Who Gets the Best of You?

 I worked with a VP at a payments tech company who couldn't enjoy time with his own child.

With great self-awareness he described how he'd be there, physically at least. Toys between him and his child. The whole scene of a present father. But his head was somewhere else entirely...

...replaying the day. Rehearsing tomorrow. Half-listening for his phone and calculating what he might be missing by not checking it.

His child would show him something and he'd perform the engaged parent for a moment, then slip back into his own head.

He had a few hours with his child at the end of the day and at weekends and spent it mentally at his desk, then ruminate that he was failing at the part that mattered most.

None of the mental activity was even useful. The replaying didn't change what had happened. The rehearsing didn't improve tomorrow. It was an unconscious habit while the thing right in front of him, the thing he could never get back, slipped past unattended.

Somewhere in our conversation he made a connection he hadn't expected: that this wasn't only happening at home.

It was happening in meetings. One-to-ones. Conversations with his team. He was never quite there for any of it. Present enough to respond, absent enough that nothing connected. And as a result, he noticed that his professional relationships were transactional. People dealt with him efficiently but nothing got built.

He'd assumed that was just what senior leadership was like. Functional. Busy. A bit cold.

What he came to see was that trust, influence, the willingness of people to follow and clients to trust him, is built in presence or it isn't built at all.

It doesn’t form in transactional exchanges with someone who's only half in the room.

The relationships that strategic leadership depends on were the exact thing his distraction was preventing.

It wasn’t just his loved ones who got the distracted version of him. It was everyone. He'd just noticed it at home first, because that was where it hurt.

He worked on it by paying attention to where his attention was, and if necessary, bringing it back to whoever, or whatever, was in front of him. 

And learning to be with the only thing he can influence – now. At home and at work.

It was an attention problem. And attention is something you can choose where to place.

Who gets the best of you, and who gets what's left?

Who Gets the Best of You?