Attention-based view of leadership

Healthcare leaders' attention is stretched in healthcare organisations due to the large number of issues that they must respond to. Effectively attending to legitimate attentional demands, which involves deprioritising less important demands, is a defining feature of competent leadership.

This piece summarises key findings from research in the attention-based view, integrating its key findings with insights from conversations with healthcare leaders in executive education settings.

The attention-based view develops three premises that explain how organisations structure and channel attention in ways that shape what organisations do: (1) given the scarcity of attention, where leaders focus their attention shapes what they do, (2) people's attention is situated (eg, in the work they do and the meetings they attend) and (3) organisations structure roles and communication channels in ways that shape who pays attention to what. Five lessons drawn from these premises are that leaders should: create an architecture that will address critical issues; be mindful of attentional networks; cultivate opportunities for voice; create attentional capacity and embrace creating attentional coherence as perhaps the core task of leadership.

Given the diverse issues, people and demands that characterise contemporary healthcare organisations, effectively focusing attention on what matters is essential if organisations are to function well. A critical task for leaders is to prioritise for themselves and for everyone in their organisation the key issues that should be fundamental to, and hence merit attention from, everyone.