Leading Means Earning Attention
Leadership means a great many things and is done in many ways, but boils down to one skill: convincing people to pay attention to what you are saying, and ideally act on it.
And that’s harder than ever, because attention is more scarce than ever.
Why Is Attention So Valuable Now?
Scarcity has always guided value. In the industrial era, materials and labor were scarce, so to become a titan, you had to command as much scarce materials and labor as you could (think Vanderbilts building the railroads, etc). In earlier days of the technological era, as people realised data was a valuable competitive edge, they scrambled to generate data and organise and understand it. Companies with more data on users & their behaviors grew rapidly, as they could tailor their product fast (think early Facebook). Similar things happened in the world of content - we used to have a paucity of it, so the companies amassing larger libraries of content thrived.
Now, we’re overloaded with data and content. Getting your data or content to reach the user and influence them has become the hard thing. Their attention is the scarce resource.
Information itself (content & data) has become nearly infinite, while attention – the ability to consume it – remains finite. As Netflix boss Reed Hastings famously said ‘We’re competing with sleep’.
Commanding useful attention while all others struggle to do so, therefore, becomes a means to shape not just markets, but collective reality. If you successfully command the attention of your peers, your influence groups, your customers and beyond, you’re in a position of power.
What is the Attention Economy?
The term "attention economy" describes the system in which human attention is bought, sold, or otherwise commanded. Every statement, earnings call, political speech, press release and headline is making its play for this precious resource to try and influence people. And to do so they have to outflank every viral TikTok or other piece of compelling content, all of them vying to distract humans and monetize their attention on behalf of brands.
The market for human attention is intensely competitive, and the concept of the "attention economy" has become a focal point as leaders in politics, business, and culture compete for influence.
The ultimate lever of power is now the ability to focus others’ attention and harness it for meaningful impact, but we’re trying to do that in an era of infinite noise and distraction. Attention is finite & fleeting. This new reality rewrites the rules of leadership, challenges how leaders command attention, and makes strategic selectivity more valuable than constant broadcasting.
Signal vs. Noise
As a leader you cannot contribute to the noise, you must be the clear signal within it.
Leaders today must recognize their most important asset isn’t their reach or even their audience, it’s their capacity to focus and direct attention, both their own and that of their audience. Every leader faces a crucial question: Should I spread my influence wide but shallow, or will I deploy my finite attention capital intentionally toward my most strategic goals, and my most important audiences? The answer is almost always the latter.
In his book on attention ‘The Siren’s Call’, Chris Hayes argues that scattershot communication dilutes a leader’s power and brand, ultimately undermining trust and making it nearly impossible for important messages to resonate. Commanding attention is no longer about being everywhere, all the time. Keeping your message singular and connecting at key moments is a critical skill for leaders, and often means resisting the urge to communicate & broadcast more frequently.
I’ve written about this in the past for The Currency. Twitter is the ultimate example of a tool that can connect a leader’s ego directly to the audience - often to their detriment. In The Currency I wrote:
“When a CEO is intrinsic to the brand they represent, the CEO has an added burden. When they speak, or write or tweet, they are their brand in a very real sense, and their words become the brand’s words. And when circumstances are heated or pressured, the highest-risk impulse for this category of CEO is the urgent need to say something.”
At an operational level, an over-communicating leader can prove incredibly distracting. Worse, it can pit a leader against their board, leading to their removal, or to a running battle to prevent an ouster, none of which serves the core purpose of commanding the right type of attention in an environment of hyper-distraction.
Useful attention vs useless attention
The audience isn’t the only one that’s easily distracted, after all. It’s easy for leaders to get distracted and fall prey to the same pitfalls that the audience does. Interaction & engagement are addictive, likes and comments are an alluring vanity metric. Sure, a lot of people might agree with or engage with what you’re saying, but to what end? Is it aligned with your core goal as a leader? Is it helping clarify to your key audience what you’re about? Is it helpful to your team as they try to define success?
Often business leaders fall into the trap of posting about their personal political views, for example, and feel emboldened to take a particularly brash stance on a lightning-rod issue. Ego laps up the attention this inevitably drives, from both sides of the divide. But what is the opinionated doing with this attention they’re commanding? Is it useful to them? Is it distracting from their core goal? Is it creating clarity for others about your core purpose?
