Earlier this summer, I saw this sign on a church marquee:

“The greatest gift you can give someone is the purity of your attention.”

It stopped me in my tracks. Literally.

It’s great advice for anyone. But it’s especially great for team leaders.

If you’ve followed me for any time at all, you know how I used to think dashboards were the bees’ knees…. Until I didn’t. I recently wrote about our profession’s collective sense of inadequacy when it comes to data tracking, measurement, and analysis.

Our inner monologue on any given Thursday: “Everybody else has these cool dashboards and can spit data points like nobody’s business. But I can’t. Gawd. I’m a total failure. Here’s my resignation letter. I’ll show myself out.”

But I eventually realized that beating myself up because I can’t be like the cool data kids was stupid AF. Basically, it was jr hi all over again… but with better skin.

However, there is one dashboard that every person who manages a team needs: a staff dashboard. Managing people is like that data problem, only harder.That’s because you don’t get a dashboard. There’s no chart for motivation. No line graph for frustration, confidence, trust, or burnout. All that signal comes through meetings, one-on-ones, conversations, and behavior. Even worse, it changes shape depending on who’s giving it to you. Leadership requires the same signal-detection skill as reading a dashboard, only inputs don’t hold still.

All you have is your attention. And if you’re anything like me, that shit’s precious and fleeting.

Push vs. pull

Most management advice is about what you push out: what you communicated, what you asked for, what expectations you set, what action you took. 

That’s half the job. 

The other half is pull: what you’re receiving, what you’re noticing, what changed, what it means, what deserves your attention. The key is interpreting signals, not communicating better. Those are two different disciplines, and most of us leaders tend to focus on the former way more than the latter.

When it comes to your team, using your attention looks like watching changes in patterns, not noticing isolated events. A missed deadline is an event. Someone who used to ask three questions in every meeting and now asks none is a change in pattern. A complaint is obvious enough that you don’t need a framework to catch it. A formerly-engaged staffer who went quiet is easy to miss, because nothing happened.

The baseline is what makes the second category readable. Compare people to their own normal, not to each other. We all have our own baseline. And any data person, no matter how savvy, knows that’s what you measure against.

Talkative, reserved, independent, collaborative, fast, deliberate, those are personality traits. How they act now vs how they used to act? That’s the delta you’re looking for.

Four ways to give the gift of your attention

Baseline first. Know how someone normally shows up: talkative or reserved, independent or collaborative, fast or deliberate. Then remember to ask yourself what’s different about how this person is showing up compared with three or six months ago.

Pay attention to what stops happening. If you notice that someone stops volunteering ideas, stops challenging you, or stops asking for feedback, follow up. Don’t just ask what happened. Ask what’s changed in their world.

Skip the blip. Watch for the pattern. One quiet meeting means nothing. Less participation, fewer questions, and less initiative over time is a pattern.

Use the signal to open a conversation, not to close one. You don’t need more data, you need better questions. “I’ve noticed X has changed lately. What am I missing?” turns an observation into a conversation instead of a diagnosis.

Silence from someone who normally pushes back means something different than silence from someone who’s always been quiet.

A problem that disappears hasn’t necessarily been solved. Sometimes people just stop believing that raising it matters. Pushback is often a trust signal, not a management problem, and a team that suddenly stops disagreeing with you is worth more attention than one that argues too much. None of these mean anything alone. Stacked together over time, they’re worth a conversation.

Not gonna lie: this one is crazy-hard to master. You’re human, too. You’re focused on managing your team, managing your projects, managing your calendar, or managing your boss. 

Give yourself a fighting chance by creating some cheat codes: a simple prompt on your copy of the meeting agenda, a calendar reminder or recurring task item, hell, a post-it on your computer screen – anything that helps you do the mental work of paying attention.

And it’s just like the line from the Prayer of St. Francis: ‘It is in giving that we receive.”

I’m not equating 15th century saints with modern day marketing directors but I bet with a little practice, you can get kinda close.