for

everybody is one the military, right? The exception is or the difference, I guess I should say is instead of leaders intent, it's called commanders intent, right? Because folks are in command, similar with the incident management system, but they reference more leader's intent than commander's intent, but there could be both, right? There's an incident commander. And then lean project management, which we'll get into kind of how that talks about it with different references. What does that mean? What is their reference to leader's intent? Or what are some pitfalls we could look at? And then for me, what's the real breakdown of what that means in these different examples and how we can apply this as leaders?

So the first one I want to get into, I mentioned, is an example. It's an article from Major Richard Dempsey, who is a U.S. Army, and Major Jonathan M. Chavos, U.S. Army. It's called Commander's Intent and Concept of Operations. It's from armyupress.armymontmill. And I will put that on the website, of course course and there's a lot more to the URL there but it's there and the article is called Commander's Intent and Concept of Operations and they reference another document

that is the Army Doctrine Reference Publication 5 or ADRP 5 that talks a lot about Commander's Intent too but what I'm going to do is read you the definition that they talk about from that and so they say as described in ADRP 5.0, the commander's intent, quote, succinctly describes what constitutes success for the operation.

It includes the operation's purpose, key tasks, and the conditions that define the NSAID. It links the mission, concept of operations, and tasks to subordinate units. A clear commander's intent facilitates a shared understanding and focuses on the overall conditions that represent mission accomplishment. Commander's intent, when used properly, should bridge the gap between the mission and the concept of operations. That last part was not part of the quote from the reference, but from the authors. So as you can see, it should lay out pretty well, kind of like a project management plan that's efficient or an incident action plan in the all hazards world or wildfire world for incident management.

It should lay out quite a few things. But as you can see, they link primarily to what is the purpose of this whole operation, which we know what is the why, right? Simon Sinek or ProSci change management, so many different things that reference a why. So the purpose, what's the purpose of this whole operation, which we know what is the why, right? Simon Sinek or ProSci change management, so many different things that reference a why. So the purpose, what's the purpose of this mission? Military wise, we're going to take back this city, let's say, what are the key tasks? First, we have to take this block to hold control and then move through there. And I'm not, you know, some military technician, this is super generic statements. But if you think

about that's how this kind of breaks down, and what are the conditions that define the end state the end state is when we have pushed through to take this much space and establish this much defensive right because once you have it then you got to hold it then you have to be you know set up some perimeters and those kind of things and not just still be in the fight and go okay we're done because you're not done yet so it links all those things together and within that within those different parts of the intent, are the concept of operations that talks to the tasks you need to do for every subordinate unit, right? So from the top box in the org chart, down to all the however far it goes boxes, it connects all those different things, right? So these teams need to work with this group that needs to work with this section that needs to work with the overall operation in a incident management point. And that was from the bottom up of an org chart, similar thing. So for let's say for a project, right, why are we doing this project where we need to put a new process in place for people to clock in more efficiently or more effectively, both through new technology, and through some behavior changes, right? What are the key tasks? Well, we need to do some workflow studies on where we're losing productivity, some frustration that our users are having, how are our leaders able to

or not able to track time appropriately, kind of gathering those things. How are we going to do that then? What are key tasks to get this done? Well, we're going to source out the new hardware, we're going to use some process improvement professionals to help us map these optimal workflows. And what are the conditions that define the end state? Well, the end state is going to be that we've got all the equipment in place, we've got everybody trained by this certain date, we are sure that our or have a good idea, a good feeling about our change management processes that we have buy in from people, we've educated and we've given them the opportunities to get things done. And, you know, the ultimate end state could be for a project that a year from now,

we'll see x percentage of reduction in clock in errors, and we'll see x, you know, percentage increase, decrease, wherever you're looking to save money, or make sure it's more accurate, something like that, right. So you could see how commanders intent military wise, if you're looking at an objective of capture, capturing an an area or even liberating an area, depending on what era or what war you're talking about, connects folks to certain either physical places taking over or even psychological objectives. But you can see how all these parts connect just like they do on a project and just like they do on an incident management deployment.

