Intentional Leadership

12 lenses for focusing strengths, managing weaknesses and achieving your purpose

The core message of this book is that although one may manage with purpose, lack of self-knowledge can block recognition of the limitations that accompany strengths. Intentional leaders, on the other hand, learn to focus not only on what they want to accomplish, but also on how they are going to lead others to get there.

Step one is to identify your ten leadership priorities - Kise offers a list of 40, including for example, Results, Personal Development, Expertise, Mentoring and Efficiency.

Step two is to align those priorities with action, ensuring that there is a good balance between using strengths to advantage while also minimising potential threats.

The 12 lenses for leadership

In order to take action effectively, leaders at all levels need tools that will help them look in the mirror and recognise not only the strengths on which they build their style, but those blind spots that, if not managed, have the potential to harm their careers and the work, morale and overall effectiveness of those whom they lead.

Kise's intentional leadership model is a framework developed from her extensive research on personality type and emotional intelligence that offers a meta-analysis of the essential tasks and attitudes of a successful leader.

Finding balance

The twelve lenses Kise identifies are about balancing opposing tendencies in such a way as to optimise achievement. Core leadership priorities will define the lenses you need to use most to achieve your purpose. So for instance leaders who choose Organisation as a leadership priority usually devote time and resources to planning. However, without the opposing tendency of flexibility a blind spot may be that the leader fails to adjust to changing circumstances.

The framework is about balancing the following twelve areas of focus:

1. Inner and outer focus
2. Breadth and depth
3. Leadership with listening
4. Reality with vision
5. The known with the new
6. Clarity with ambiguity
7. Logic and values
8. Outcomes with people
9. Individual trust with team trust
10. Planning with flexibility
11. Goal orientation with engagement
12. Limits with opportunities

"Vision without action is a daydream.
Action without vision is a nightmare"