I spent years in environments where the stakes of misplaced attention were immediate and visible: helping Jay-Z build enterprises at Roc Nation, then alongside the very talented team at Westbrook. What I watched in those rooms, and later confirmed as an investor, is that the people who moved the needle weren’t the most available. They were the most present. There’s a difference. And many organizations are quietly, systematically, rewarding the wrong one.
We have built workplaces that optimize for responsiveness over results. The employee who replies in 30 seconds reads as engaged. The one who takes two hours because they were deep in a problem worth solving reads as checked out. That inversion is not just a management failure. It’s a competitive one.
The Attention Economy Has Moved Inside Your Company
The conversation about attention, who captures it, who monetizes it, what happens when it fragments, has dominated the consumer world for years. What I’ve watched play out in startups and portfolio companies is that the same dynamics are now operating inside organizations, and most leaders haven’t caught up.
When a team member is context-switching between six Slack channels and a strategic challenge, the strategy suffers. The work that requires genuine presence, reading a room, building a relationship, solving a problem that has no template, cannot survive in an environment designed to continuously interrupt it.
Training for the Olympics taught me something that translates directly to this: consistency matters more than intensity, and recovery is just as important as effort. You cannot perform at the highest level if you are never allowed to fully focus. The same is true for the people doing the most important work in your organization.
A 2023 Microsoft Work Trend Index report found that 68% of workers say they don’t have enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday, and that those who struggle most to find the time and energy for their work are 3.5x more likely to also struggle with innovation and strategic thinking, exactly the capabilities organizations claim to need most.
The Manager’s Job Has Changed
For much of the last century, the manager’s core function was coordination, ensuring information moved between people who couldn’t reach each other easily. Communication tools have largely automated that function. And yet the coordination-as-management instinct persists, now expressed through Slack pings and calendar invitations and the ambient pressure to be perpetually available.
The new managerial skill, and it is a skill, one that requires deliberate cultivation, is protection. The best managers today are the ones who actively create conditions for deep work: who push back on unnecessary meetings, who resist the urge to message when an email would do, and who read a slow response not as disengagement but as a signal that something meaningful is underway.
This requires a fundamental reorientation of how performance gets measured. If what gets tracked is response time and calendar participation, that is what gets optimized. If what gets measured is quality of contribution, depth of thinking, and real impact on the people an employee serves, whether those are customers, colleagues, or partners, the culture begins to change.
Practical Shifts for C-Suite Leaders and Business Builders
This is not an argument against digital tools. It is an argument for using them with intention rather than reflex. The changes that make the most difference are simpler than most leaders expect:
Audit your meeting culture with honesty. Most organizations have significantly more recurring meetings than they need. Every hour on a calendar is an hour unavailable for focused work. Identify meetings that exist out of habit rather than necessity, and eliminate or consolidate them. This is one of the highest-leverage decisions a senior leader can make for team performance.
Model the behavior you want to protect. If the CEO is pinging at all hours, no policy will hold. Focus norms require leadership to go first. Designating protected time, and visibly honoring it yourself, is what signals to the organization that depth of work is a genuine priority.
Invest in small moments of real recognition. People don’t leave jobs, they leave managers and cultures. The most effective retention strategies I’ve seen are not flashy: they involve giving people ownership over real problems, trusting them to solve them, and acknowledging that work in specific, genuine ways. Performative praise doesn’t move people. Honest, specific recognition does.
Measure what actually matters. Build performance frameworks that reward quality of contribution rather than speed of response. This is harder than tracking availability metrics, but it is the only way to signal to your best people that what they actually bring, judgment, creativity, presence, is what the organization values.
Hire for judgment, then protect it. If you are recruiting for strategic thinkers and people who are exceptional with other people, you are hiring for capacities that require space to operate. Onboarding them into a culture of constant interruption is not just a management failure, it is a direct return-on-investment problem.
The organizations that protect and develop that human depth, that create the conditions for their best people to think deeply, engage genuinely, and build things that matter, will have a structural advantage over those that don’t.
The next time one of your best people takes two hours to respond to a Slack message, resist the instinct to interpret that as disengagement. Ask instead: what were they working on that required that much uninterrupted time? Because whatever the answer is, that is probably where the most important work is happening.
The work that looks the least like work from the outside is often the work that matters most.