So commander's intent is really, to me, the origin of what we call leader's intent now in the private sector, and what we call that that in the incident management team world. But you know, again, we're looking at what is the operations purpose, the key tasks and the conditions that define the end state in a military in a military commander's intent is what leads into this foundation one that I call leader's intent, that was one of the key things that was taught to me early on. So with commander's intent with the military, and again, the military and military doctrine, a lot of its concepts set the tone for public safety practices, like I've talked about in previous episodes, certainly from commanders intent bridging to leaders intent,

and the direct bridge really in the 70s, that a lot of the folks out west fighting wildfires, and then eventually, you know, standing up the national wildfire coordinating group um was taking that commander's intent and looking at leaders intent right because we do have incident commanders but leadership is a huge part i mean leadership's big everywhere right there's you know tons of books and podcasts and stuff out there about it but um in this in this article called lead time or as part of this publication from the National Wildfire Accordion Group, and again, I'll link this on the website. I want to write the article up for it. It's from November of 2020. But the category is leadership.

So I'm going to read from some of this and talk through it. But the focus of this is leaders intent in the wildfire incident management world, which for those of us that grew up in the all hazards, it means world meaning day to day on the streets, police, fire, EMS, public works, public safety, public health, those kind of folks, my mentors, my leaders from particularly the Central Virginia All-Hazard Incident Management Team had exposure to these folks out west, got trained up by them, are part of those teams now still doing just high level great stuff and got us to a level where again we were a regional type 3 team doing type 1 national level events including huge political events and huge sporting events that a lot of other places would

have called in bigger teams for but because we were trained up so well from our folks had good leaders intent right from our leadership in there it was really helpful so I'm going to go through and talk about the write up from NWCG now. So let's look at this. So from this page, in fast moving endemic situations, top level decision makers cannot always incorporate new information into a formal planning process and redirect people to action within a reasonable timeframe. Right. And again, this is the thought of there's a wildfire going on the wind shifts, the heat changes, they can't get resources whatever especially in the past you know five years for sure there's been huge fires particularly out

west so imagine the situation changes you gave your leaders at ten hours ago well you're not gonna stop everybody and pull them together and get a megaphone or on the radio you know unless you're doing a you know an emergency thing to get people out of the way or something like that but they also need to know what they can or can't do or should or shouldn't do. It continues to say, we provide leaders intent so people closest to the scene of action can adapt plans and exercise initiative to accomplish the objective when unanticipated opportunities arise and when the original plan no longer suffices.

Right now we're getting into that kind of decentralization, and of course, Jocko podcast fans will, you know, understand decentralized command. So you want to set the intent. And we'll get into three big elements that NWCG likes to use for that. But similar to the military, right? What's the purpose of this? What are the tasks we have to do? What is the outcome we were trying to achieve, so that you're always working towards it? and you don't have to stop and ask me, right? And hopefully ahead of time, we've picked leaders or we've put people in places that are confident enough and skillful enough where they're not going to get bound up by, you know, a situation changing. And here's a more direct kind of thing. So leaders intent is a crucial element of effective operations because it reduces internal friction and empowers, sorry, empower subordinates, even when chaotic conditions prevent the chain of command from communicating effectively, right? So when you can't talk all the way up and down the chain of command, there's too much going on, maybe there's too much chatter, you don't have

comms, whatever it is, it just really helps. And part of that too, if you think about that as a bridge to that project management, that reduction of internal friction, if we all know that folks from the C suite of our given organizations, expect these kind of things, this to be done, here's why we're doing it, here's, you know, generally what we're supposed to do. And here's the outcome. If we all understand why we're doing it, and we all understand the outcome, we it's beholden to us to figure out the tasks to bridge those things, right of the here why, and here's what I expect for success. And in between all of us, project managers, program managers,

team leads, technical folks, whatever, we all know what the expectation is. So if we all have to stay a little bit later, if we have to show up a little bit earlier, if we have to change maybe our scope, because we know, wait, what we thought about a year ago is change based on these conditions. Now let's still try and meet that end state. Then that's what we have to work toward. So and speaking of end state, kind of a

