Turn Intention Into Action

Many of us know what we value. Far fewer of us live like it. Here's why and what to do about it.

A few years ago, I was working with the leadership team of a large healthcare company. They were smart, experienced, and deeply committed to their mission. When I asked each of them (individually, before we met as a group) what they valued most as leaders, the answers came quickly: transparency, psychological safety, putting patients first. They didn't hesitate and they meant every word.

Then I spent a week watching them work. What I saw was a team that interrupted each other constantly, avoided difficult conversations by burying them in process, and made decisions behind closed doors that they later presented as collaborative. This happened because they were busy leaders, and busyness has a way of replacing our values with our habits.

This is the gap I see in many organizations I work with: the distance between what leaders say they care about and what they actually do on a Tuesday afternoon when they're tired and the agenda is packed and the easiest path is to just move on.

I call it the intention-action gap. And I've come to believe it's a big obstacle standing between good leaders and great organizations.

Why knowing isn't enough

Here's what behavioral science tells us: knowing what you value is necessary but radically insufficient. People who articulate their values with complete sincerity will often violate those same values when the environment doesn't support them. When we're under pressure (and leaders are very often under pressure), we tend to default to whatever behavior requires the least cognitive effort. That's usually the behavior we practiced yesterday, not the one we aspire to today.

The problem is that the systems, habits, and environments that make those values the path of least resistance are often lacking or missing.

Think about it this way. A leader who values candor will still avoid a hard conversation if the meeting is already running twenty minutes over, if the person sitting across from them controls a budget they need, and if the last person who was candid in that room got publicly contradicted. That's a failure of design.

A story about practice

I worked with a CEO a couple of years ago (let's call her Maria) who was frustrated that her senior team kept agreeing with her in meetings and then complaining in private. She valued honest debate. She said so constantly. She even had it printed on the wall of the conference room.

But here's what she didn't see: she always spoke first. She spoke longest. And when someone did push back, her body language (a slight lean back, a pause just a beat too long before responding) signaled something her words didn't. The team had learned, without anyone ever saying it explicitly, that agreement was safer than honesty.

Maria had plenty of intention but she was lacking a practice.

So we built one. It was simple. In every leadership team meeting, Maria would speak last on any decision item. Not first. Last. And for the first two minutes of any discussion, the most junior person in the room would share their perspective before anyone else.

That's it. Two small structural changes.

Within three months, the quality of the team's decisions had noticeably improved. People did not necessarily became more courageous, though some I believe did. The environment changed: the architecture of the meeting now made candor the easy path instead of the risky one.

Maria's values hadn't changed. Her behavior had. And the behavior changed because the system around it changed first.

Three ways to close the gap

If you recognize this pattern in yourself or your team, here are three practices I've seen work consistently across industries, cultures, and organizational sizes.

Practice #1: Name the gap out loud. In your next leadership meeting, ask a deceptively simple question: "Where is the biggest gap between what we say we value and how we actually operate?" Then be quiet. Let the silence do its work. The first person who speaks will usually name something everyone has been thinking about for months. This is about seeing clearly. You cannot close a gap you refuse to acknowledge.

Practice #2: Design for the behavior you want, not the behavior you have. Values don't live in mission statements. They live in meeting structures, feedback loops, promotion criteria, and how you spend the first five minutes of a Monday morning. Pick one value that matters most to your team right now. Then ask: "What would someone see if they watched us for a week? Would they be able to guess this is something we care about?" If the answer is no, change the structure before you change the people.

Practice #3: Make it small and make it regular. The research on habit formation is unambiguous: big commitments fail, small practices stick. Don't launch a "culture transformation initiative." Instead, pick one moment in your week — a standup, a one-on-one, a decision point — and change how you show up in that single moment. Do it consistently for eight weeks. Then add another. That way, you’ll accumulate small, deliberate changes over time.

We don't change by deciding to change. We change by creating the conditions that make the change inevitable.

That's what I mean when I talk about creating the space. The space isn't a retreat or a workshop, though those can help. The space is the gap between stimulus and response: the moment before you default to your old pattern, when you could, if the environment supports you, choose a different one.

The effective leaders I know are clear on what they value. But they also build worlds where those values are the easiest thing to act on. They make it simple for the people around them to show up as their best selves through design.

The question then is: what have you built that makes it easy to act on what you care about?

Start there. Start small, and watch what changes.