Being More Present as Manager? Your Team Notices It
David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach based in Amsterdam, working with senior leaders and directors. This article covers attention and presence in one-to-one conversations between a manager and their team members. The reader learns why attention drifts during meetings, what a daily five-minute attention practice involves, and how long the change usually takes to show up at work.
The people on your team know whether you were with them. They can see you sitting there. The part they read is whether your attention stayed in the room during the thirty minutes they got with you. Most of them could never point at what gave it away. They know anyway. Being more present as manager is trainable, and the method is smaller than you would expect. Five minutes a day of doing nothing.
Your team can tell when your attention left the room
If you manage people, those thirty minutes might be most of what someone gets from you in a week.
You feel the difference yourself when you are on the receiving end. Someone listens to you properly. Someone else waits for their turn to talk. One leaves you thinking you were taken seriously. The other leaves you feeling like an item on a list.
The phone gets the blame, your own head does the work
Most managers point at the phone. The real competition sits between your ears.
You are across the table from someone. They are telling you about a problem with a client. Meanwhile you are replaying the meeting you just came out of, or rehearsing the one after this. Your face is aimed at them. The rest of you is elsewhere.
Most of your thinking runs by itself
Thoughts turn up about something that already happened or something that has yet to happen. Yesterday's conversation. Next week's presentation. The thing you should have said back in March.
Almost all of it concerns someone other than the person in front of you. And that person is the part that is actually happening.
Thinking on purpose is useful. Planning a quarter, working out why a project went sideways. The rest of the time it runs on its own and we follow along, which is a strange way to spend a life.
Being more present as manager in five minutes a day
Phone in another room. Nothing playing. Sit and watch what your mind gets up to.
It is like a radio playing somewhere in the house. You can hear it while staying out of the conversation.
You will get pulled into a thought anyway, maybe twenty times in five minutes. Noticing that you were gone is the exercise. That is the whole practice.
Plenty of people find five minutes alone with their own head mildly unnerving, which says something in itself.
How long this actually takes
Reading this, you might think it is a matter of understanding the idea and then doing it. It took me a lot longer than that.
Changing how you relate to your own thinking is slow work. Closer to learning an instrument than having an insight. Weeks where nothing seems to happen. Then you catch yourself in the middle of a meeting and come back.
It does work. I have got noticeably better at letting a thought pass without starting a whole internal discussion about it. I have watched the same change in people I coach. The radio still plays. I join in a lot less.
The housekeeping around your meetings
Notifications off. Phone in your bag rather than next to the laptop. Two minutes before a meeting to write down whatever you keep reminding yourself about.
These help. They will also leave the main work untouched, so treat them as support.
Attention is one of the few things you give personally
Budget, headcount, tooling. Most of what a manager hands out comes from somewhere else. Attention comes from you, and you can get better at giving it.
At director level the stakes around attention rise, because fewer people get time with you and each conversation has more impact. This is one of the recurring themes in executive coaching for directors, where we look closely at how you spend the attention you have.
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