preview there. So these are the three big things that I know I was taught that our commanders always mentioned to us that they learned as well, is the leader's intent is clear, concise statement about what people must do to succeed in their assignments. It delineates three essential components. So here's where we get into kind of some specifics that are helpful, whether you're doing incident management, public safety, you're in the military, you're in the private sector. These are three great statements, right? So task, purpose, end state. So the first one, task, the objective or goal of the assignment, right? So what's the tasking that let's say I'm a unit leader, let's say I'm the resource unit leader, right in the planning section. And so you

all can Google that if you're not familiar with it. So that means I'm I'm responsible for tracking accounting for everyone on an incident on an event, whatever. So my objective is to have 100% accountability from start to finish of this given event or incident. That is a resource unit leader is always to me a standing objective. Your responsibility is enormous. It's to know where people are, what's going on so that when the operations section, when safety is looking at, oh my gosh, it's super dangerous over here, the fire shifted or in the all hazards world, like collapses we've seen, hey, if it's a big stadium, which is a big exercise we do, but in real world, hey, this section is getting unstable. How many

people do we have in that area? We need to be able to tell them or reassure them. We've got 25 people. We're tracking them. They're all right there and know that, right? That is a huge goal of that. What's the purpose, right? So the purpose, using my resource unit example, is why this assignment needs to be done is what purpose goes with here on this publication. In reality, the purpose is to make sure that we know our people are safe, that we can account for them, get them fed, get them home, all the practical things that we do for our people, right? Just like the first word of this podcast, people process progress. Anything we do, we're doing for our people, right? Or other people, if we're doing

rescue operations or something like that. So that's a really important thing to think about. So we've done task, what's the objective or the goal for this assignment for me as a resource unit leader, 100% accountability throughout the assignment. What's the purpose to keep our people safe to get them fed to the best we can for them? What's the end state, the end state is that I get everyone in, we track them, and I get everybody out safely until they are home, right? And that's it. The definition here on the on this page is, end stated says,

how the situation should look when the assignment is successfully completed. So the situation on the incident management having to do with this is that everyone's come in, we've tracked, we got all their stuff back, if they, you know, we issued them things. And then from a personnel perspective, they're home, right? We're not done until they're home.

All hazards, a little bit different, right? Typically when people check out, let's say you have a sporting event or something else, they're kind of off your hands a bit, but we're still making sure everybody got home safe. The last part of this says within the framework of the defined end state, leaders can develop plans that include incident objectives, right? We like objectives, priorities, strategies, trigger points, and contingency plans. And we've certainly talked about contingency plans. It's never a sunny day all the time. So we've got to be ready for that.

What are trigger points? When we, you know, if the flood gets to this part, we need to evacuate this, you know, those kinds of things. What's the overall strategy for doing these and what takes priority? So let's kind of come back through this real quick because I really like task purpose end state for a project, right? Let's say a software project. What's the objective or goal of the assignment of this, right? The objective or goal is to put a better product or more efficient product in place or one that saves time or money or probably a combination of those. And you could break those into different smart, right? Spec, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-based objectives. But that's why we're doing it, right?

We need to have this new product that's going to replace this other one that's 10 years old. It doesn't work with these certain other things. It's end of life, whatever that is. So the task is that we're going to replace the current outdated system with the new, more efficient system, right, by whatever end date to, you know, tax some time on it or quarter, whatever. The purpose is that we want to create efficiencies for the team or for the organization, we want to reduce errors and maintenance costs. And you know, so you can have a few different purposes there. And then the end state is, we successfully maybe archived all the old information, we got everybody trained up on the new system.

We got, you know, some good test cases through there. We maybe did some iterations where we built it and tested it and fixed things and went back and forth. But the end state is we have a stable, fully functioning system that users understand how to use that has replaced the old system. And, you know, we are not seeing big spikes other than right after go live, which is expected in calls and volumes, right? So you can see that task purpose end state is still a great, you know, way to summarize what do we want to do on this project or this deployment for incident management, or, you know, tying back to kind of the commander's intent for the military time, but a really straightforward thing. And I'm really appreciative of my

leadership coming up in the incident management teams that helped me learn this and really for the military time, but a really straightforward thing. And I'm really appreciative of my leadership coming up in the innocent management teams that helped me learn this and really provided this really well for us, whether we were doing a planned event or we got a call that said, hey, there's a huge four block fire, they need help. And then we went to help them.