If not, why not? You have fewer opportunities than ever to command attention. You can align your brand as a leader to only a few key concepts in the mind of your audiences. If you’re selling a product or a service, the key concept is likely to be how that thing makes their lives easier or more prosperous. It may be a higher-level brand concept that is key for you to communicate. But anything that distracts from those core concepts or isn’t actively driving attention towards them is wasted energy.
Become the Focus You Want To See in the World
To focus others, a leader must be incredibly focused.
A company I love to use as an example of focus is Strava. I must have listened to a dozen interviews with founders Mark Gainey & Michael Horvath, and what stuck with me was the clarity and unshakability of their narrative - they built Strava to digitally recreate the competitive camaraderie they experienced as competitive rowers. Their singular focus was sharing the joy of friendly competition, and making that collaborative motivation the core of a network of athletes and would-be athletes.
Every time they spoke in person, they were crystal clear on this goal for the platform. Everything rolled up to those externally-communicated principles. They never missed an opportunity to tie the concept of Strava back to the feeling of friendly competition. The message was clear and unequivocal - if you want to get fit with your friends, Strava is the way to do it.
Internally, Strava also did a great job of focus & clarity. A network like theirs is only as valuable as its users, so the focus within Strava became a single metric devised to ensure everyone was laser-eyed on acquiring the right type of user for Strava - active ones who started using it immediately.
Strava came up with a KPI called Cost-Per Strava Uploading Member in 7 Days (CPSUM7D).
Essentially, their north star for marketing in that key growth period was the question of how much do we have to spend to acquire a user who will upload an activity in the first seven days of use after downloading the app? This focused the team on efficiency and selectivity - they had to know what a useful Strava user looked like, what they were willing to pay to command their attention – and how to do it.
It worked. Strava has 150 million users in 185 countries, posting 51 million activities a week. It’s worth more than $2.2 billion.
Another simple example is Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary. O’Leary has relentlessly beaten the drum of creating more opportunity for regular people to fly at affordable prices. Cost is everything for O’Leary, which allows him be pugnacious with customers, governments and partners alike. He has positioned every move, every tussle as pro-consumer, pro-traveller, and shrugs off every challenge to his strategy by redirecting attention to the core purpose for Ryanair: making air travel cheaper for more Europeans.
How to Command, Not Demand, Attention
Posting every day isn’t a strategy. It’s a distraction. No matter what you think, It’s highly likely you’ll dilute your core message by trying to maintain an arbitrary cadence. The same goes for blog posts as it does for LinkedIn as it does for every channel. Authoritative, highly-cited content will always trump high-volume, low-grade communications. That’s as true in the AI age as it has ever been - probably more so. You will be competing against people and organisations creating AI slop at industrial scale to try to create volume. As a leader, you are not a content farm, you are a figurehead. This is not the way.
Firstly, you have to know who your audiences are, what your core purpose is, what message is best to communicate that in the circumstances and beyond that, you need to define for yourself what you will and won’t discuss as a leader.
Assuming you’ve done all that, the less is more principles for leadership comms are simple as follows:
Curate Your Messages: Focus on essentials. Prioritize messages that are core to your purpose. The easiest thing to say publicly is always nothing, so never feel bullied or hurried into communicating. Every communication is an opportunity to command attention, or dilute it. Be clear on what your intended message will do.
Choose Your Moments: Scarcity still drives value. Leaders who speak less often but with greater weight capture deeper, more lasting attention. Is now the time? Is there a better, more strategic moment to say what you’re going to say?
Storytelling is King: Narrative, emotion, and specificity trump generic messaging. They help the user remember why you’re important to them, and why you share your core purpose. That story might not be yours alone, it might belong to a previous leader, it might be the foundation story of an organisation, or it could be as simple and personal as a boathouse friendship.
Relevance Over Reach: Target your message to the audiences who matter most – and they’ll hear and appreciate it. Don’t try to blanket every channel. Rather, tailor your message so that it will be heard with maximum resonance on the chosen channel.
