Why leadership has to Decide what is important
Dear Readers,
To whom or what does our attention actually belong?
When I ask myself this question, I realize that I rarely think about it consciously in everyday life. We constantly talk about how to use our time more effectively, how to organize our tasks or how to set priorities. But we talk surprisingly little about what happens to our attention and how much our ability to stay focused on one thing has changed. And when we do talk about it, it is often in the context of younger generations and their use of smartphones and social media. Yet this is precisely what determines what we actually notice, what we think about, what we understand and ultimately what we are able to achieve together. And that applies to every generation.
We all know the situation: You are sitting in a conversation with a colleague, listening and you are actually fully engaged. Then there is that smartphone lying on the table and suddenly the screen lights up or it briefly vibrates. Perhaps you do not even pick it up or check who sent the message. And yet, for a moment, there is that little thought:
Who could that have been? What just came in? Could it be something important?
Actually, nothing has happened at all. Nobody has spoken to us, nobody has interrupted the conversation. And yet, for a brief moment, our attention has left the room.
| Read more about this in my colleague Dr. Sandra Dentler’s article, “Concentration Needs Distance: Why Being Close to Your Smartphone Is Distracting.” |
I find this thought particularly interesting because we now live and work in an environment in which our attention is constantly competing with many other things. And the difficult part is not necessarily that we can no longer concentrate. Many of us are still very good at it when we genuinely have the peace and quiet to do so. What seems to have become more difficult is something else: staying with one thing even though there are so many other things competing for our attention at the same time.
And in the process, we overlook the fact that attention is not an unlimited resource, and that every shift from one thought to the next also means moving part of our attention somewhere else.
This is where attention suddenly becomes more than a personal ability.
Because the question is not only whether I am personally good at concentrating. It is also about the environment in which I am expected to work, what an organization constantly expects us to respond to and what kind of behavior we model as leaders. If I, as a leader, am available at all times, respond immediately to every message and declare something new to be urgent at every moment, I am also sending a signal to the people around me.
That is why today I want to talk less about how we can optimize our personal periods of concentration. Instead, I am interested in a different question:
What happens to our attention when it is constantly competing with something else, and what responsibility do we have as leaders to help people direct their attention back to what really matters?
Have We Forgotten How to Focus Our Attention?
American cognitive psychologist Daniel T. Willingham has spent many years studying learning, attention and memory. Research on attention provides an interesting finding here: at present, there is little reason to assume that our fundamental ability to concentrate on something has simply disappeared.
People are still able to engage with one thing for extended periods of time. Anyone who has ever watched someone become completely absorbed in a hobby for two hours or get lost in a book knows the phenomenon. So, to me, the more interesting question is:
Why can we sustain our attention almost effortlessly with some things, but hardly at all with others?
There is a difference between our ability to concentrate and the conditions under which we are able to draw on that ability. Because those very conditions have changed dramatically.
The Silent Shift: Our Attention Has Competition
Never before has the next distraction been just one click, sound, or vibration away. At the same time, it is too simplistic to blame the smartphone alone. After all, our working environment has long been organized according to the same principle: emails arrive, Teams messages pop up, calendars remind us of appointments, and project management systems notify us of changes. On top of that, there are video conferences, questions from colleagues, and all the little things that are supposed to be taken care of “really quickly.” And, on top of all that, there is AI.
At the same time, something interesting is happening in our brains. The more easily information becomes available, the more of it we can process or at least try to. So our ability to concentrate has not suddenly disappeared, but the competition for our attention has grown.
Why Instant Rewards Are So Appealing
There is also a mechanism known in psychology as “delay discounting.” Put simply, we humans tend to value an immediate reward more highly than a reward we have to wait longer to receive. This is something you do not have to be a psychologist to understand. Anyone who has ever worked on a difficult presentation and opened their emails “just for a moment” in between knows the principle. The emails provide something new immediately; one of the messages may even bring recognition or a small sense of accomplishment. The presentation, on the other hand, may reward me three days from now, when it is finished. Or a week from now, when I present it and if I am really unlucky, perhaps not at all.
Applied to focused work, this does not mean that we are losing our ability to pay attention. It does, however, mean that focused work is taking place under increasingly difficult conditions. And this is where what initially appears to be a personal issue becomes, for me, a leadership issue.
Of course, each of us is responsible for how we work. I can put my smartphone away and avoid checking my emails for a certain period of time. That can help and yet I would find it too simplistic to place the entire responsibility on the individual. After all, organizations shape a significant part of the environment in which concentration is expected to take place.
If employees have three meetings in one morning, are expected to respond to messages in between and are simultaneously working on several projects that are all labeled as the highest priority, even the best focus app will eventually only help to a limited extent.
When Five Things Are All “Priority One,” There Is No Priority Anymore.
That is precisely why I believe good leadership means not only demanding attention, but also protecting it.
This starts with clarity at a very basic level. People need to know what really matters right now and, just as importantly, what can wait or perhaps even has to wait. Because when everything appears urgent at the same time, it quickly creates a working environment in which people are constantly reacting but have less and less space to truly engage with one thing.
This also includes the way we communicate with one another. Does every question really need to be answered immediately? Does everyone need to attend every meeting? And do we really need to be constantly available simply because technology makes it possible?
And finally, it is about how we organize work. Complex tasks require time in which a thought can be pursued for longer than ten minutes without the next message, the next question, or the next appointment getting in the way. In theory, this sounds self-evident. When you look at our everyday working lives, however, it surprisingly often is not.
Good leadership cannot prescribe attention, but it can create conditions in which people are able to direct their attention where it is genuinely needed. Through clarity and real priorities, through fewer unnecessary interruptions and through working environments in which people can sometimes stay with a thought until they have fully thought it through.
And perhaps this will become even more important in the future. Because the more technology takes individual tasks off our hands and the easier information becomes to access, the less it will be about keeping everything in view. What will become increasingly important is the ability to decide what actually deserves our attention in the first place.
Yours, Daniel Keller
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A brief digression: What generation Z has to do with it In our article “Generation Z in the Workplace” we explore how the conditions under which they grew up influence focus, self-management and collaboration. And this also explains why leaders would be well advised to first understand these connections before jumping to conclusions about their willingness to perform or ability to concentrate. |
Image source: Photo by TheYuri Arcurs Collection on Magnific
