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Abstract

Background
Healthcare leaders’ attention is stretched in healthcare organisations due to the large number of issues that they must respond to. Effectively attending to legitimate attentional demands, which involves deprioritising less important demands, is a defining feature of competent leadership.

Method
This piece summarises key findings from research in the attention-based view, integrating its key findings with insights from conversations with healthcare leaders in executive education settings.

Findings
The attention-based view develops three premises that explain how organisations structure and channel attention in ways that shape what organisations do: (1) given the scarcity of attention, where leaders focus their attention shapes what they do, (2) people’s attention is situated (eg, in the work they do and the meetings they attend) and (3) organisations structure roles and communication channels in ways that shape who pays attention to what. Five lessons drawn from these premises are that leaders should: create an architecture that will address critical issues; be mindful of attentional networks; cultivate opportunities for voice; create attentional capacity and embrace creating attentional coherence as perhaps the core task of leadership.

Conclusion
Given the diverse issues, people and demands that characterise contemporary healthcare organisations, effectively focusing attention on what matters is essential if organisations are to function well. A critical task for leaders is to prioritise for themselves and for everyone in their organisation the key issues that should be fundamental to, and hence merit attention from, everyone.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2025. No commercial re-use. Published by BMJ Group. This article has been accepted for publication in BMJ Leader 2025 following peer review, and the Version of Record can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1136/leader-2024-001156
Publisher Keywords:	communication, effectiveness, engagement, health system, information
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management
Departments:	Bayes Business School Bayes Business School > Management
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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