Several years ago, my federal client closed out each year with an email to her entire 30,000-person team, plus consultants. This was not a typical “thanks for your hard work this year, go enjoy family for a few days, and come back ready to work hard in the new year” message – for which I was grateful. Her email was immensely personal and bold as she recounted the status of her annual leadership intention.

As this leader wrote her email, she did not apply a filter on her year-long endeavor to live into a focused, intentional way of showing up in the world. She shared the missteps and missed opportunities, along with the joys, lessons learned, and mysteries of her experiences trying to embody her leadership intention—and did so in detail. The close of her email would be to share her leadership intention for the new year.

To me, her email embodied bold accountability rarely seen in modern leaders…. and inspired me and I began the practice of a leadership intention.

Set an Intention

Over the past years, my intentions were helpful, forgotten, motivating, haphazard, or often based on “shoulda’s” – set in the moment or as a reaction rather than with, well, intention. I wanted more (better) for myself this year, so I used the Leadership Intention Workbook created by Kristen Lisanti, and joined her and other Radiant Leaders in her 1.5 hour “retreat” to think about, process, and draft an intention.

In honor of the one who inspired me, I’ll share that for 2025, as a leader, my intention is to “help authentically.”

I chose this leadership intention – or perhaps it chose me – due to joy. Specifically, the joy I felt when I was my best as a leader as indicated by ease, creativity, fun, growth, and outcomes generated in community with others… that my teammates told me occurred for them too. I wanted to have more of this “vibe” and impact not just in my formal roles as a leader, but in all aspects of my life. Upon reflection and with input from others at the retreat, I realized that when I centered on helping in an authentic way – making it about the person/people in that moment rather than the task – that honest conversations emerged, barriers dissipated, ideas bubbled up, more felt possible. And most of all, everyone felt more empowered, so outcomes seemed to more easily occur. I also want to show up authentically to help others do the same.

Intentional Words

Because I love words, I explored “authentically” and “authentic” before I settled on my intention, and here are phrases that Google provided:

• Being genuine
• True to yourself and your values – aligned to your core self
• Faithfulness
• Self-aware
• Open minded
• Shows vulnerability
• Brave and takes risks
• Living in the moment with conviction and confidence
• Puts others around them at ease
• Courage to love with a rigorous inside-out consistency

So, here’s to my year to practice “help authentically” as a leader. A year to learn. A year to fail. A year to adjust. A year to grow. A year to play. A year to discover.

Cheerleading, feedback, and patience will all be appreciated.