Manage Your Team’s Attention

Julian Birkinshaw

JANUARY 29, 2015

What’s your scarcest resource at work?

Most people answer, without hesitation, that it’s time. It certainly is finite, but I would argue that time isn’t actually your scarcest resource. After all, everyone has the same amount of time, and yet individual differences in productivity can be enormous.

A better answer might be your attention — your personal capacity to attend to the right things for the right amount of time. As Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon first suggested 40 years ago, when information is plentiful, attention becomes the scarce resource.

So perhaps the biggest challenge we face as individuals at work, and as leaders, is attention management. This means being thoughtful and disciplined about how we split our time between different activities, and also about how we encourage others to focus on the right things. How?

First, consider yourself as an individual contributor. If attention is your scarcest resource, the first thing you need to do is discipline yourself to avoid interruptions. So if you are working on something that needs real focus — say, writing a report — then switch your phone to silent, and close down Outlook and Facebook. This is obvious stuff, but it’s amazing how often we don’t do it, and how easily we get sidetracked.

Second, and more difficult, is figuring out when to stop gathering information. When I was a doctoral student, the cost of acquiring information was high — I had to go to the library and make my own copies of annual reports or academic papers. Today, such costs have shrunk dramatically, but the net result of easy access to information is that we often keep on collecting information long after we have enough to make a decision or write a report. How can we avoid this “analysis paralysis”? The best approach is to develop your hypothesis or argument early on, so that your search is focused on supporting or refuting that argument. If that doesn’t work, just give yourself a deadline. One rule I use when working with collaborators is to ensure I have something to send over to them by the end of the day: this helps me avoid getting into an open-ended search process.

Third, even though we live in an era of ubiquitous information, we should not be afraid to bring our intuition and emotion to the table. It is tempting to seek evidence to support every argument we make, but the most successful business leaders — from Jack Welch to Steve Jobs to Jeff Bezos — have always sought to combine rational and intuitive thinking. An ounce of real insight is worth a pound of data.

Finally, when we have plentiful access to information, we also need to find time for reflection. Think of this as a low-tech version of meditation or mindfulness: it simply means creating breaks in the day, perhaps during a commute or while exercising, where you make sense of the stimuli you have been bombarded with, and where your ideas are allowed to gestate. When I am feeling distracted, a half-hour swim is the best way I know for clearing my mind and clarifying my next work priorities.

Now, consider your role as a manager. Remember, your team is as easily distracted as you are. Your team members are also highly sensitive to stimuli and cues that come from above. If you start talking about, say, an impending cost-cutting initiative, you are manipulating your team’s attention, whether you like it or not. Changes to job titles, to the layout of the office, to the agenda of the weekly meeting, to decisions about who gets promoted — all of these are attention “cues” that collectively shape people’s views of what is important, thereby shaping how they behave. (This idea was first developed by Tom Davenport and John Beck in The Attention Economy).

If you recast your role as the manager of your team’s attention, there are a couple of simple pieces of advice to follow. First, keep the message simple and clear. If you emphasize different things each week, people will become confused, and will learn to tune out. But if you come back to the same message time and time again, the effect on your team’s behavior is likely to be substantial. For example, most mining companies start every meeting with a “safety share” (a story about a recent safety-related incident) — it’s a simple, but effective way of keeping safety top-of-mind.

Second, be clear on what the default focus of attention is, so that you can be strategic about how to shift your team away from it. Here’s an example: a global software company was losing out on opportunities in Asia because every decision ended up prioritizing the needs of the European business (its historical home base). The CEO moved himself (temporarily) to Asia; global team meeting times alternated between morning in Europe and afternoon in Asia; the Chair of the meeting alternated between the two locations; the agenda always included region-specific as well as global concerns. By manipulating these relatively symbolic cues, rather than changing the entire reward system or reporting structure, there was a marked shift in behavior towards a greater focus on Asia but without a loss of attention to Europe.

Our key job as managers is to make efficient use of scarce resources. In the industrial era, the scarce resources were capital and labor. In the knowledge era, we have become accustomed to thinking of knowledge and information as the scarce resources we need to harness. But increasingly, information is ubiquitous and knowledge is shared widely across companies. In such a world, the scarce resource is our own and our employees attention. We need to become smarter about how we manage it.