Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Daniel Goleman that originally appeared in Harvard Business Review (December 2013), The Focused Leader , was selected by the HBR Editors to be included in HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2015: The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review, published by Harvard Business Review Press (2015).

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The Problem: A primary task of leadership is to direct attention. To do so, leaders must learn to focus their own attention.

The Argument: People commonly think of “being focused” as filtering out distractions while concentrating on one thing. But a wealth of recent neuroscience research shows that we focus attention in many different ways, to serve different purposes, while drawing on different neural pathways.

The Solution: Every leader needs to cultivate a triad of awareness – an inward focus, a focus on others, and an outward focus. Focusing inward can and focusing on others helps leaders cultivate emotional intelligence. Focusing outward can improve their ability to devise strategy, innovate, and manage organizations.

As Goleman explains, “To be authentic is to be the same person to others as you are to yourself. In part that entails paying attention to what others think of you, particularly people whose opinions you esteem and who will be candid in their feedback. A variety of focus that is useful here is open awareness, in which we broadly notice what’s going on around us [i.e. what Ellen Langer characterizes as “mindfulness”] without getting caught up in or swept away by any particular thing. In this mode, we don’t judge, censor, or tune out; we simply perceive.”

Daniel Goleman is a co-director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers. He is the author of numerous books, including Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, published by HarperCollins (2013). To learn more about him and his work, please click here.