Going from that military commander's intent, the NWCG and then then some all hazards leaders intent, task purpose and state stuff. Now we're transition really heavier into project management specific use of it. And I found a great resource that hadn't heard of this company, don't work with them or anything like that. But it's Valaction. I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, where they do continuous improvement, I guess, for improvement-oriented companies. And they had leaders intent, I found in there, in a lean terms directory. So lean, as you know, or may not know, is it is a way to improve efficiencies.

You've heard of like lean Six Sigma, lean agile, kind of a mix of all these things. But it's basically making yourself more efficient. It's a concept that we've talked about before, particularly in manufacturing, but also process improvement, continuous improvement, and just trimming away the inefficiencies in an organization. So with this lean and this company, Companyville Action, they have a lean terms directory. And again, I'll link to it, which was great. That talks about commander's intent. So they link back also back to a mission briefing.

The commander describes it, right? So really cool there. And then they talk about, you know, in a combat operation, if you lose somebody, there's a leadership vacuum. And then they kind of get into their own, which is good, with the commander's intent too, and the leader's intent that they kind of transition to, right? Because you find yourself without your leader, and then you could be stuck there.

So as they say in the article, workplaces don't really have commanders, even though there are some managers that probably act like commanders, they do have leaders, right? So that's where we again, kind of go from that commander statement to leader. And if you're a manager or leader, if you're certainly a project or program manager or leader, the C-suite folks are leader, but also I've talked about every level of the organization of the team as a leader, but some folks have a little more explicit position, right? So they need to be able to provide this and let folks know what's going on. And a great way that they describe, especially this lean concept or the leader's intent applied there is really how often, you know, do decisions get deferred when a leader's not there? As opposed

to like your boss is out a week, you'll have to wait until next week, or you're trying to have a meeting with key players and go, well, they're not here, we can't make the decision. Well, if we all understand the leader's intent and we all have the authority, right? So if we have decentralized command a bit, if we're delegated authority or just the trust factors there, is that maybe we shouldn't have the bottleneck so much if it's a key person. And maybe that could speak to maybe how can we build some, you know, either efficiencies in our organization or competencies or whatever, so that if one or two key leaders aren't out, we can still move forward and still make those, right? And so for this company, they're really into this continuous improvement, looking at that. And per their definition page, what they speak to is, you know, the granddaddy of leaders intent, as they say, is policy development, or deployment rather. So

meaning, if you have a standing policy, and it's deployed throughout, and the quickest example that always comes to mind is, people on this position level can spend this much money before they need authorization for, you know, a higher expense, or people at this level can decide about these things before they have to escalate it, right, if it affects this many users or something like that. So really defining what are either your operational support models, your governance, your policies that are deployed, could help so that you're not waiting for that one person on the project or in the program or for the product, you know, whatever you're doing kind of project management worldwide, to do that. So think about how you can take this leaders intent concept and put it into

policies and procedures and get those out in the world, whether it's a standard operating procedure, but again, you want it quick and actionable, not like an 800 page document to be helpful. A good thing they had on their website, too, is a word of warning about leaders intent, right? It can be confusing. If maybe the leaders intent differs from perception. And the example they talk about is a boss says not to pass on bad quality, but then focuses on loss of production, right? So if you have high quality stuff, but it takes a little bit longer, but then your boss gets upset because you're not putting as much stuff out the door, then how do you, you know, how do you balance those kind of things out? And as they say here, does she extol the need to follow processes only to do an end run as soon as they're a little heat on the customer. So that's a balance to on leaders intent is can it be too rigid? And then maybe they circle back and kind of counter.

