Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes
In a comment on my post “The Little Things are the BIG Things”, Gordon brought up the topic of attention and said that “attention is the currency of the universe.” I very much agree with this, in fact to me attention should be the number one tool we have in our leadership toolbox and is the absolute key to Reflection Leadership. But this is nothing new. Tim Enalls’ post of Napoleon Hill’s 17 Principles of Success, lists number 11 as “controlled attention”. The idea being that what we focus our mind on we have the ability to achieve. This from Hill’s book “The Law of Success”
What is clear is that we can only focus our attention on one thing at a time. No matter how hard we try to be master multi-taskers the best we can hope for is to get more done; quality over quantity. To do anything well requires our attention and the more attention we give to something the better off we are. Whether it is driving instead of texting (yeah, I’ve done it) or being present and listening when someone you work with brings you a problem, giving your full attention it crucial.
Attention and the Reflective Leader
The reflective leader understands the importance of attention. As part of a regular reflection practice, we are able to understand what things are most important and focus our attention on those things.
But attention can be a double-edged sword. When we focus our attention on something it shines a light and brings that thing into view. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, when we focus our attention on something it tends to be realized. So if we are focusing positively, say on helping one of our employees be more confident and assertive when dealing with other departments for example, the positive attention helps us to produce the positive outcome that we are hoping for. However, if we are focusing negatively on the same thing, we inadvertently produce negative outcomes on the same situation. In this case, if we were to focus on the employee’s lack of confidence and assertiveness as a negative, it would only reinforce this behavior and we would be viewing it as a problem instead of an opportunity for growth.
How to Pay Attention
As most of us know, one of the greatest thing we can do as leaders is to take the time and exercise our ability to pay attention. But so many times, even if we do take the time to pay attention, we end up paying attention to the wrong things or the right things in the wrong way. Here are 3 things we can do on a regular basis to pay better attention:
- Listen – To play on the words of the old public service announcement Listening is Fundamental. The first step to knowing where we need to focus our attention is to listen to what is really going on around us. We need to listen to what our people are telling us; not just hear them, but listen to what is behind their words.
- Filter – With everything that goes on in a typical day it can be hard to focus our attention on the important, because the urgent tends to take our attention away. When we are able to filter what is going on around us, we can purposefully choose to focus our attention on those things that are most important.
- Follow Through – Understanding what to focus our attention on is important, but if we don’t continue to focus our attention on something, another issue will come along and take our attention. As the saying goes, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” If something else takes our attention from the thing that is most important the likelihood of our follow through on the original issue will diminish.
When we focus our attention on the things that we want, we have a greater chance of seeing those things realized. Whether these things are something we want to be, do or have in our own lives or if these things are related to activities in our organization. As leaders, we need to spend our time looking at what is going on around us so that we are able to understand what things are most important to focus our attention on. Once we know what to focus our attention on we need to keep our focus on those important things in order to see our desired outcomes.
