It's attention. How people pay attention to the present, past and future, each other, emerging signals and opportunities, lessons from experience, their questions and the timing of anything.
Organizations are ecosystems of teams, each of which perform at the level of their attention. Higher performance and happier teams pay attention differently than teams that struggle.
We have an abundance of stories about how teams are given increases and decreases in their budget and talent resources and neither make significant or sustainable difference. Attention is the pivotal asset that makes the difference between how people perform, interact, feel, innovate and impact their worlds.
We teach people for example, how to give more attention to their talents and dreams than weaknesses and complaints, how to give more attention to their questions than assumptions and how to give more attention to possibilities than constraints. We see the story again and again, how without changing bosses, structure or the nature of work, just shifting people's attention moves them from stuck to thriving.