Leading with Attention

Most leadership challenges aren’t technical. They’re perceptual. As a leader, your real work is inviting people to see differently, starting with yourself.

What lens does your team use to interpret their role? What does personal or spiritual growth mean to your client?

Even you may be unconsciously holding a frame: Fix. Solve. Optimize. 10X.

But…why?

Why are we increasing the bottom line?

What are we stacking these coins for?

What’s this urgency culture really about?

These frames aren’t wrong—but are they rooted in anything real? Or are they just inherited momentum?

Most leaders come to me looking for “clarity” or “tools” when what they often need is reorientation—a shift in the meaning of the work, not just the mechanics.

Consider: “What’s left when there’s nothing left to prove? What’s the vow beneath the strategy: what are you truly here for? Are you the architect of your values or the inheritor of someone else’s myth?”

Rather than simply improve performance, we as ethical leaders uncover hidden assumptions about what someone’s role is and what it means to them. Once that is understood, we can then work towards reframing it in a way that points the person back to themselves and their deepest aims.

For example, an employee who sees their role only in terms of output might discover it’s actually a vehicle for integrity, service, or creativity—something far deeper than quarterly goals. An employee with this lens will also provide far more value to you and your aims, if you are seated in that same vehicle, moving in the same direction.

As Robert Cialdini says in his famous book Pre-Suasion, where attention goes, influence grows. Attention doesn’t just reflect meaning, it creates meaning.

So, to lead, you must learn to set the stage—to create a psychological environment that prepares others to say “yes,” not through manipulation, but by aligning attention, emotion, and context with what truly matters.

By John Driggs

“What are we doing here

Our bodies are playing hosts

Maybe we’re only guests

Maybe we’re future ghosts”

– Dekker, Future Ghosts