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Why managing people’s attention is a big challenge for today’s business leaders.
Contrary to popular belief, our scarcest resource in the workplace isn’t time – it’s attention. To achieve maximum productivity, companies should dedicate sufficient time to the most pressing tasks.
They should also challenge the common view that businesses gain a commercial and competitive advantage by absorbing as much information as possible. As Nobel Laureate, Herbert Simon, suggested 40 years ago, attention becomes the scarce resource when data is ubiquitous – a theory that’s applicable in today’s world, where everyone is bombarded with data.
While your team is as easily distracted as you are, each member is also highly sensitive to stimuli and cues from their manager. Without realising, you adjust their attention when talking about cost cutting, job titles or promotions…These changes focus your team’s attention and collectively shape people’s views on what’s important, which in turn influence their subsequent behaviour. A manager’s role is to effectively manage their team’s attention.
My advice for managing your team’s attention is to follow these rules:
While your team is as easily distracted as you are, each member is also highly sensitive to stimuli and cues from their manager. Without realising, you adjust their attention when talking about cost cutting, job titles or promotions…These changes focus your team’s attention and collectively shape people’s views on what’s important, which in turn influence their subsequent behaviour. A manager’s role is to effectively manage their team’s attention.
My advice for managing your team’s attention is to follow these rules:
Our job as managers is to use scarce resources effectively. Capital and labour were rare in the industrial age; in today’s knowledge era, we think of knowledge and information as the scarce resources that need harnessing. However, information is everywhere and knowledge is shared widely across companies. In such a world, the scarce resource is your own and and your employees’ attention – we need to manage it smarter.
Photo by Stéfan. Used under Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license.
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