Organizations spend billions of dollars each year on leadership development programs. Often, they invest in teaching critical leadership skills such as strategic thinking, decision-making, coaching and communication skills. However, there is one important leadership skill that most organizations largely overlook: the ability to earn and sustain people’s attention.

It amazes me how many times a leader steps up to a group of team members with a presentation that includes pertinent information for the organization. However, the audience members eventually start looking at their phones or thinking about other important meetings they have.

The issue is that the leader failed to capture the audience’s attention before sharing their important message.

Many leadership development programs spend a lot of time teaching leaders how to communicate their message to their employees. However, they spend less time teaching them how to earn their audience’s attention prior to sharing their message.

Without capturing the audience’s attention, it’s impossible for a leader to effectively communicate their message. Therefore, the ability to earn and sustain attention should be viewed as a leadership competency rather than a communication skill.

Why Attention Matters

The foundation of effective learning is attention. Cognitive psychologists have studied the mind and how it focuses on information it chooses to select as important while ignoring other information.

In today’s digital-first world, people are bombarded with information from multiple directions. As such, it has become challenging to capture and retain people’s attention.

Leaders may feel their team members are engaged simply because they are present in the room. However, a skilled leader knows that people’s attention varies throughout a presentation or meeting. Effective leaders know how to adjust their communication to retain their audience’s attention.

Curiosity is one of the best ways to earn people’s attention. When a leader begins a presentation or a meeting with a question, problem or challenge that their team members must overcome, they naturally become more engaged in the communication process.

Psychological safety plays a significant role in retaining people’s attention. Amy Edmondson, Ph.D., Harvard Business School professor and author of “The Fearless Organization,” has shared research on crisis leadership showing that people are more likely to participate in a conversation if they feel psychologically safe to do so.

People are more likely to remember information when they understand why it matters to them. While storytelling can be an effective way to create meaning, it isn’t the only way. Leaders can also make information memorable by clearly explaining its relevance to employees’ work, goals or experiences.

Make Attention Part of Leadership Development

In most leadership development programs, there is time to teach people presentation skills. However, there is little time to teach them how to earn their audience’s attention prior to sharing their message.

Rather than asking if a leader can effectively deliver a presentation to their team members, the program can focus on whether they know how to capture their audience’s attention and adapt their communication skills if they lose their audience’s attention.

Making attention a measurable leadership competency can help organizations shift the focus of their leadership programs from having individuals present information to creating an engaging communication experience with their team members.

4 Strategies for L&D Professionals to Develop Attention Skills

1. Add attention objectives to leadership development programs.

When organizations create leadership development programs, they typically include objectives such as improving presentation skills for executives or asking individuals to refine their communication skills.

Consider including additional objectives related to gaining learners’ attention. For instance, leaders can be taught to:

• Capture people’s attention within the first minute of a presentation or meeting
• Recognize when people are losing attention
• Adapt communication skills to retain audience members’ attention
• Encourage audience members to participate

All of these behaviors are measurable within leadership development programs.

2. Build attention practices into leadership development programs.

Leadership development programs should give leaders opportunities to practice capturing and sustaining their audience’s attention.

For example, ask participants to deliver a presentation without slides. This encourages them to open with a compelling question, a customer challenge or another relevant example that immediately engages their audience rather than relying on presentation software.

Another effective exercise is to have participants deliver the same message in five minutes, then two minutes and finally 30 seconds. This helps leaders identify the most essential points, communicate with greater clarity and eliminate unnecessary information.

By incorporating these types of practice activities into leadership development programs, learning and development (L&D) teams can help leaders develop communication skills that earn and maintain their audience’s attention.

3. Create “attention labs.”

Organizations often use simulations to help employees develop skills such as negotiation and sales. Similarly, L&D teams can create “attention labs” that give leaders opportunities to practice capturing and sustaining their audience’s attention.

These labs can involve small groups of leaders creating five-minute presentations for their colleagues, who observe and provide feedback on how effectively the presenter engages their audience.

Follow up with questions such as:

• When did the leader first gain their audience’s attention?
• When did their audience begin to lose attention?
• What did the leader do to regain their audience’s attention?
• What communication skills did they use that encouraged their colleagues to participate in the presentation?
• What message did they share with their audience that they hoped would be remembered by their colleagues?

These “attention labs” provide greater value when they focus on helping leaders develop the skills to capture and maintain their audience’s attention rather than simply deliver information.

4. Measure the right things.

Many organizations evaluate leadership development programs by asking participants whether they enjoyed the experience. While learner satisfaction can provide useful feedback, a more meaningful question is whether the program changed the way leaders communicate with their teams.

L&D teams can measure behavior-based outcomes such as:

• Employee participation during meetings
• The number and quality of questions employees ask during discussions
• Employees’ ability to recall key messages from leaders
• Leaders’ ability to adapt their communication approach based on their audience and context
• Leaders’ ability to use presentation tools effectively rather than relying on them as the primary way to deliver information

Measuring these behaviors can help organizations determine whether leadership communication training is translating into meaningful changes in how leaders engage and communicate with their teams.

Post-Training Reinforcement

Formal leadership development programs provide a strong foundation, but leaders need ongoing opportunities to practice and reinforce these skills in their everyday work. Without reinforcement, leaders will likely revert to their previous communication styles.

By creating opportunities for managers to reinforce these skills on the job, L&D teams can help leaders incorporate them into their everyday leadership style.

Final Thoughts

When people evaluate a leader’s communication skills, they typically focus on how the leader presents information to their team members.

A better evaluation approach is assessing whether their team members listened to them, learned from them and took action based on the information they shared.

By treating the skill of gaining and retaining people’s attention as a leadership competency, L&D teams can improve how well leaders communicate with their employees and how engaged their teams are with the organization’s leadership.