with Gareth Holebrook:
Most leadership frameworks try to teach you what a leader is. Intent-Based Leadership teaches you what a leader does. It rewires how people speak, decide, and act together. It shifts the centre of gravity from “permission” to “ownership”. It gives teams the confidence to think, not just comply.
This workshop is for people who want more than theory. It is for people who want to see the patterns in their own context (workplace, sports team, family) and practise new ways of speaking that produce clarity, psychological safety, and shared responsibility.
Gareth Holebrook has used Intent-Based Leadership for over a decade. He has worked directly with David Marquet for the past five years, including co-presenting this course, and contributed to his 3rd book Distancing, co-authored with psychologist Michael Gillespie.
The aim is to show how these ideas work in practice and help you adopt them with confidence.
From 9am to 12.30pm (including breaks).
Why this workshop matters
The industrial age taught us to separate thinking from doing. Most workplaces still operate in that shadow. We speak in ways that shut others down. We make decisions too far from where the information lives. We reward compliance and then wonder why initiative is scarce.
Agile ways of working try to break this pattern. Intent-Based Leadership gives you the language and structure to do it safely.
What you will walk away with
- A clear understanding of how Intent-Based Leadership works in practice, and a set of tools you can use the next day:
- A simple mechanism for diagnosing your team’s current decision patterns
- A practical Ladder of Leadership map for your own context
- Language templates for psychologically safe conversations
- Distancing techniques to improve clarity and reduce noise in decision-making
- A repeatable way to increase initiative, accountability, and trust
Why attend
- Leadership is not a job title. It is a behaviour pattern.
- Teams work better when the people closest to the work feel trusted to think.
- The world we work in now demands more from everyone, not just from the person at the front of the room.
- The economic value of better decisions compounds.
Most of all, this workshop will give you practice. Not slogans. Not a slide deck. Practice.
Learning outcomes
What you will learn:
Spot the hidden patterns shaping behaviour
You will learn to see the linguistic habits that keep teams stuck: command-and-control phrasing, binary questions, premature advocacy, and the subtle signals that trigger silence.
Shift from industrial-age language to knowledge-age leadership
You will practice the micro-moves that change how others think in your presence. Clear intent. Shared mental models. Language that reduces fear and increases cognitive scope.
Use the Ladder of Leadership® in real conversations
You will map where people sit on the ladder, learn how to move them up without pressure, and practise the coaching questions that develop initiative, judgment, and psychological safety.
Ask questions that create thinking, not compliance
You will build the discipline of asking questions that expand the room rather than close it. These are simple moves, but they change the tone of a team almost immediately.
Bonus: Distancing — A brief look at Marquet & Gillespie’s new work
You will be among the first to learn how Distancing reframes the psychology of decision-making:
- Get out of “Me-Here-Now”
- Be someone else (Perspective-Taking)
- Be someplace else (Context-Shifting)
- Be some time else (Temporal Distance)
These moves create calm, reduce emotional bias, and make reflection safer. They strengthen the quality of decisions without slowing the team down.