When Intention and Impact Diverge

August 17, 2026 | By Laura Flynn

Some time back, I was walking to a meeting with a colleague and our leader when the conversation turned to intention and impact. My colleague argued that impact mattered more. I pushed back. Surely intention mattered at least as much.

I was thinking about it largely from a legal perspective. Intent matters. It can be the difference between an accident and an offense, negligence and deliberate wrongdoing. She was looking at it through a social justice lens: whatever someone may have intended, the experience and consequences for another person are real. I remember being quite convinced of my position.

Years later, I think she was right. Or, perhaps I was asking the wrong question.

When I think about leadership and culture today, I’m less interested in which matters more. Both matter. What interests me is what happens when the two diverge.

Most leaders I’ve known want to have a positive impact. They want to be fair, build trust, encourage people to speak honestly, set clear expectations, and create environments where people can do good work. Yet what we intend and what others experience don’t always line up.

That gap can be difficult to see because we have privileged access to one side of it: our own intention. We know what we meant, what we were trying to accomplish, and the considerations that shaped what we said or did. When others experience it differently, it is natural to explain: That wasn’t what I meant. I was trying to help.

The explanation may be entirely true. But intention cannot erase impact. And when the two don’t align, defending the intention can prevent us from learning from the impact.

So what can the gap tell us?

Sometimes the answer is uncomfortable. The gap may point to an assumption we haven’t questioned, a pattern in our behavior we haven’t noticed, or a blind spot we didn’t know we had. It may reveal that something that seems relatively inconsequential to us carries considerably more significance for someone else.

Authority can make those differences harder to see. The more senior the leader, the more weight a question, reaction, decision, or even an offhand comment can carry. What feels like healthy debate to the person with the most power in the room may feel quite different to someone whose career could be affected by that person’s judgment. What feels like giving someone room to operate may be experienced as a lack of support. What feels like holding a high standard may leave people reluctant to bring forward work that is directionally sound but not fully formed. 

We can't fully understand another person's experience simply by imagining it. Sometimes we need to ask. Sometimes we must listen longer than is comfortable. And sometimes the evidence is in what people do rather than what they say: the questions that stop being asked, the problems that surface later than they should, the disagreement that disappears from the room.

I think this is where the gap becomes useful. Rather than treating an unexpected impact as something to defend against or explain away, we can treat it as information - an invitation to widen the aperture and consider what may be outside our current view.

I’m not suggesting we assume every reaction is ours to fix. People bring their own histories, expectations, pressures, and interpretations to work, and leadership inevitably involves decisions that disappoint or frustrate others. Sometimes we may look carefully at the impact, understand it better, and still believe we made the right choice.

But sometimes the gap shows us something worth acting on. Perhaps we ask more before responding. Perhaps we communicate differently. Perhaps we adjust something in our behavior. Or perhaps we simply become more conscious of the influence we carry as executives and bring that awareness to the next decision, action, or interaction.

I no longer think the interesting question is whether intention or impact matters more. Intention matters. Impact matters. And the distance between them may tell us something neither can tell us alone.