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Intent: The Leadership Attitude

The Intent

LeadershipIsShapedbyIntent

Intent defines leadership. It's the inner attitude we carry into decisions, conversations, and moments of pressure, and over time it's what shapes culture, trust, and long‑term impact.

In an age shaped by artificial intelligence and growing uncertainty, leadership needs to evolve to a more conscious intent.

Explore the Pathways

The Problem

The Limits of Surface Development

Leadership development has advanced significantly: frameworks are clearer, data is richer, expectations are higher. Yet many leadership challenges remain stubbornly familiar. Under pressure, we still see:

  • Reactive decisions
  • Inconsistent values
  • Cultural instability
  • Performance without coherence

Why? Because behaviour can improve while intent stays unexamined. Skills strengthen capability, but it's intent that shapes impact.

Where Leadership Falters

Leaders are capable, and many are deeply committed. The struggle comes when:

  • Internal drivers go unexplored
  • Emotional reactions override judgement
  • Short-term urgency outweighs principle
  • External success masks internal misalignment

Without inner structure, leadership becomes fragile. Development, therefore, has to go deeper than behaviour.

A More Sustainable Standard

Leadership isn't only behavioural. It's psychological, ethical and relational too. Sustainable maturity requires:

  • Clarity of identity
  • Strength of discernment
  • Relational steadiness
  • Disciplined execution

This doesn't happen by accident. It takes a conscious and deliberate shift in the inner attitude we bring to leadership. This is the work of The Intent.

Explore the Path

The Path

The Dharma Code

Leadership attitude develops across four integrated domains. Together, they cultivate the self-awareness, discernment, relational responsibility and discipline to lead with conscious intent and sustained impact.

The Dharma Code: four overlapping circles, Being, Differentiating, Relating and Doing, around a central circle

Applied development

The Path is strengthened through:

Leadership Series

Structured engagements over time, bringing The Path into the realities of organisational leadership.

Leadership Conversations

Focused one-to-one conversations creating space for reflection, challenge and clearer choices.

Leadership Circles

Small-group dialogue where leaders learn through shared experience, inquiry and perspective.

The aim is to bring intent, values and action into closer alignment, strengthening our capacity to lead consciously through pressure and change.

Intent evolves

The three dots of our logo represent how the quality of our intent can evolve as we become more conscious of what drives us and how we respond.

Cards marked Inert, Instant and Intent beside a notebook reading 'What's your next move?'

Inertia

We are passive, hesitant or stuck. Our response is shaped more by habit, avoidance or circumstance than conscious choice.

Instant

We are active and responsive, but often immediate or reactive, driven by pressure, impulse, ambition or the need to act.

Intent

We become more conscious of what is shaping us. There is greater clarity and choice between what happens and how we respond.

The dots offer a simple reflective tool. In any of the four domains of Being, Differentiating, Relating and Doing, we can pause and ask:

  • Where am I now?
  • What is moving me?
  • What is my next move?

The aim isn't to stay in inertia or instant, but to move forward deliberately, building the capacity to lead with greater consciousness and intent.

Skills strengthen capability. Intent shapes impact.

The Perspective

The Perspective shares research notes, essays, and reflections exploring leadership attitude and how it shapes our choices, relationships, and actions.

Some reflections are brief; others invite deeper thought. All are guided by one question:

How does leadership change when intent becomes conscious and deliberate?

Listen

Leadership as Example

Accountability is painful

Motivation is personal

Question your story

The People

The people behind The Intent.

Simon Haas

Simon Haas

Simon devised the Dharma Code to define purposeful leadership. He is an internationally renowned author and teacher of yoga philosophy who specialises in applying ancient wisdom to everyday leadership challenges, and the author of the international bestsellers The Book of Dharma: Making Enlightened Choices and Yoga and the Dark Night of the Soul, published in seven languages. He has delivered leadership solutions across five continents, including at the United Nations, and is currently completing doctoral studies in Oxford.

Pradip Gajjar

Pradip Gajjar

Pradip leads The Intent, bringing together people, ideas and practice to help leaders act with greater awareness and purpose. With over 20 years of international experience in leadership development and corporate learning, he has worked with leaders across cultures and industries, including within Fortune 500 companies. His work is driven by a deep interest in the relationship between our inner attitudes and the way we lead. Through The Intent, he is bringing the Dharma Code to life through learning, conversation and reflection, helping leaders make conscious choices and translate their values into everyday action.

Begin a Conversation

The Practice

The Intent Practice

We help leaders, teams and organisations consciously develop the inner attitude they bring to decisions, conversations and action.

Through reflection, dialogue and practical application, we turn insight into everyday leadership practice. Choose from three ways to engage:

A hand writing in a notebook at a sunlit desk

Leadership Series

Structured learning over time, using The Path to explore the realities and challenges of leadership.

Each series creates space for inquiry, reflection and application, helping leaders connect inner attitude with the choices they make and the impact they have.

Three people in focused conversation around a table with a notebook reading 'What's your next move?'

Leadership Conversations

Focused one-to-one conversations that create space to think more clearly.

A place to examine assumptions, explore difficult decisions and notice what is shaping a response, before choosing how to act with greater consciousness and intent.

Four people in dialogue beneath a sign reading 'Learning from experience, perspective and inquiry'

Leadership Circles

Small groups of leaders coming together for facilitated dialogue around real leadership questions and challenges.

Through shared experience, perspective and inquiry, leaders learn from one another, while noticing what is happening within themselves and how that shapes the way they lead.

Who Is This For?

The Intent is for leaders, teams and organisations who recognise that leadership requires more than competence. For those willing to examine:

  • What is shaping their choices
  • How they respond under pressure
  • The quality of their relationships
  • Whether intent and action are aligned

The work is reflective, practical and grounded in the realities of leadership. It begins with a simple question:

What is shaping how I lead?

Begin a Conversation

Begin a Conversation

Leadership changes when intent evolves.

If you are considering how The Intent might work with you, your team or your organisation, begin with a conversation.

There's no predetermined programme and no off-the-shelf solution. We start with the leadership questions that matter to you.