One will often find leaders of high performing business question their leadership and thinking about whether they are doing enough for the health of the organization. A primary task of leadership is to direct attention. Learning to focus their own attention, is therefore of great importance. So what does being a focused leader entail? Does it only mean thinking about one thing while filtering out distractions? A great deal of recent research in neuroscience shows that we focus in many ways, for different purposes, drawing on different neural pathways—some are harmonious, while others are antithesis.
When we group these modes of attention we find three subcategories- a] focusing on yourself, b] focusing on others and c] focusing on the wider world. This information sheds new light on the practice of many essential leadership skills. Focusing constructively and on others helps leaders cultivate the primary elements of emotional intelligence. The aptitude of leaders would greatly improve to orchestrate strategy, innovate, and manage organizations, once they understand how they focus on the wider world.
A quote from another article on the same topic by Daniel Goleman, Co-Director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University states: “Every leader needs to cultivate this trinity of awareness, in abundance and in the proper balance, because a failure to focus inward leaves you rudderless, a failure to focus on others renders you clueless, and a failure to focus outward may leave you blindsided.”
Focusing on yourself
It is very rightly said that the start of human’s emotional intelligence is self-awareness. Getting in touch with your inner voice can elevate you both mentally and emotionally and enable you to become better at handling problems or, in general, handling life. Leaders who heed their inner voices can draw on more resources to make better decisions and connect with their authentic selves.
Self-awareness
To be self-aware is to monitor our inner thoughts, emotions and beliefs. It is important because it’s a major mechanism in influencing personal development. When you pay careful attention to your internal physiological signals you can achieve self-awareness. The subtle cues which are monitored by the insula, tucked behind the frontal lobes of the brain helps in hearing your body’s miniscule signals. A standard way to measure one’s self-awareness these days is how well people can sense their heartbeats.
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Identifying our own sensory impressions is one major element of self-awareness. But combining our experiences into an intelligible view of our true selves is another aspect that is integral to a focused leader.
When you are true to yourself you can be the same person to the outer world. This, in turn, entails paying attention to what others think of you, most importantly particular individuals whose opinions matter the most to you or you hold in high regard. When we broadly notice what’s going on around us without focusing on a particular thing, we don’t judge, censor, or tune out; we simply perceive. This leads to open awareness.
Life rarely gives us a few chances to learn how others really see us, and it may be even fewer for executives of higher ranks. Bill George from Harvard Business School has a course that is extremely popular amongst students called ‘Authentic Leadership Development’, in which he teaches students to heighten this aspect of self-awareness.
During the course, students form groups which are open and intimate, “a safe place,” George explains, “where members can discuss personal issues they do not feel they can raise elsewhere—often not even with their closest family members.” Now you may ask what good does that do? “We don’t know who we are until we hear ourselves speaking the story of our lives to those we trust,” George says. These groups are based on the precept that self-knowledge begins with self-revelation thus providing a systematic method to match our view of our true selves with the views our most trusted colleagues have—an external check on our authenticity.
Focusing on others
The origin of the word “attention” comes from the Latin attendere, meaning “to reach toward”. This is a perfect definition of focus on others, which is the foundation of empathy and an ability to build social relationships—the second and third pillars of emotional intelligence.
Leaders who can pay attention to others are easy to recognize. They are the ones who find common ground, whose opinions carry the most weight, and with whom other people want to work. They emerge as natural leaders regardless of organizational or social rank.
The empathy trinity
We talk about empathy as a single quality. Upon taking a closer look at where executives pay more attention when they exhibit it reveals three particular kinds, each important for effective leadership:
- cognitive empathy—the ability to understand another person’s perspective;
- emotional empathy—the ability to feel what someone else feels;
- empathic concern—the ability to sense what another person needs from you.
Focusing on the wider world
Business heads with a strong outward focus are not only good listeners but also good questioners. They have the ability to imagine how the choices they make today will play out in the future. They know the consequences of their decision made today. They are open to the surprising ways in which seemingly unrelated data can inform their central interests.
Focusing on strategy
The two main elements any business school course on strategy will give you are exploitation of your current advantage and exploration for new ones. Upon performing brain scans on experienced business decision-makers while they were pursuing or shift between exploitative and exploratory strategies revealed the specific circuits involved. The results weren’t far from the expectations.
Exploitation requires concentration on the job at hand, whereas exploration demands open awareness to recognize new possibilities. But exploitation is accompanied by activity in the brain’s circuitry for anticipation and reward. One is happy in a familiar environment with a familiar routine. On switching to exploration, a deliberate cognitive effort needs to be made to disengage from that routine so as to move around without hindrance and follow fresh paths.
Herbert Simon, the economist, wrote: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention,” in 1971.
Some factors like sleep deprivation, drinking, stress, and mental overload all interfere with the executive circuitry used to make the cognitive switch. In order to sustain the outward focus that leads to innovation, some uninterrupted time in which to reflect and refresh our focus is required.
Putting it all together
When we talk about a focused leader we talk in a broader sense, an individual who commands the entire spectrum of their attention not the most brilliant systems thinker, or the one most in tune with the corporate culture. A focused leader is in touch with his/her inner emotions, they can control their impulses, they are aware of how others see them, they understand what others need from them, they can weed out distractions and also allow their minds to roam widely, free of preconceptions.
This can prove particularly challenging but great leaders are achieved by practicing the art of focusing on relevant issues and letting go of the more trivial ones. What it takes to practice focus isn’t talent so much as diligence—a willingness to exercise the attention circuits of the brain just as we exercise our analytic skills and other systems of the body.
References:
- Daniel Goleman, Harvard Business Review, December 2013 “The Focused Leader”
- What Is Self-Awareness, and How Do You Get It? -Tchiki Davis, Ph.D.
