Leadership Skills in the Workplace

Maintaining Gains Made

LEADERSHIP BRIEFS

18 Intent Does Not Equal Impact

Objective

To understand how people may misunderstand your intentions and how you can minimize such situations.

Lesson

Have you ever been in a situation where you interacted with someone, thought you had conveyed yourself perfectly clearly to that person, then been astonished to find out later that they had clearly not understood what you meant?

If this has happened to you, you are not alone. This kind of misunderstanding in a communication is one of the most fundamental causes of relationship problems in the workplace and at home.

“But I was so clear about what I expected. How could he/she possibly have thought THAT is what I meant?” Let’s examine how this may have happened and what we might be able to do about it so it’s less of a problem in the future.

Whenever you interact with somebody, you perfectly well know and understand your meaning. Whatever you say and do is coming from your own knowledge of yourself and how you understand the current situation. Therefore, you have a certain “intention” about what you say.

You may mean for your words or actions to “fix” the situation, challenge the other person, comfort the other person, maintain peace and harmony, or any number of other intentions. Intentions represent your hopes and expectations from the interaction.

To complicate matters even further, often we are in a stressful situation or a “gotta act quick” situation, where we may be going through our decisions, words, and actions so quickly that we may have little conscious awareness of our “intentions.”

Even under stress, things would usually be just fine if the others around us knew our intentions. They don’t. But without making some judgments or assumptions about our intentions, they are unable to react or respond. SO…

People we interact with always make assumptions about our intentions. All of us make judgments about others all the time; otherwise we couldn’t interact or respond to them at all.

Many times they we wrong about those intentions. The trouble comes when we have not further checked out our assumptions or clarified the intentions of the other person. Let’s look at a couple of examples.

An employee comes to you with an urgent work issue; there is a current “crisis.” Because you are involved in a pressing deadline of your own, rather than checking out the situation yourself, you instruct your employee on what to do immediately and what to begin to do for a more permanent solution, promising to check out the situation as soon as you finish one more thing.

By the time you break away to check things out further, you find that he has misunderstood your intentions, perhaps working on the long-term solution without applying the temporary solution to “stop the bleeding.” You look at your employee, clearly displeased. “But I thought you said…” You thought your intentions/ your instructions were perfectly clear. His intentions were probably to do what you said. But the “impact,” the results, were that he acted on his own interpretation of your intentions. Your intention did not equal the impact.

Remember that the results you get will always be based on the “impact” of your words and the resulting actions may not align with what you intended. That's why it's important to pay attention to the body language cues you may unintentionally be conveying, and check out the other person'a understanding of what you have said.

Questions for Discussion

1. Have you experienced an example of this?
   
   
2. What could you have done differently to reduce or avoid this miscommunication?