Attention-Based Leadership

People don’t necessarily become different people. They become different expressions of themselves.

I’ve been thinking about the idea that people don’t really change.

That’s not quite right. Of course people change. They learn things, develop skills, abandon beliefs, and make decisions that alter the course of their lives.

But I don’t think most of us become entirely different people.

I think we lean.

We lean toward certain parts of ourselves and away from others. Sometimes deliberately. Sometimes because of the circumstances we find ourselves in. And sometimes because the people around us keep paying attention to one version of us until that becomes the over muscled version we know how to be.

Over a lifetime, those small directional choices can add up to enormous change.

Which brings me to leadership.

The things we notice

I think we underestimate how much of leadership is simply deciding what to pay attention to.

Imagine you have an employee who’s naturally good at solving problems. They’re resourceful, quick on their feet, and particularly good when things get messy.

As a leader, you notice this.

So you start giving them the messy problems.

They solve them. You praise them. You give them more.

Before long, this person has become your problem solver. It’s how you introduce them to other people. It’s what you reward them for. It’s what you think about when you’re deciding what they should work on next.

From the company’s perspective, you’ve identified a strength and put it to work.

Good leadership, right?

Maybe.

But what if that person doesn’t want to spend their entire career solving everyone else’s problems?

What if they’re also creative, thoughtful, or interested in building something of their own?

You might never find out.

Not because those qualities aren’t there, but because you’ve built a relationship around the one part of them that’s most useful to you.

You’ve taken something they were good at and turned it into something they’re expected to be.

Their strength has become a cage.

The other side of attention

We do the same thing with weaknesses.

Someone struggles with public speaking. So we make it a development priority.

We put it in their performance review. We ask them how they’re progressing. We offer coaching. We check in after every presentation.

All perfectly reasonable things.

Except now this person is thinking about being bad at public speaking every time they stand in front of a room.

They’re watching themselves speak instead of speaking.

They’re thinking about whether they’re improving instead of thinking about what they’re trying to communicate.

And sometimes they get worse.

Not because they’re incapable of improving, but because the attention itself has changed their relationship with the activity.

I’ve seen this happen in organizations. I’ve probably contributed to it myself.

We identify something we want to improve, direct a tremendous amount of attention toward it, and then wonder why the person becomes increasingly anxious, defensive, or frustrated.

We call it resistance to feedback.

Sometimes it is.

But sometimes we’ve made the problem bigger by making it the center of someone’s identity at work.

The myth of the Leader

I think part of the problem is what we’ve done to the idea of leadership itself.

We’ve turned the word Leader into something larger than life.

There’s this implied progression where someone managing five people should aspire to manage fifty, then five hundred, then five thousand.

As though the person running a small team is an unfinished version of the person running a multinational company.

But those are different jobs.

They require different temperaments, skills, interests, and sacrifices.

Someone can be extraordinary at leading ten people and miserable leading a thousand.

Someone else might love building systems for thousands of people but struggle to maintain the intimate relationships required to lead a small team.

Neither person is inherently better.

They’re different expressions of what leadership can be.

Yet we’ve built a culture that treats scale as evidence of personal development.

We do something similar to employees.

We assume growth means more responsibility, more output, more ambition, and eventually more people reporting to you.

But maybe someone wants to be excellent at their craft, make a good living, and go home to their family.

Maybe someone wants to spend ten years mastering one thing.

Maybe someone wants to lead a company with a billion employees.

Those are different choices about how to spend a life. Not different levels of human achievement.

A little better is a lot

This is also why I’ve become interested in the phrase “a little better.”

I think getting a little better is an enormous commitment.

Not because the improvement itself is enormous, but because choosing to improve requires sustained attention.

You have to notice what you’re doing. Experiment with doing it differently. Accept that you might get worse before you get better. And then keep going.

That’s real work.

But when you tell someone to get a little better, you’re not necessarily creating that commitment.

You’re expressing a desire.

And those are different things.

I’ve heard managers push back on this idea.

They’ll say, “Well, I have an employee who could get a little better every day and still not be good enough to do the job.”

Maybe that’s true.

But I think it misses the point.

That employee probably isn’t making a genuine commitment to incremental improvement simply because you’ve told them to.

And if they’re already struggling, your attention might make them more conscious of the struggle without making them more capable of overcoming it.

The result isn’t necessarily growth.

Sometimes it’s paralysis.

Of course, a business still needs the work done. Not every person is suited to every role. And empathy doesn’t require pretending otherwise.

But I think we should be careful about confusing a person’s inability to meet a particular expectation with their unwillingness to become a better person.

Those aren’t the same thing.

Attention-Based Leadership

I’ve started thinking about an alternative.

Attention-Based Leadership.

The idea is simple.

What leaders consistently pay attention to influences which parts of people get expressed, reinforced, and developed.

Attention isn’t neutral.

Praise is attention. Criticism is attention. Opportunity is attention. Silence is attention, too.

And over time, the patterns of attention inside an organization tell people who they’re supposed to be.

The question isn’t just whether you’re paying attention.

It’s what your attention is doing.

Are you helping someone discover a capability they want to develop?

Or are you reinforcing the capability that’s most convenient for you?

Are you helping someone work through a weakness?

Or are you teaching them to see themselves primarily through that weakness?

Are you creating an environment where people can explore different parts of themselves?

Or are you rewarding them for remaining the version of themselves you’ve already decided is valuable?

I don’t think there’s a perfect formula for this.

And I don’t think the answer is to stop giving feedback, abandon standards, or treat every employee’s personal development as more important than the work the company exists to do.

That wouldn’t be leadership either.

But I do think a more gentle form of leadership needs to emerge.

Not gentle in the sense of avoiding difficult conversations.

Gentle in the sense of recognizing that people are not raw materials we get to shape into whatever the organization needs.

They’re already people.

With histories, ambitions, contradictions, talents, insecurities, and lives that extend far beyond the work we’re asking them to do.

The responsibility of being noticed

There’s a danger in this idea.

Once you understand that attention influences behavior, it becomes tempting to use attention as another management tool.

Figure out what motivates someone. Reinforce the right behaviors. Redirect the wrong ones. Get more productivity.

And suddenly Attention-Based Leadership is just another way of extracting more from people.

That’s not what I’m interested in.

I think the difference comes down to agency.

People should have a meaningful say in which parts of themselves they want to develop.

A leader can help someone see possibilities they haven’t considered. They can challenge them, encourage them, and sometimes tell them something difficult that they need to hear.

But they shouldn’t confuse the person the company needs with the person that employee is obligated to become.

Those two things will sometimes align.

And sometimes they won’t.

Good leadership has to make room for both possibilities.

Because the purpose of developing people shouldn’t be to produce a standardized version of a successful employee.

It should be to help people become more capable of making choices about their own lives, including the work they choose to do.

People lean

I keep coming back to the original thought.

People don’t necessarily become different people.

They become different expressions of themselves.

And the attention they receive plays a role in which expressions become stronger.

That makes attention one of the most consequential things a leader has to offer.

Not because leaders have the power to determine who someone becomes.

But because they have enough influence that they should be careful about trying.

Maybe the next evolution of leadership isn’t about becoming better at getting people to change.

Maybe it’s about becoming more thoughtful about which parts of people we’re asking to show up.

And remembering that the person standing in front of us is always more than the part we’ve learned to notice.