Imagine you’re a senior-level executive, stepping into a new role at a new company, and you need to endear yourself to your new team.
How do you do it?
You have a one-on-one meeting with an employee. You get to know her. Ask her about her job, her family, her background. You listen and give her the attention she deserves.
Then repeat that process with the next employee. And the next. And the next.
You might see a problem here. That only works if you have, at most, a couple dozen people under your charge. What if you have 100? Or 1,000?
That’s when you have to follow a strategy I like to call scaling attention.
What is Scaling Attention?
I observed the scenario above almost exactly, and the way the senior executive handled it inspired this idea of scaling attention.
What he did was spend time talking to one of his employees in a meeting, getting to know her on a personal level. At one point, the employee said her son was off at college, but was struggling through an illness.
A few days later, in an all-hands meeting, the executive recalled the conversation with the employee. In front of everyone, he asked how her son was doing.
That made an impact on her. She was touched that he remembered their conversation and expressed concern for her son (he’s fine, by the way).
But that impact didn’t stop with her. It was noticed by all of her colleagues in the room. They got the message that he cared about them as people, even if he could never give all of them that same kind of attention.
He was able to demonstrate attention at scale.
How to Scale Attention
If you follow Nate Randle on LinkedIn (and you should), you’ll see that he regularly posts about his employees at Gabb. He gives them his attention. He celebrates them as people. He shows his appreciation.
It’s a pretty simple formula that involves getting to know individual employees and telling their stories in a public forum, in this case LinkedIn.
The key is to be consistent. This is not a one-off. You need to make it a regular thing at a frequency that works for you.
Why Scale Attention?
This may seem like a warm & fuzzy, soft & squishy kind of thing. Senior executives have lots of important sh*to to get done, and spending time telling employees’ stories might seem like a low priority.
But as Zach Mercurio, Ph.D., and I discussed in the videobelow, it’s actually a strategic imperative.
When you make your people feel seen and appreciated, business outcomes like profit, productivity, and performance will naturally follow.
And when you do it publicly, other audiences – customers, stakeholders, prospective employees – will also take notice.
That will naturally elevate your brand and make it easier for you to accomplish your objectives.
Interested in scaling attention in your organization by using executive storytelling? That happens to be my specialty, so let’s meet to talk about someideas.