The awareness and practice of intentional leadership

Unrestricted Moment-to-moment level of communication includes looking specifically at what leaders are thinking and doing during each fragment of a short transaction. Do leaders use intentionality on a strategic broad based level, a daily level, or a moment-to-moment level? If they do, how aware are they of this behavior? Leadership literature represents a large variety of hypotheses regarding what constitutes a good leader and how to become a good leader. There is abundant information on the perceived ingredients necessary to create the best leader possible. This study focuses on communication, in particular, the question as to what effect it has on the practice of leadership. The purpose of this study is to discover the level of intentionality used by individual leaders through exploration of one communication transaction in its moment-to-moment sequence. In order to examine the level of moment-to-moment intentionality used by interviewees, levels of intention are broken into three categories.; The three categories include overall strategic goals/intentions, daily scheduling goals/intentions, and moment-to-moment goals/intentions. Exploring the effect of what the acting approach might have on the effectiveness of a leader may be useful to those who work in leadership settings. Exploring intentionality at the moment-to-moment level is important to the field of leadership for two reasons. First, exploring how intentionality is used to strengthen moment-to-moment communication by leaders supports individual leadership relationship building and communication skills overall. Second, if intentionality has in fact been learned or taught, it may then become a valuable tool for the growth of future leaders. Exploring the degree to which leadership communication is intentional at the moment-to-moment micro level is significant for growth in overall leadership practice. If this acting approach, which includes a specific set of tools, can assist leaders in communicating more effectively at a moment-to-moment level, then it may be useful to the skill of leadership and higher education overall.