So and it's a tough thing, right? Because like I mentioned the example earlier, did we make decisions a year ago, and they're different now, because we're in the reality of, we tested five things in a lab. Now we have 500 of those things in the world with other people affecting the outcomes of it or the environment or whatever, you're going to change, it could be there. But the leader's intent with a policy, maybe when we look at crafting those or delivering those, you know, in a direct message, thinking about how can we make this stand on its own and be kind of evergreen. And certainly if, you know, the best of intentions are put out there and people take advantage of, you know, whatever the intent is or part of that, then we may have to circle back to it. And that's one of the ugly realities of a policy is right. There'll be some folks that'll try and work through the policy and take it to their advantage, not in the best way sometimes.

But, you know, thinking about positively, so leaders intent certainly exists in the project management space. When you're standing up a project, this should be something really early, right, particularly in those objectives that you set for the project with the sponsor with the stakeholders, so that it is widely known for everyone at every level and both from the kickoff meeting to, you know, some people go over guiding principles, like every team meeting or every steering committee meeting. And that's good. I think maybe a few reminders, but doing it every meeting is probably a lot, right? Especially if you're busy and you're getting into other work, but make sure everybody at every level knows it, right? If you

have a monthly team meeting, maybe a quick reminder or something like that. But you get the point. So with all these great examples of commander's intent and then to leader's intent that I know helped shape the folks that trained me, that made me tack it on to, you know, we used to have, I used to call it the foundational four. Before that, I was taught the big three. So like we do both in podcast land and in the world, we share and we adapt and we build on each other. And so this leader's intent, I think has to, it starts the movement towards success for any team, whether it's an emergency or a planned event or a project or whatever that we're doing. So I think the best application of the ones I've gone through is all of them,

right? I think it's a mix of all those. You have to mix some of the military aspect of being clear and concise and measured and things like that and treat things like a mission. What's our mission that we're focused on with the National Wildfire Coordinating Group's great summary of task, purpose, and state. Sometimes you've got to write that up a little bit more, some there. I think overall, and then, of course, lean, we're looking for efficiencies. What if they're gone the warning, the intent versus reality. So if you're if you're worried about productivity, but you also want high quality, what's the balance there? For me, again, it's a mix of these. And part of this is an intangible, there's no book, there's no podcast, that's going to

prescribe to any of you listening or anybody else that you share this with exactly how to do it. But I think these are all good guides. And then as you get into the whatever world that you're into, you'll be able to apply these a bit more. To me, I think some key things are, it can't be a political statement, right? And over the past almost two years, we've probably heard tons of those at various different topics. We'll just say that, right? Whether it had to do with COVID or race relations or who's going to get elected or not or who believed what or whatever else. But in the reality of the team that needs to do the work, we can't provide effective

leader intent, task purpose, end state. What's the overall end objective of this with some grandiose political statement. It's not helpful for our team and it's not effective. Going along that line, it can't just be an altruistic prose written that's super long and it may read well, but again, it doesn't help the team understand what's going to happen. Now, some of the way, if it's a policy or procedure kind of thing, like the, the, um, the last, um, uh, company mentioned in their lean dictionary, uh, you know, if it's in a policy and procedure, some of those can get worried and some of it is legalese if it's documented like that. But again, we want to make sure our team clearly understands

what needs to be done, why we're doing it, what the outcome should look like. Clear and concise to the point. And I think also including what are the positive expectations, as in from the leader's intent, the expectation is that we will all do these things. We are doing it because of this. We are going to meet these kind of objectives. The end state includes this, but also what does it not include? We're not going to do it the old way. We're not going to cut corners. We're not going to not communicate and on and on. There are there, I think it's just as effective to include what the team should not do and what the intent from the leader is that's over everybody as much as it's important to speak toward the positive of what the leader does want to do.

What I want to do with the show is to continue to provide helpful information, summarize things, share what I know, share what I've learned, bring people on, let them talk about themselves as the people, what processes have worked or not worked for them. And again, the end state for me, for this whole show, for all of us is to make progress personally, professionally, every little bit counts. So every little bit that you have, uh, time that you've spent listening, visited the site, contacted me. I really appreciate it. I hope you all are doing really well. Um, please reach out people process, progress.com or at gmail.com peopleprocessprogress at gmail.com we have Facebook page

Instagram as well thank you so much please stay safe out there wash your hands and Godspeed