Working with Intention
I’m Andy Temte and welcome to the Saturday Morning Muse! Start to your weekend with me by exploring topics that span leadership, business management, education, and other musings designed to support your journey of personal and professional continuous improvement. Today is August 17, 2024.
Does it feel like you’re just swinging in the breeze, rudderless and directionless in your work? A mindset hack I like to employ is to tell myself: Today I will practice being INTENTIONAL to improve engagement with my work.
It's easy to fall into the trap of allowing the subconscious to take over and guide us. It's much more difficult to engage the frontal lobe and be deliberate with our words and deeds. Entropy—the natural tendency for things to fall apart—is always lurking in the wings and is all too happy to take over when we take our eye off the ball. So today, I’m musing about building the skill of living with intention. While I’m talking primarily about your work environment today, practicing the skill of being intentional also adds value in your personal life.
Improving Intention, Step 1: Self-Reflection
I believe that both personal and workplace intention must be practiced. To get started, carve out time for self-reflection. I like to engage in self-reflection on my tractor, or while I’m out on our property trimming or gardening. I encourage you to find your happy place and use that space to self-reflect. Turn off the music and all the other convenient distractions that consume your mind. Learn to just ‘be.’ For many, it’s difficult to be still and allow your thoughts to wash over you.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
Are my individual and team goals well-defined? Do they align with my purpose? Does my purpose align with the company's north star? Do I even know what my purpose is?
Am I filling the work day with "busy work" that is not moving me and my team closer to our goals?
What's the status of my "joy/drudgery" ledger? Is it out of balance?
Are things "happening to me" or am I "making things happen?"
On average, am I a "tourist" or a meaningful contributor in the endless stream of meetings I'm invited to?
Am I adrift or anchored - floating or grounded?
A wonderful tool to use during this (or any other) self-exploration exercise is the "five whys" to help uncover root cause. To use the five whys, pick a question from above and ask your first why. Your response is unlikely to arrive at root cause, so ask "why" a second time. Continue asking whys in an attempt to shed the surface-level or superficial rationale we use to justify our actions and delve deeper into the true meaning behind motivations and purpose. Oh, and if you’re unsure of your personal purpose, here’s the link to my free guidebook that can help create personal clarity and define your personal purpose.
A word of caution: self-reflection and the use of the five whys requires an open mind and a strong ego in order to challenge potential unconscious bias and consider answers that may not be popular or fit neatly into existing narratives. Hence, it's seldom the case that meaningful results come solely from self-reflection exercises. To make more progress, we will need the help of our coaches and mentors.
Improving Intention, Step 2: Talk to a Coach
Many of us will need the help of a coach or mentor to turn self-reflection into action. To start, ask your supervisor for a meaningful block of time to discuss the results of your self-reflection. An enlightened, empathetic supervisor will have a strong coaching skillset that will help get you back on track. This brand of supervisor will have excellent active listening skills and will jump at the chance to engage in a development conversation driven by you versus more traditional development conversations that are driven by them.
The reason behind starting with your supervisor is that they should have a clear understanding of business priorities and are in the best position to help "connect the dots" between your role/work and that of the team and ultimately the company's north star. Narrowing focus is key here—it's easy to become overwhelmed by the list of things we should be more intentional or deliberate about and end up paralyzed and do nothing.
If you don't feel like your supervisor would be receptive to this conversation do two things:
Engage in the "five whys" exercise to uncover the root cause of behind your reticence to have a deeper development conversation with your supervisor. One of your boss's primary jobs is to help coach and develop you into that next best version of yourself. Maybe you're held back by the post-traumatic stress of a "bad boss" in your past and you're projecting that experience on your current supervisor. However scary it may seem to have a deep development conversation with your supervisor, I recommend giving it a chance - you might be pleasantly surprised!
Ask a non-work coach or mentor to help you make sense of your self-reflection. As an alternative, your company's HR department may have access to third-party coaching resources.
Conclusion
According to Gallup, employee engagement has been on a "rollercoaster" ride since early 2020, when the percent of employees ‘engaged’ in their work peaked at 36%. Since that time, we’ve lived through a deadly pandemic, social/economic upheaval, and a period of reflection on the meaning of work and where work fits into our lives. As of this recording, engagement has ticked up a bit from its low point of 30% in February of this year. I believe strongly that if (a) corporate leaders do a better job of defining and communicating organizational purpose, vision, and goals, while (b) each of us simultaneously identifies and connects with our purpose and lives with intention, employee engagement will increase. We all win if we operate with more intention.
