Body of Knowledge · Glossary
Intent-based leadership
Replacing "may I…" with "I intend to…". The person states what they are about to do and why, the leader's silence counts as consent, and an objection has to be voiced. Decisions move to where the information is, and the leader stays informed.
Where the standard develops it
- PL-1Delegation, ownership, and decision rightsMatching scope to capability, making authority explicit, not taking work back.
Related terms
- Decision rights
- The explicit statement of who may decide what, and at which level of authority.
- Delegation brief
- The written form of a delegation for anything larger than a day's work: outcome, constraints, authority level, who else is involved, and when the work is next reviewed together.
- Managerial leverage
- Grove's framing that a manager's output is the output of the organisation under them, and that activities differ in how much output they produce per hour spent.
- One-way door
- A decision that is hard to reverse and so deserves deliberation and senior involvement.
- Reaching around
- A leader of managers overriding a manager's decisions with that manager's own engineers, fixing their team's problems directly, or letting their escalations become the leader's workload.
- Rescuing
- Stepping in with the solution the moment someone struggles.
- Situational leadership
- Adjusting leadership style (directing, coaching, supporting, delegating) to a person's competence and confidence on the task at hand.
- Task-relevant maturity
- How much direction a person needs on a specific kind of work, set by their experience with that work and not by their general seniority.
Cite this definition
Chicago, BibTeX and licence →Engineering Management Academy. (2026). Intent-based leadership. In Engineering Management Academy Body of Knowledge (Version 3.1, GLO.intent-based-leadership). https://www.engineeringmanagement.academy/body-of-knowledge/glossary/intent-based-leadership